Chinese foreign policy

The ideological foundations of China’s 1911 Revolution and previous attempts to overthrow the Qing rested on three pillars: modernization, recovery of full sovereignty, and setting up a modern nation-state. All  connected to Hong Kong and Taiwan. When the Communist regime decided to move away from Mao’s legacy and shift to a more balanced economic model and a return to the world stage, once again Hong Kong and Taiwan loomed large in Beijing’s radar. The ideological instrument designed to bring about the reintegration of both territories, the “One Country, Two Systems” concept, succeeded at first in providing ideological cover for the transfer of Hong Kong and with a pro-Chinese government in Taipei seemed, for a while, a realistic prospect across the Strait. However, Beijing’s impatience in Hong Kong, the city’s growing democratic maturity, and the realization in Taiwan that the island’s hard-won democratization would not survive annexation, have cast a shadow over the concept.

As early as the 1980s, Chinese leaders were proclaiming the need to strengthen what they termed “maritime consciousness” (海洋意识) among the country’s traditionally land-oriented population. Since then, the task of elevating public attention on the maritime domain has been personally mandated by top leaders and written into state development plans.

Today, in academic and media circles outside China, speculation persists regarding the relationship between Chinese public opinion and the PRC’s actions in the disputed areas in recent years. Are assertive policies driven by hardline policy preferences among the public? Are the country’s leaders constrained from necessary compromises by nationalistic sentiment? How will public opinion shape China’s future relations with its neighbours and the world? Although online surveys are common, and state-owned media occasionally organize telephone polls on current events, there is a pressing need for more reliable indications of the evolving nature of Chinese public opinion on these maritime
territorial issues, in order to help move this vital discussion beyond the realm of speculation.

At the end of the Cold War, commentators were pondering how far Western ideas would spread in an international environment defined by 'the end of history'. Today, the debate seems to be how far Chinese ideas will reach. This innovative edited volume goes beyond the conventional focus on China's bilateral relations, in a bid to identify the extent to which China's nascent rise has provoked fresh geo-strategic and intellectual shifts within Asia. Offering a unique discussion of the evolution of Chinese schools of International Relations and the reactions of China's Asian partners to the practices of its international interactions, the contributors to this volume seek to explain and understand the relational nature of China's international outreach in the full spectrum of its unabridged complexity, contingency, and contradictions.

ในยุคสงครามเย็น ผู้นำของจีนมักกล่าวถึงความสัมพันธ์ระหว่างจีนกับเกาหลีเหนือว่าสนิทสนมกันประดุจริมฝีปากกับฟัน ซึ่งแสดงให้เห็นถึงมิตรภาพที่ผังอยู่ในสายโลหิตอันเป็นผลมาจากความร่วมมือกันในการต่อสู้กับจักรวรรดินิยมอเมริกันในสงครามเกาหลี (ค.ศ. 1950 – 1953) อย่างไรก็ตาม การเป็นพันธมิตรดังกล่าวมิได้ดำเนินไปอย่างราบรื่น บทความนี้ต้องการชี้ให้เห็นว่าในทศวรรษ 1960 จีนต้องการใช้สนธิสัญญาพันธมิตรที่ลงนามกับเกาหลีเหนือเมื่อ ค.ศ. 1961 เพื่อสกัดกั้นอิทธิพลของทั้งสหรัฐอเมริกาและสหภาพโซเวียตบนคาบสมุทรเกาหลี จีนจึงต้องเอาใจเกาหลีเหนือโดยยอมประนีประนอมในเรื่องเส้นเขตแดน แต่แล้วการปรับปรุงความสัมพันธ์ระหว่างจีนกับสหรัฐอเมริกาเพื่อต่อต้านสหภาพโซเวียตในทศวรรษ 1970 ก็ทำให้จีนคำนึงถึงข้อเรียกร้องของเกาหลีเหนือน้อยลง ดูได้จากการที่จีนไม่สนับสนุนให้คิมอิลซุงใช้กำลังบุกเกาหลีใต้อีกครั้งใน ค.ศ. 1975 นอกจากนี้ การเปิดประเทศและปฏิรูปเศรษฐกิจของเติ้งเสี่ยวผิงในปลายทศวรรษเดียวกันได้นำไปสู่ความสัมพันธ์ทางเศรษฐกิจระหว่างจีนกับเกาหลีใต้ ความสำคัญของเกาหลีเหนือในสายตาของจีนยิ่งลดน้อยลงไปอีกเมื่อจีนปรับปรุงความสัมพันธ์กับสหภาพโซเวียตได้สำเร็จใน ค.ศ. 1989 และทำให้ในที่สุดจีนตัดสินใจสถาปนาความสัมพันธ์ทางการทูตกับเกาหลีใต้ใน ค.ศ. 1992 ซึ่งเท่ากับเป็นการสิ้นสุดความเป็นพันธมิตรระหว่างจีนกับเกาหลีเหนือในทางพฤตินัย

During the Cold War, Sino-North Korean relations were often described by Chinese leaders as “lips and teeth”, showing the sealed-in-blood friendship between the two countries which fought the American imperialists together in the Korean War (1950-1953). As a matter of fact, the so-called lips and teeth relations were mere rhetoric. This article shows that, in the 1960s, China used the 1961 alliance treaty with North Korea to contain the American and Soviet influences on the Korean Peninsula. As a result, China made a concession to North Korea in the case of border demarcation. However, the process of Sino-American normalization of relations against the Soviet Union in the 1970s made China less receptive to North Korean demands, including its refusal to support Kim Il Sung’s plan to launch the second Korean War in 1975. In addition, Deng Xiaoping’s institution of reform and opening-up policy in the late 1970s led to the rise of economic ties between China and South Korea. By 1989, the Sino-Soviet normalization made North Korea less strategically important in Chinese eyes, which in turn resulted in the establishment of Sino-South Korean diplomatic relations in 1992 and the de facto demise of the Sino-North Korean alliance. 

