Tracing China's Long Game Plan
Mini Teaser: Many Western observers think China is due to liberalize as it rises. Yet Chinese reformers have long favored Western ideas merely as a means to a different end: wealth and power.
Orville Schell and John Delury, Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-First Century (New York: Random House, 2013), 496 pp., $30.00.
SINCE THE 1990s, U.S. policy toward China has been premised on the idea that increasing Chinese wealth and international stature would lead naturally to domestic political liberalization. Early in the previous decade, the Bush administration also held out hope that China would become a “responsible stakeholder” in the international community. The intervening years have witnessed marked growth in China’s economic and diplomatic heft, with the country emerging as the second-biggest economy in the world. Its leaders refer to it as a “great power” alongside the United States. And yet the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) retains its monopoly on political authority, and since the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics the party-state has clamped down on domestic human-rights activists, lawyers and other advocates of liberal reform. Abroad, China has engaged in increasingly militarized efforts to press its claims to disputed territory, and it has also used economic tools, including threats to slow or halt commerce in certain goods, to this end. Where Chinese political elites once at least paid lip service to democratic values and international norms, now they actively tout their model as an alternative to the so-called Western system. How did successive generations of U.S. policy makers get China so wrong?
One answer is that they ignored indicators from modern Chinese history and the CCP’s record that would have called into question the notion of inevitable Chinese liberalization and assimilation to international institutions. Better late than never, Orville Schell and John Delury probe those indicators in their excellent and erudite new book, Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-First Century. Schell, a former dean of the University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and current director of the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations, and Delury, a Yale-trained historian based at Yonsei University in Seoul, combine scholarly learning with a reportorial appreciation of colorful, revealing details. They breathe life into their history through biographical sketches of pillars of Chinese intelligentsia and politics from the nineteenth century through the twentieth, and they argue that national rejuvenation—defined in terms of fuqiang (“wealth and power”)—has been the goal of these figures all along. Chinese elites over the past two centuries have attempted to convert the shame of their country’s nineteenth-century humiliation, when outside powers repeatedly exploited China’s military inferiority, into energy to fuel China’s ascent and redress its anguished past. If some of these elites from time to time promoted Western political values, they did so only fleetingly, at moments when they believed liberal democracy could enrich and strengthen the state. Schell and Delury’s introduction identifies a common theme across these cases:
Unlike democratic political reform in the West, which developed out of a belief in certain universal values and human rights as derived from a “natural,” if not God-given, source, and so were to be espoused regardless of their efficiency, the dominant tradition of reform in China evolved from a far more utilitarian source. Its primary focus was to return China to a position of strength, and any way that might help achieve this goal was thus worth considering. . . . Reformers have been interested in democratic governance at various stages in China’s tortuous path, not so much because it might enshrine sacred, inalienable political liberties but because it might make their nation more dynamic and thus stronger.
Among Chinese elites, concerns about power, understood as a function of economic and military capacity, have trumped any serious appreciation of human rights or the rule of law, whether at home or abroad. They see the world through power-hungry lenses. It is a dog-eat-dog competition out there, and the unit of account is the state, not the individual or citizen. While this perspective contrasts sharply with contemporary Western norms, it would have been familiar to nineteenth-century European statesmen such as Otto von Bismarck. Such an outlook precludes support for genuine political liberalization, which would entail popular sovereignty. Instead, China’s leading thinkers and statesmen have tended to see themselves as essential to their country’s effort to prevail in the global rat race—and, accordingly, as entitled to amass their own personal wealth and power.
