China's New Thinking on Alliances

Yet alliance thinking is making a comeback in China’s intellectual and policy communities. Important scholars are suggesting a re-evaluation of the non-alignment principle in China’s foreign policy. Though still on the margins of official thinking, a new discourse on alliances has emerged in the last couple of years, advocated by some of the country’s eminent international-relations scholars. Why has alliance thinking returned to Chinese discourse? What are its possible policy implications?

현대 중국의 비공식적인 국제 관계 담론의 기여자들 중 칭화 대학에 본부를 둔 옌쉐퉁은 비정통 정책의 가장 논쟁적이고 무뚝뚝한 옹호자 중 한 명으로 두드러진다.그는 또한 중국의 분석가들 중 가장 오랫동안 지속적으로 동맹을 옹호하는 기록을 가지고 있는 것으로 보이며, 2009년 초에 그 아이디어를 제안했다. 이듬해, 대학생들을 상대로 한 연설에서, 옌은 중국의 비동맹 원칙이 중국의 주변국들과의 관계 개선을 방해하고 있었기 때문에 외교 정책의 주요 결함이라고 주장했다.

“Non-alignment”’, he wrote, means not making the most reliable friends. Without reliable friends, we have no one to rely on in times of difficulties. Our lack of allies does not reduce other countries’ fear of our rise. The non-alignment policy has become an obstacle for us to win the support of most countries in the South China Sea region.

This general discussion was followed by more specific analysis of the necessity and feasibility of a Sino-Russian alliance. Beginning with the premise that the desirability and reliability of any alliance is determined by the degree of common security interests among its members, he avers that neither Russia nor China has a better strategic choice at the moment than to opt for an alliance with each other.

proposals for quasi-alliances, especially between China and Russia, seem to be gaining followers, apparently because it is thought that quasi-alliances would allow China to benefit from the security advantages afforded by strategic alignment while avoiding the risk, inflexibility and complexity of formal alliances.16 Relatively cheap, flexible and convenient, quasi-alliances are seen to entail no loss of the foreign-policy independence cherished by China. A Sino-Russian quasi-alliance in particular, with its proposed defensive orientation, is seen as potentially developing into a new model of great-power relationship. As Yu Zhenjiang writes, a Sino-Russian quasi-alliance is not meant to challenge or replace American hegemony; it is merely a strategic reaction to evolving circumstances intended to achieve a balanced relationship with the West and protect China’s strategic interests.17 The informal nature of quasi-alliances partly explains their popularity with analysts concerned about abandoning established policies too quickly.

Another important voice in the growing alliance debate belongs to Fudan University scholar Tang Shiping, who does not advocate a specific alliance policy but rather suggests consideration of the role alliances have played in China’s own rich experiences. He criticises China’s denial of alliance-making as an act of self-deception, adding that it has exposed China to the derision of other countries because of the dishonesty in glossing over the importance of alliances in China’s own foreign-policy history. He argues that alliance-building does not necessarily signal a ‘Cold War mentality’, as China’s official discourse alleges, and that, historically, China was never a non-aligned country.

If such ideas become policy, the result may be two opposing alliance systems in the Asia-Pacific, creating a Sino-US version of the Cold War confrontation for the twenty-first century. If nothing else, the region has seen a disheartening revival of realist logic. The rise of Chinese power and the country’s apparent assertiveness23 in recent years have elicited a vigorous strategic response from Washington and its regional allies, which has in turn stimulated Chinese domestic discussions on an equally robust response centered on reclaiming alliance from the historical limbo of Chinese foreign policy. One can interpret this as an example of an intensifying security dilemma between China and those of its neighbors that are strategically backed up by the United States, whereby one side, in seeking to be more secure through expanding military capabilities, increases fears in the other and hence drives it to build up its own capabilities, thus rendering neither side more secure than before.24 Equally plausibly, one can interpret this as a strategic competition between a rising power (China) and an existing hegemon (America) over the future configuration of the regional order. Either way, if America continues its ‘pivot’ without reassuring China, and if China finds itself compelled to adopt an alliance strategy, the worst outcome may be a struggle for strategic dominance in the Asia-Pacific.

How important is the new alliance thinking compared with established policies, and with other policy ideas vying for intellectual dominance and policy support? In official circles, not only is alliance thinking not in the mainstream, it is antithetical to the official non-alignment thinking that has become entrenched in the past 30 years. Unsurprisingly, the new alliance thinking has generated controversies and opposition from multiple directions. Some consider it unrealistic.

Zang Jisi, a significant scholar and policy analyst also based at Peking University, avers that there is almost no country in the world that is willing to construct a long-term, anti-US alliance with China, and that building a cooperative part-nership with the United States, rather than pursuing an anti-US strategy, remains China’s primary policy objec-tive.36 Still others doubt whether Russia, if it were willing to ally with China or even play second fiddle in such an alliance, would be a reliable ally given its historical policy pragmatism and fickleness.

