China Among Unequals: Asymmetric Foreign Relations in Asia by Brantly Womack (review)

Conventional wisdom in international relations suggests that a rising power is an inherent threat, which is bound to expand its national interests and augment its foreign influence. China has been on the rise during the last three decades. However, China has hardly pursued a revisionist approach in the course of its current rise as the most powerful state in East Asia. Such a judgment on China’s foreign policy is supported by many well-researched studies. Even using more rigorous criteria for determining whether a state’s foreign policy is status quo or revisionist oriented, it is hard to conclude that China is a clearly revisionist state (Johnston 2003). In some cases, China’s efforts to improve its ties with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are fundamental compromises that China has chosen to make in limiting its own sovereign interests for the sake of engagement in multilateral frameworks and pursuit of greater regional interdependence (Shambaugh 2004/2005). In general, states will respond to a rising power in two ways. The theory of bandwagon politics suggests that actors seek to share in the spoils of imminent victory by jumping on the bandwagon of the apparent winner. The balance-of-power theory suggests that a state can build up its own capabilities or form an alliance against a rising power in order to block the dominance of emerging hegemons in the region. However, the developments of international relations in East Asia during the last three decades do not uphold such conventional wisdom. The great powers and most Asian states neither have strived to build a regional coalition to counterbalance China’s rise, nor have they tended to jump on the bandwagon of a rising China. So far, forecasts of an unavoidable United States–China clash have not come true. China’s emergence as the most powerful state in East Asia has been accompanied with more stability than pessimists had believed (Kang 2005). Conventional wisdom in international relations finds its limits in explaining the relationships between the rising China and the other Asian states and global powers.

On the one hand, China has continued to possess more resources that can be mobilized to pursue the state’s national interests beyond its borders. On the other hand, the rise of China has not caused widespread suspicion, jealousy, fear, and even hostility in East Asia that would give birth to a counterbalance coalition in the area. It has become obvious that we need other theoretic approaches to understand the puzzle behind China’s rise. Brantly Womack’s book China among Unequals has made important contribution to theories of international relations and the study of international relations in Asia. Based upon his insightful observations on China’s relationships with its Asian neighbors and the United States, Womack tries to provide a new theoretical paradigm—asymmetry theory—to analyze the international relations in East Asia. According to Womack, this new theoretical paradigm not only has been tested by China’s rich history of successfully managing asymmetric relationships in the premodern era, but also is fully applicable to the contemporary international relations in Asia. Therefore, the utility of asymmetry theory lies in the fact that asymmetry theory can accurately explain Asian international relations, which have been structured with asymmetric relationships both traditionally and currently.

The first section of Womack’s book provides a theoretical framework on asymmetric foreign relationships by discussing the four important issues that are often related to the asymmetric structure of international relations: human rights and moral autonomy, soft power wielding, the strategic dilemma of regional powers in dealing with global powers, and the asymmetric wars between democratic states and small states. Although the book is mainly a collection of research essays that have been published by the author during his decades of research on asymmetric theory in international relations, it is the most comprehensive and original study on this subject. To his credit, the...