SCHELL AND DELURY thus explain why China has not democratized, and this is a significant accomplishment. But they also illuminate the domestic underpinnings of China’s foreign and security policy. While the authors focus almost exclusively on Chinese internal developments, their analysis provides critical context for understanding contemporary Chinese strategy and its roots in the work and thought of key Chinese figures over the century and a half since the Opium Wars. For example, the authors profile the nineteenth-century reformer whose blueprint for both naval modernization and a “charm offensive” vis-à-vis Southeast Asia and Russia seems to guide Beijing today. And from the book’s treatment of Deng Xiaoping’s economic guru, Zhu Rongji, the careful reader may detect how and why Zhu let Western interlocutors deceive themselves into thinking he was a true free marketeer, when in fact he had no intention of abandoning state-sponsored capitalism. Since the emergence of the modern state at the end of the last dynasty, China’s leading thinkers and statesmen have set their sights on reestablishing the Middle Kingdom as the preeminent power in its orbit, and they have seen this goal as a zero-sum endeavor, requiring them to steal, plot and use force against rivals or even potential rivals and their allies.
The book chronicles the pioneers of China’s rise from its low point in the late Qing period, when Western states and Japan inflicted defeat after defeat on the demoralized, disintegrating dynasty. As reflected in the officially sanctioned history curriculum for all Chinese students today, the catalogue of horrors includes the Opium Wars of 1839–1842 and 1856–1860, the first Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895, the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 and the Paris Peace Conference after World War I in 1919, which transferred to Japan Germany’s colonial leases over Chinese ports on the Liaodong and Shandong peninsulas. (China’s curriculum downplays the Taiping Rebellion, a civil war that ravaged the country from 1850 to 1864, but this purely domestic conflict was another major blow to the Qing.) Among the figures profiled in the book’s coverage of this period are the nineteenth-century reformist intellectuals Wei Yuan (1794–1857) and Feng Guifen (1809–1874); the last effective Qing dynasty ruler, Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908); a turn-of-the-century thinker and coiner of the phrase “sick man of Asia” for his homeland named Liang Qichao (1873–1929); the founder of China’s Nationalist Party, Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925); the father of the May Fourth movement in 1919, Chen Duxiu (1879–1942); and Sun’s Nationalist successor Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975), who lost the Chinese Civil War and ended up on Taiwan. While the last Qing ruler abdicated in 1911, China remained divided and weak through the period of Japanese incursions and the civil war following the end of World War II.
The book then turns to CCP chiefs Mao Zedong (1893–1976) and Deng Xiaoping (1904–1997), as well as Zhu Rongji, who arguably engineered China’s economic growth in the 1990s. The final profile focuses on Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize laureate who has been in prison since 2008. Liu differs from the preceding characters in that he is a genuine democrat. “Despite the episodic emergence of brilliant and courageous liberal dissenters, their demands for democracy have not ended up being the main motive force of modern Chinese history, at least so far,” write Schell and Delury, adding that the stronger driver seems to have been the urge to restore China’s past wealth and power. They end their book, however, on a note of characteristic Western optimism:
But as these goals now become realized, will not more and more Chinese demand to enjoy their newfound affluence in a more open and law-abiding society where they have a greater role in deciding who leads them and how they are governed? Is it not also probable that the yearning of Chinese leaders for international respect will end up being just as strong a magnet drawing them, too, toward a more consultative, even democratic, form of governance?
Despite such questions, Schell and Delury will leave careful readers wary. Their account of China’s internal evolution explains why its persistent authoritarianism is no accident but rather reflective of deeply held beliefs within the elite that stretch back at least a century and a half. The work also reveals that these beliefs are likely to preclude China from becoming what Westerners call a responsible stakeholder. With the exception of Liu Xiaobo, the book’s central figures have tended to view wealth and power as inextricably linked—and as the lodestars of international relations. In their minds, success in interstate commerce naturally produces geopolitical dominance, furnishing the resources for a robust military and facilitating global influence. Further, they have believed that in order to reassert Chinese primacy in a world dominated by wealth and power relations, China must strengthen itself—or “self-strengthen” (ziqiang)—in all possible ways and embrace realpolitik, which means, in part, learning from enemies and appropriating their winning ways. Chinese leaders have understood for decades that, during this period of learning and building up forces, China must defer to stronger powers. But, in accordance with the logic of realpolitik, Beijing also would try to divide hostile coalitions and exploit weaker powers. Finally, Chinese reformers in the late nineteenth century revived two classical Confucian principles related to harmony and shame that live on today, serving as a reminder of the fundamentally illiberal, antidemocratic premises of Chinese politics. Schell and Delury thus clarify that CCP leaders are steering the country down a path outlined more than a century and a half ago, when China was still an empire and international relations could realistically be characterized as the clash of colonial titans. China hatched its current approach to domestic politics as well as to foreign relations in this nineteenth-century context.