The influence of contemporary alliance thinking in China should not be exaggerated: it falls outside the mainstream among both China’s intellectual and policy communities. Rather, its importance lies in the forceful challenge it presents to official policies, in its ability to provoke wide-ranging debates, and in its potential as a policy option for the future. The outside world need not be unduly alarmed, both because alliance is not yet a policy and because most proposals are defensive rather than offensive in their strategic orientation

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The fact that structural pressures similar to those driving alliance thinking today did not drive similar strategic ideas or policies in these instances suggests that international strategic pressure is only a partial explanation for the new alliance thinking. The remaining explanations must be found in China’s enhanced power position, as well as changes in domestic foreign-policy debates. When is a country more likely to ally itself with others? Structural-realist balance-of-power theory suggests that states balance against the most powerful states in the system.26 Presumably, the larger the power gap, the greater the propensity of weak states to balance against strong ones, unless they are in a unipolar system in which one state is so materially dominant that traditional balancing is rendered inoperative.27 Balance-of-threat theory, on the other hand, holds that states usually align against a more threatening state, with the level of threat determined by the combination of that state’s power resources, geographical proximity, offensive capability and policies that suggest malign intent.28

The Chinese case, however, presents puzzles for both theories. If balance of power theory is correct, China’s propensity to balance the United States should be gradually diminishing in the post-Cold War era, since it is catching up with the United States in terms of material capabilities. Yet the alliance argument has in fact arisen at a time when China has achieved the status of the world’s second-largest economy, not when it was lagging far behind. Thus, when analysts such as Yan Xuetong argue that China is now in almost the same power category as the United States, producing an emerging global bipolarity, they are suggesting balancing, even though, from the perspective of relative power, China has less need of balancing today than during the entire post-Cold War period. On the other hand, if balance-of-threat theory is correct, the alliance rhetoric should have appeared several times since the end of the Cold War; certainly, it should not be more intense today than, say, in 1999 when an American bomber actually damaged a Chinese embassy.

A different cause, having to do with a distinctive Chinese understanding of alliance politics, seems to account for the emergence of alliance proposals at a time of Chinese strength. China, according to this logic, needs to construct alliances when its power is equal to or stronger than that of its alliance partners, and when it is not significantly weaker than the balancing target. Chinese analysts have learned that in previous alliances with the Soviet Union and the United States, China, as the weaker partner, was at a disadvantage, especially in its relationship with the Soviet Union. They would thus prefer a reverse asymmetry in future alliances, with China as the stronger side, or at least a structure of equality. It is argued that an alliance with Russia, for example, would pose no risk for China, since Chinese power now rivals Russia’s and is likely to overshadow it in future.29 (This is even more true of alliances with other, weaker countries.) Analysts also believe that China’s present capabilities will make alliance an effective and consequential strategy to counterbalance US power, unlike, say, during the early 1990s, when external balancing might have made little difference due to China’s material weakness. In this sense, the new thinking on alliances is emboldened by China’s enhanced power position after three decades of impressive economic growth. It seems that, to many Chinese analysts, achieving the No. 2 rank in terms of global power is the threshold past which external balancing begins to make sense, as the country is not significantly weaker than the No. 1 country against which it will balance, and is stronger than the rest, with which it might ally.

three schools

An analysis of the structure of China’s foreign-policy debates helps to further clarify the place of the alliance idea in the intellectual spectrum, which is currently dominated by three schools of thought. The first school, which might be called the ‘status quo’ school, continues to insist on the validity and applicability of the tao guang yang hui orthodoxy. But this is now a minority view, mainly held by a small number of former foreign-policy officials who have deeply internalized the established principles of the Deng era. Most contemporary officials and policymakers now recognize that the Deng orthodoxy requires modification, if not yet rejection.

More influential within the intellectual community are two other schools of thought that both suggest revising the Deng orthodoxy, but in different and sometimes contradictory ways. One school, which might be called ‘cooperative revisionism’, holds that the Deng orthodoxy of a low-profile and defensive approach geared mainly toward the United States and the West needs to be revised, in accordance with changed international environments and domestic contexts, toward a more proactive approach in furthering foreign cooperation and managing new challenges. The general direction should be toward ‘peaceful development’ (which eventually became the catchphrase of Chinese foreign policy during the Hu Jintao era after the much-discussed ‘peaceful rise’ and ‘harmonious world’ for-mulations39), rather than revolution or confrontation. This is probably the dominant thinking among intellectuals; certainly, it prevails in policymaking, and thus represents the mainstream in China today.

In contrast, the other revisionist school, which might be called ‘assertive revisionism’, would see the Deng orthodoxy replaced by a more assertive and confrontational stance. On China’s US policy, for example, while the cooperative revisionists would continue to seek strategic cooperation with Washington, the assertive revisionists would prefer that China free itself from its ‘American obsession’, a bias said to influence at least some Chinese policymaking that casts the United States as the top priority, thus limiting policy latitude and strategic vision. Members of this school would not baulk at confronting the United States were the need to arise. Indeed, some now think the United States can and should be challenged; the question is when and how.

China's New Thinking on Alliances

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three schools