Opened in 1989, it is one of China's two permanent research stations in Antarctica, located on the Larsemann Hills of Princess Elizabeth Land (east Antarctica, in the Australian-claimed sector) at 69º 22′ 24″ S, 76º 22′ 40″ E, and named after the British-educated revolutionary considered to be the father of modern China.

Scientists at the station conduct research all year round in, among others, the fields of meteorology (including the study of the ionosphere and of upper atmosphere physics), geomagnetism, sea ice, and seismology. In addition, during the summer season research is also conducted on geology, biology, medicine, marine science, polar physics, glaciology, and the environment. The station is also active in the fields of lake deposits, and ozone and Ultraviolet radiation observation.

The PRIC is China's national center for polar research, with headquarters in Shanghai. It is responsible for coordinating the country’s polar research and carrying out international cooperation and academic exchanges. It operates two permanent research stations in Antarctica plus a summer one, in addition to an Arctic station in Svalbard (Norway) and the icebreaker XueLong (“Snow Dragon”).

Introduction by Tuong Vu, University of Oregon ..................................................................... 2 Review by Joseph M. Parent, University of Miami ................................................................... 5 Review by Thomas B. Pepinsky, Cornell University .................................................................. 7 Review by Feng Zhang, The Australian National University ................................................... 10 Author’s Response by Ja Ian Chong, National University of Singapore.................................. 14

http://issforum.org/ISSF/PDF/ISSF-Roundtable-7-5.pdf

“There were really only two unpopular policies,” said Andrew Chubb, a Ph.D candidate in international relations at the University of Western Australia, who conducted the study. “The famously unpopular ‘shelve disputes and pursue joint development’ policy that got so much criticism, and ‘send in the troops, don’t hesitate to fight a war.’”

...To Chubb, the fact that a majority agreed that it wouldn’t be in China’s national interest to send in the military in either dispute, even if the other side took a provocative stance and sought to escalate tensions, “seems to suggest that a lot of Chinese citizens would be amenable to national interest-based arguments against war that would jeopardize economic ties if the CCP were to decide that it needed to de-escalate tensions.” He added, “So we probably can’t see any evidence there for China’s population pushing leaders into an unwanted war.”

...“As China’s economic development continues, we can probably expect to see more and more people joining [the middle class] ranks and quite possibly believing that some islands either in the South or East China Sea are something perhaps worth starting a war over,” Chubb said.

“But,” he added. “It’s a big step to go from that and assume that the Communist Party will then take them up on that idea.”

...Chubb cautions that the results of his study aren’t definitive, and that a clearer idea of Chinese public opinion on these issues will emerge after another round of surveys is completed later this year. While he’d be hesitant to make any concrete foreign policy recommendations based on the current data, he said there may be some key takeaways. One is that China’s state media isn’t simply whipping up nationalism on a routine basis; in fact, it tends to present information to the Chinese public in a way that makes compromise seem palatable and war undesirable. On the other hand, the results suggest that Chinese diplomats may not be as constrained in international negotiations as they tend to suggest. “China often likes to tell its interlocutors that it’s under a great deal of pressure from nationalistic public opinion,” Chubb said. “They might sincerely believe that to be the case, but at the same time, that shouldn’t simply be swallowed whole or even exaggerated, as it tends to be when it goes through the processing of the Western media.”

It contains a preface of mine and Prof. Silvio Beretta, as well as 23 articles written by 25 Italian leading experts on today's  China and it covers the areas of research from international strategy, macro-economy, international politics, governance of Chinese communist Party, law, language, banking system, human rights, mass media, Chinese historiography, foreign investment, enterprise management, demography ect. Historically, this is the first book on contemporary China comprises the interdisciplinary papers written by the different foreign experts coming from the same country. It presents  a point of view of Italy on today's China.

This essay examines China’s approach to non-interventionism in world affairs through the prism of ‘governability’ thought. It argues that Chinese attitudes toward (non-)intervention are not necessarily changing as a result of shifting understandings of sovereignty or the humanitarian imperative. Rather, the decision as to whether China sanctions intervention rests more with governability considerations, which place importance on maintaining – not imposing – order and enhancing the capacity for ‘self-governance’ of the state. Here, Chinese thinking on governability presents an alternative view of how governance at the interstate level ought to be exercised, going beyond prevailing practices and discourses of global governance as premised upon a liberal governmentality. The essay illustrates how the idea of governability has roots in China’s past, flowing from the cyclical historiography inherent in Chinese political thought on the interactions between zhi (order) and luan (chaos). Blurring the boundaries separating the domestic from the international realm, it advocates a vision of ‘global governance’ based not on the creation of universalizing norms and values via modes of governmentality, but on the acceptance of diversity and the legitimacy of difference.

It matters very little to the direct Australian national interest who owns a pile of rocks in the East China Sea. What matters is that Japan and China don’t go to war over them and risk Asia’s (and hence our) security and prosperity in the process. We can’t afford to be so complacent on this crisis as to assume that major war, involving Australian lives, could not result from it.