IT WAS in the mid-1800s that Wei Yuan articulated many of the themes that came to define the work of China’s twentieth-century modernizers. When the first Opium War broke out, Wei found himself in a ringside seat. Having repeatedly failed the imperial civil-service exam after a promising early academic career, he wound up advising provincial officials and accumulating a small fortune as an investor in the salt trade in the city of Yangzhou along the Yangtze River. There in 1842, he witnessed British warships steaming past after a successful attack on Shanghai. Wei’s response to the trauma of China’s defeat at the hands of a British force of only a few thousand men combined precepts from ancient Chinese philosophy with insights from his observation of modern statecraft and warfare. Wei did not turn to the traditional reservoir of Chinese thought, Confucianism, but rather drew on a rival school called “Legalism.” Where Confucianism propounds “benevolence, ritual propriety, and social harmony” as the “only legitimate and effective basis for good government,” Legalism stresses the need to “enrich the state and strengthen its military power” (fuguo qiangbing, which is alternately translated as “rich country, strong army” and from which the term fuqiang is derived as an abbreviation). In the place of the Confucians’ rule by virtue, Legalists argue for rule by law, defined as a system of incentives wielded by a ruler to ensure his subjects’ loyalty. Schell and Delury write, “These ancient Chinese realpolitikers had no patience for what they considered the moralistic blather of the Confucians. Since they put little stock in good intentions, wealth and strength alone were the ultimate arbiters of a policy’s success or failure.”
Realpolitik in this context refers to a purely pragmatic, results-based approach not only to domestic rule but also to foreign relations. As Schell and Delury note, Wei believed that Western powers like the British “promote trade by sending out soldiers,” so that “soldiers and trade are mutually dependent.” This idea was to persist in the minds of Chinese elites, including Sun Yat-sen, who wrote in 1894:
In the West the interests of the state and those of commerce flourish together. . . . National defense cannot function without money, and money for the military will not accumulate without commerce. The reason why Westerners are ready to pounce like tigers on the rest of the world and why they bully China is also due to commerce.
Wei’s emphasis on wealth and power and his attraction to Legalism—or, at least, his skepticism about Confucianism’s claim to a monopoly on civilized ways—may have helped him resist the traditional Chinese impulse to reject all things foreign as inferior. In a treatise on the first Opium War, Wei argued that China needed to accumulate wealth and power to recover its imperial greatness. In other words, it needed “self-improvement and self-strengthening” (zixiu ziqiang), which it could only achieve by “borrowing”—that is, acquiring and copying—technology from abroad while enacting governmental reforms at home. This impulse to appropriate certain Western means and employ them toward the end of strengthening China against the West would become a key theme of Chinese modernizers, as would the Legalist spirit of realpolitik. With weak states condemned to be prey for strong states, China must work to amass its own wealth and power, deferring as necessary to its superiors while trying to learn from and, where possible, weaken them. Schell and Delury point out that Wei endorsed the idea of weakening China’s Western adversaries by playing them off against each other, or “yiyi zhiyi” (“using barbarians to control other barbarians”), a classic Chinese stratagem. Finally, self-strengthening would require intelligence about foreign states to identify their points of vulnerability, and diplomatic finesse to divide up hostile alliances. After the first Opium War, Schell and Delury explain, Wei regretted that the Qing had possessed too little knowledge of foreign relations in the outside world to exploit the tensions between Britain on the one hand and France and the United States on the other—despite the fact that both the French and the Americans had offered the dynasty support.
