A Tale of Two Realisms in Chinese Foreign Policy

In a seminal article published a decade and a half ago, Thomas Christensen unambiguously asserted that “China might be the high church of realpolitik in the post-Cold War world”, a qualification that, translated in more theoretical terms, meant that “[Chinese] analysts certainly think more like traditional balance-of-power theorists than do most contemporary Western leaders and policy analysts”.¹ Based on this observation, the evolution of China’s foreign policy over the last two decades could have best been analysed through the use of the realist prism. However, decades of “restatement and renewal” in the realist research programme have made such analysis much more compli-cated.² More precisely, given the increasing complexity of the realist research programme, the question might not be so much whether Chinese foreign policy conforms with realism, but rather, which of the different branches of realism provides the most consistent analysis of China’s policy in the contemporary international system.

This article examines how the two competitive branches of structural realism — offensive and defensive realisms — perform in explaining China’s rise. After outlining the main differences between the two, a comparison is made on their respective hypotheses with China’s posture towards three different types of actors: the extra-regional superpower — the United States; the potential regional great powers — Japan and India; and the lesser states of Southeast Asia.

Rivalling Theories: Offensive and Defensive Realisms

Among several fault lines that run through the realist research programme, one of the most significant evolutions since the end of the Cold War has been the schism within the branch of structural realist.³ While Fareed Zakaria and Randall Schweller clearly identified what they considered as defensive realism’s “status quo bias”,⁴ the offensive turn of structural realism was fully completed by John Mearsheimer.⁵ Offensive realism has, however, not simply overtaken defensive realism, and both theories continue to offer competing views on the constraints produced by the international system and on the strategies great powers are likely to adopt.

Defensive and offensive realisms share a set of basic assumptions about the international system. Among them are axioms concerning the centrality of the state and the rationality of international actors. More significantly, both branches of structural realism consider international anarchy to be the pivotal principle of international relations.⁶ And “because any state may at any time use force, all states must constantly be ready either to counter force with force or pay the cost of weakness”.⁷ This constant state of pervasive wariness creates the conditions for what John Herz famously termed the “security dilemma”. Placed in an anarchic system where no supranational authority can serve as a security guarantor, states that are “striving to attain security from [an] attack, are driven to acquire more and more power in order to escape the impact of the power of others. This, in turn, renders the others more insecure and compels them to prepare for the worst”.⁸ While sharing this generally grim view of international politics, offensive and defensive realists, however, part company over the severity of the security dilemma, which means that they diverge over the level of security that international systems are likely to produce, and over the best strategy a state might adopt to ensure its security.

From a defensive realist perspective, anarchy and security dilemma might not lead states to live at daggers drawn at each other. First, under some conditions, the security dilemma might be partially or totally “solved”. Robert Jervis developed the “offence-defence balance” (ODB) concept and pointed out that the severity of the dilemma depends upon “whether defensive weapons and policies can be distinguished from offensive ones, and whether the defence or the offence has the advantage”.⁹ While possible “differentiation between offensive and defensive stances comes close to abolishing [the security dilemma]”¹⁰ because it allows a clear distinction between actors bent on aggression and those who only try to enhance their security, an ODB tilting towards defence simplifies the task of defence-minded actors while making the realisation of offensive designs more complex.¹¹ On the other...