WEI’S INTELLECTUAL heir, Feng Guifen, built on Wei’s ideas of self-strengthening and copying “techniques and methods” from foreign powers. Like Wei, Feng had proceeded all the way to the point of the imperial-level civil-service exams and then stumbled, and he lived at a time of great tumult, the period of the second Opium War and China’s enormous internal conflagration, the Taiping Rebellion. Schell and Delury highlight the query Feng posed in the wake of China’s defeat at the hands of French and British coalition forces, and in the aftermath of a civil war that left twenty million dead and effectively sounded the death knell for the Qing dynasty: “Our territory is eight times that of Russia, ten times the size of America, one hundred times bigger than France, and two hundred times England. Why is it that they are small and strong, yet we are big and weak?” Feng offered his response in an 1860 manifesto, Dissenting Views from a Hut near Bin,1 that echoed Wei: “If we use Chinese ethics and teachings as the foundation, but supplement them with foreign countries’ techniques for wealth and power, would it not be ideal?” For those who remained skeptical, Feng reasoned, “If a system is no good, even though it is from antiquity, we should reject it; if a system is good, then we should follow it, even if it originates from uncivilized peoples.”
Consistent with Wei’s recommendation that China improve its knowledge of foreign powers (e.g., to facilitate playing them off against each other), Feng lobbied the throne to sponsor education in foreign studies. Schell and Delury note that his request was granted despite opposition from Confucian proponents of the classical Chinese curriculum. Today, China sends more students abroad than any other country, and China may also train the largest number of English linguists of any non-English-speaking state. While some of this effort is in the service of diplomacy and commerce, much of it is also part of self-strengthening—building up China’s military power. A recent report by the nonprofit Project 2049 Institute disclosed that the part of the Chinese military thought to house its cyberunits is the largest employer of well-trained linguists in China.
Feng’s message about self-strengthening gave rise to an eponymous reform movement in Beijing, and in 1896 the provincial official Zhang Zhidong even successfully petitioned the Empress Dowager Cixi for permission to establish a “Self-Strengthening Army.” Meanwhile, Feng’s endorsement of Wei’s notion of copying from the West helped to ensure that this concept would endure. As Schell and Delury note, Zhang also formulated the self-strengtheners’ famous motto: “Zhongxue weiti, xixue weiyong” (“Chinese learning should remain the core, but Western learning should be employed for practical use”). By the beginning of the twentieth century, Sun Yat-sen was using self-strengthening language to argue for the adoption of not only Western know-how but also the latest Western form of government, republicanism, and the overthrow of the Qing: “The future of China is like building a railroad. Thus if we were now building a railroad would we use the first locomotive ever invented [i.e., dynastic rule] or today’s improved and most efficient model?” Yet Sun evinced only a practical interest in republicanism. In his famous 1924 declaration of the “Three Principles of the People,” he qualified his support for rights and liberty with concern about unity and the collective: “The individual should not have too much liberty, but the nation should have complete liberty. When the nation can act freely, then China may be called strong.” Later in his life, Sun came to admire another foreign political model, Leninism, because of its ability to generate party discipline, underscoring his merely instrumental embrace of republicanism as the most promising new political technology to deploy in the service of China’s essence.
THE THINKING of the late Qing and Republican eras has influenced Chinese statesmen from Mao and his successor Deng Xiaoping to the current generation of CCP officials. They all have spoken of exploiting xiyong (Western function) while preserving zhongti (Chinese essence). Mao talked of adapting Marxism to China’s circumstances; Deng advocated importing Western market-based economic know-how while building socialism “with Chinese characteristics”; and the latest incarnation of this approach involves aggressively “borrowing” Western industrial and military technology. Witness China’s massive efforts to extract U.S. intellectual property using cybertechniques along with more traditional forms of espionage.2 Imitation is said to be the sincerest form of flattery, but in this case it should be interpreted as evidence of a consistent and enduring ambition on the part of Chinese elites. The goal, again, is not to become like the United States insofar as the United States is a democracy and supporter of the post–World War II international system. It is rather to preserve CCP rule and make China as strong as possible so that Beijing can establish a new global order on its own terms.
What would a Chinese-dictated world order look like? The details are murky, but it is nonetheless possible to identify certain contrasts with the current order. Rather than starting with the dignity of the individual and the entitlement of all human beings to certain fundamental rights, protected by law, the Chinese order would be premised upon the existence of the collective and the priority of its stability. Where Washington promotes liberty, Beijing would substitute the aim of datong (“Grand Harmony” or “Great Unity”). Part of Wei Yuan’s unorthodox approach to Confucianism was that he believed that instead of proceeding cyclically, with the rise and fall of dynasties, history was actually linear, progressing toward a utopian era of “Grand Harmony.” Schell and Delury explain that Wei belonged to a school of thinkers who contended that even Confucius understood history this way, and he secretly authorized the use of realpolitik methods “to keep the world orderly” until the arrival of datong. As with Wei’s conception of self-strengthening and its requirements, his view of realpolitik as the means and datong as the goal lived on well after Wei’s lifetime.
At the end of the nineteenth century, China suffered its most devastating defeat up to that time when it lost to Japan in the first Sino-Japanese War. On the heels of this trauma, the reformist scholar Liang Qichao, an intellectual heir of Wei Yuan and Feng Guifen, penned a preface to a new edition of Wei’s work on Legalism and statecraft. He wrote: “Those who open themselves to the new will prosper and grow strong. But those who confine themselves to the old will diminish and become weak.” Liang Qichao’s mentor, Kang Youwei, an adviser to Cixi’s nephew when he reigned as emperor for 102 days in 1898, published in that same year a book called Datong Shu (Book of Grand Harmony).Even as Kang was engaged in the practical task of advising a weak Qing emperor on how to reform and shore up his regime, he was conjuring a harmonious utopia. Kang had studied in the same scholarly circle as Wei Yuan and was in agreement on the linearity of history, the ultimate goal of datong and the usefulness of realpolitikin the intervening period. Mao later told the sympathetic Western reporter Edgar Snow that he was a big fan of Liang and Kang and as a young man would “read and reread those books until [he] knew them by heart.” As the Chinese-educated, Kentucky-based political scientist Shiping Hua has pointed out, subsequent CCP leaders have not hesitated to hold out datong as the ideal while endorsing alternative near-term goals that seem more attainable for the present. He argues that “the persistence of Grand Harmony as an ideal also suggests that China’s evolution in the direction of Western-style liberal democratic capitalism is not very likely.” The recurrence of datong across successive generations of CCP elites, including the virulently anti-Confucian Mao, reflects an entrenched Chinese tradition that puts the collective ahead of the individual and endorses realpolitik at home and abroad pending the arrival of the ever-elusive Grand Harmony.
Despite the focus of China’s late nineteenth-century reformers on modernization and their generally heterodox stance toward Confucianism, datong was not the only classical Confucian principle that they revived. Scholar-activists such as Wei and Feng also emphasized the traditional Confucian virtue of humiliation and packaged it into a force for modernization. Wei recalled the Confucian aphorism, “Humiliation stimulates effort; when the country is humiliated, its spirit will be aroused.” And Feng wrote, “Once one feels a sense of shame, nothing is better than self-strengthening.” Like datong, the motif of chi (“shame” or “humiliation”) endures to this day in China. In 1927, Chiang Kai-shek, Sun Yat-sen’s successor as head of China’s Nationalist movement, established National Humiliation Day, and the holiday continues to be observed. As Schell and Delury point out, many of the most popular tourist destinations for Chinese domestic travelers commemorate moments of Chinese defeat and devastation at the hands of Western or Japanese forces. These sites often take liberties with history; the state-run Opium War Museum, for example, erroneously includes the United States in the ranks of China’s opponents. A regime that persistently highlights national humiliation and manipulates history to galvanize the population for struggle is not a regime on the verge of recognizing the individual rights of its citizens or embracing the current international order.
Although many of the figures covered by Schell and Delury considered democracy a source of the West’s strength and therefore mustered at least an instrumental interest in it, none ended up a democrat—again, with the exception of Liu Xiaobo, currently imprisoned and not likely to gain much of an audience in China. Although Feng Guifen admired Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 election, he was, in Schell and Delury’s words, more of a “participatory authoritarian” than a democrat. Liang Qichao started out in favor of democracy before deciding that China wasn’t ready for it. As noted, despite Sun Yat-sen’s endorsement of republicanism, he never fully embraced the premises of the liberal social contract and eventually came to admire Leninist party organization. Chiang Kai-shek was out of the same mold: “While Chiang splattered his speeches and writings with references to ‘constitutional democracy,’ ‘liberty,’ and ‘freedom,’” write Schell and Delury, “he did so in much the same way as had Sun. . . . For him, these were vague, long-term aspirations, nowhere near as important in China’s immediate struggle for survival and national rejuvenation.” The pattern is of flirtation with, but never true conversion to, liberal-democratic principles. Accordingly, Wealth and Power’s query as to whether China’s leaders’ quest for international prestige might lead them to democratize seems to represent a wisp of optimism rather than a realistic projection for China’s future.
AN ALTERNATIVE vision of China’s future comes from a rare source that Schell and Delury mention but neglect to mine fully. Wei Yuan’s Illustrated Treatise on Sea Powers was published in 1843, four months after the signing of the Treaty of Nanking, which removed British warships from the Yangtze. This is the treatise in which Wei remarked on the mutual dependence of British military and commercial power. But as the scholar Jane Kate Leonard has observed, Wei goes well beyond this diagnosis of British success and presents a blueprint for Chinese naval modernization and geopolitical strategy. Elements of it could have come from an official planning document from the 1980s, so closely does Chinese behavior over the past several decades track with Wei’s recommendations.
Wei begins from the idea that Western states derive their power from a network of bases that facilitate domination of maritime communications and trade. He cites not only the British ports in Africa, India, Ceylon and Singapore, which conferred influence over the Strait of Malacca, but also the Dutch facility at Batavia, which afforded access to the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra. He further concluded that China was not in imminent danger of invasion, so long as the Western powers had not penetrated mainland Southeast Asia, Nepal or Japan. (Had he lived long enough, Wei might have seen Japan’s assault on Southeast Asia at the outset of World War II as a prelude to Japan’s further incursions into China and thus judged his assessment to have been validated.) That said, Wei believed that the Western powers’ network of bases in the region clearly destabilized the old tributary order—at China’s expense—and positioned the West to threaten the Chinese coast. Against the backdrop of this analysis, Wei’s Treatise proceeds to prescribe a course of diplomatic and military actions through which China might fortify itself.
The Treatise recommends that China focus its diplomatic efforts on mainland Southeast Asia, particularly Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia, along with Japan, which later demonstrated its ability to rebuff the West in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, and Nepal. Following the logic of yiyi zhiyi, Wei argued that Beijing should play external powers off against each other and use diplomacy with tributary states to weaken them. For instance, he suggested trying to balance the British presence at Hong Kong by giving France and the United States access to Guangzhou (then called Canton). He further recommended seeking support against the other Western powers from Russia—going so far as to advocate encouragement of Russian action against the British in Afghanistan and northwestern India, which would allow the Nepalese to destroy the British at Bengal. Such a chain of events would leave the British position in Singapore exposed, so that Thailand, in conjunction with Vietnam, could attack.
The world and the map have clearly changed in the 170 years since Wei penned this plan. Japan has been locked in an alliance with the United States since 1945, and the British no longer govern Hong Kong or India, are no longer on the ground in force in Afghanistan and are not the Western country that China most fears. But the essence of Wei’s recommendations still resonates and even seems to explain China’s recent diplomatic choices. Consider China’s charm offensive vis-à-vis Southeast Asia over the past few decades and the more recent inroads that China has made in India’s traditional sphere of influence, including Nepal. Consider, too, Beijing’s apparently tightening relations with Moscow, which deny other potential rivals the opportunity to form an anti-Chinese coalition with Russia. Finally, there also seems to be a modern-day analogue to Wei’s argument that pressure on British positions in other parts of Asia would yield dividends for the Chinese in their near abroad. In the context of Beijing’s efforts to cultivate a range of partners in the Middle East and Afghanistan, including America’s enemies, it would seem possible to substitute the United States for Britain and the Middle East for India and perceive the same indirect logic in operation—the need to divert and weaken the great power most threatening to China’s East Asian ambitions.
Complementing this diplomatic strategy, Wei offered a set of naval-modernization recommendations that track even more closely with China’s military modernization over the past few decades. The blueprint begins with measures to shore up China’s coastal defenses in the short term. Next is the development of long-term defenses, along with a reorganization of the military and the promotion of innovation within it. Finally, the country would be prepared to emerge as a serious naval power—defending its key ports, possessing a network of strengthened bases, acquiring and developing advanced military technologies, and fielding a naval force that is smaller but qualitatively better than its predecessor. Since the early 1980s, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has pursued a strategy that exactly mirrors the Wei concept. Successive PLAN leaders have progressed from boosting the defense of China’s ports to increasing the distances from China’s coast over which Chinese forces can operate and interdict hostile forces. Today’s terminology for this effort refers to “island chains,” with the “first island chain,” bordered by Okinawa, Taiwan and the Philippines, a nearer-term goal than the “second island chain,” bounded by the Ogasawara island chain, Guam and Indonesia. According to this vision, the PLAN’s final step would be to push out to the blue waters of the Pacific and Indian Oceans under the protection of its new aircraft carriers.
China already has fielded precision missiles that can range targets in Guam, and the latest open-source estimates indicate that the country is on the verge of being able to hit moving targets up to three thousand kilometers from the mainland, well into the second island chain. Meanwhile, China’s first aircraft carrier has undergone flight trials, and several additional carrier keels have been laid. Finally the entire Chinese military has been shrinking in size as part of the effort to boost the quality of the force through the acquisition of new technologies, along with improvements in training and personnel policies.
Certainly, military modernization is not the only aspect of today’s China worth watching, but it would be reckless to exclude it from efforts to parse China’s future. Schell and Delury do an outstanding job of uncovering the thought and work of key Chinese reformers and leaders from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and their coverage of the late Qing period includes discussions of Li Hongzhang and Zeng Guofan, self-strengthening military commanders favored by the Empress Dowager Cixi. If China’s twenty-first-century self-strengthening effort continues as planned, with emphasis placed on both economic and military power, it might be worth including more contemporary Chinese defense intellectuals in a future edition of the book—such as, perhaps, Admiral Liu Huaqing, the so-called Alfred Thayer Mahan of China, who articulated the island-chain strategy in 1982. In the meantime, following the logic of Schell and Delury, we can say definitively that, if China continues on its present trajectory of economic and military expansion, it will become a bolder actor in the world, not a more democratic or responsible one.
Jacqueline Newmyer Deal is president and CEO of the Long Term Strategy Group, a Washington-based defense consultancy, and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
1 As Schell and Delury explain, though Feng was actually writing from Shanghai, the place name Bin (near present-day Xian) would have evoked for Chinese readers the ancient Zhou dynasty king Wu, a symbol of resistance to foreign barbarians. By situating himself in a hut, Feng acknowledged the boldness of his endeavor—daring to advise the imperial court on statecraft and strategy from his perch as a mere provincial official.
2 In addition to revealing Western technical secrets, Chinese spying serves the aim of helping Beijing better understand its rival, consistent with the lesson that Wei Yuan drew from the first Opium War.
Image: Flickr/Kentaro IEMOTO. CC BY-SA 2.0.
Pullquote: If China continues on its present trajectory of economic and military expansion, it will become a bolder actor in the world, not a more democratic or responsible one.Image: Essay Types: Book Review