Table Of ContentLiving with China
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Living with China
Regional States and China through Crises and
Turning Points
Edited by
Shiping Tang, Mingjiang Li,
and Amitav Acharya
LIVING WITH CHINA
Copyright © Shiping Tang, Mingjiang Li, and Amitav Acharya, 2009.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-61670-7
All rights reserved.
First published in 2009 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the
United States - a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest
of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan
Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998,
of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above
companies and has companies and representatives throughout
the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the
United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-38006-0 ISBN 978-0-230-62262-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230622623
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Living with China : regional states and China through crises and turning
points/Shiping Tang, Mingjiang Li, and Amitav Acharya, editors.
p. cm.
1. China—Foreign relations—1976- 2. China—Foreign relations—
1976—Case studies. 3. China—Relations—Asia—Case studies.
4. Asia—Relations—China—Case studies. 5. China—Relations—
Pacific Area—Case studies. 6. Pacific Area—Relations—China—Case
studies. I. Tang, Shiping. II. Li, Mingjiang. III. Acharya, Amitav.
JZ1730.A55L59 2009
327.51—dc22
2008048149
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Integra Software Services
First edition: July 2009
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction: Understanding “Living with China” 1
Shiping Tang
1 Explaining China’s Proactive Engagement in Asia 17
Mingjiang Li
2 The PLA’s Role in China’s Regional Security Strategy 37
Da-peng Qi
3 The Politics and Economics of China’s Economic
Presence in Asia: A Preliminary Empirical Assessment 53
Ruobing Liang
4 India and China: Confidence Building through Crises 69
Swaran Singh
5 Indonesia-China Relations: The Politics of Reengagement 89
Rizal Sukma
6 Japan: Reengaging with China Meaningfully 107
Haruko Satoh
7 Coping with Complexity: Trends in Thailand’s
and Malaysia’s Relations with China 129
Joseph Chinyong Liow and Mohamed Nawab
Mohamed Osman
8 Pakistan-China Relations: The Shadow of Kargil and 9/11 153
Fazal-ur-Rahman
9 Waltzing with Goliath: Philippines-China
Engagement in Uncharted Waters 173
Aileen San Pablo – Baviera
10 Russia and China: The Politics of Solving Problems 193
Alexander Lukin
vi CONTENTS
11 South Korea’s Evolving Relations with a Rising China:
Symbiosis or Mere Cohabitation? 211
Jae Ho Chung
12 Grand Strategic Fit and Power Shift: Explaining Turning
Points in China-Vietnam Relations 229
Alexander L. Vuving
Conclusion: Living with China, but Loving It? 247
Amitav Acharya
About the Contributors 267
Index 269
Preface
Debating China’s rise and its implications for Asia and beyond has become a
cottage industry, and much ink has been spilled regarding whether China is
going to be a benign or malign power and how other states ought to deal with
China. By and large, pundits—usually outside Asia—have advanced their pre-
ferred policy recommendations for handling the “China Problem” based on
their theoretical or intuitive readings into the history of the rise and fall of
great powers, without paying much attention to the real world. Few have
looked into the actual process through which regional states have managed to
live with a rising China and how their dynamic interaction has shaped the
region so far.
Theory-driven and prescription-driven discussion has its inherent limits.
Without solid empirical understanding of how other states have actually been
trying to live with a rising China, we cannot possibly know the virtue of all
those prescriptions. This volume fills a vacuum by examining ten countries’
actual experience of living with a rising China in the past two decades or so.
Many contributors to this volume have direct access to and have been often
consulted by policy-making bodies in their respective countries and thus have
intimate knowledge of how their countries live with China.
This volume is the final product of a project funded by the S. Rajaratnam
School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University,
Singapore. We thank the dean of RSIS, Ambassador Barry Desker, for his keen
support of this project.
The final product could not possibly be in this shape without the critical
comments from discussants of each chapter during and after the conference,
held for this project in March 18-19, 2007 at RSIS. The editors and the authors
wish to thank the following individuals for their comments on the volume:
Rajesh Basrur, Richard Bitzinger, Leszek Buszynski, Heungkyu Kim, Ho Khai
Leong, Kwa Chong Guan, Lam Peng-er, Lijun Sheng; Chih-yu Shi, Leonard
Sebastian, Tan Seng Chye, Tan See Seng, Sarah Tong, and Guihong Zhang.
Finally, we wish to thank the supporting staff of RSIS, Adeline Lim, Tan Eng
Chong, Peter Ng, and Caroline Ng. Their outstanding support made the con-
ference for this project a smooth sail.
Introduction: Understanding
“Living with China”
Shiping Tang1
n the early 1990s, when China’s economic growth became impossible to
Iignore, many regional observers became anxious about how China was going
to exercise its growing power. Along with the anxiety about China’s power and
intentions, various proposals for handling the “China Problem”—from contain-
ment, to engagement, to congagement, to hedging—also began to dominate pol-
icy conversations in the region.2
So far, however, much of the debate on the China Problem has been not only
Western-centric but also heavily theory driven (partly because it was Western-
centric). There has been an outstanding dearth of regional voices in the debate
and, at the same time, an outstanding lack of solid empirical work on how
regional states have coped with the rise of China.3 By and large, pundits outside
the region have advanced their preferred policy recommendations based on their
theoretical or intuitive readings into the history of the rise and fall of great
powers, without paying much attention to the real world.
In other words, few have looked into the actual process through which
regional states have managed to live with a rising China and how their
dynamic interaction has coincided with one and a half decades of relative
peace and robust growth in the region despite shocks from the 1997 Asian
financial crisis, the fallout from the September 11 terrorist attacks, SARS, and
the Bird flu.
With more than a decade since the rise of the debate on China now may be a
good time to assess what has really happened between China and regional states.
Because regional states are more sensitive to China’s behavior, they should also
be the most qualified to make that assessment.
This volume is the product of such an attempt. Its stories of how regional
states have actually lived with China in the past decade or so are told by
scholars from individual regional states. Importantly, many of these authors
have intimate knowledge gained from active involvement in shaping their
2 SHIPING TANG
own countries’ interactions with China. By telling their side of the story, they
project a distinctive regional voice in the ongoing debate.
Although we intentionally exclude case studies on the United States and other
Western hemisphere states, we do seek to contribute to the discussion about
China’s rise outside the region—in an “inside-out” way. As stated above, most of
the existing works on the rise of China and its relations with neighbors have been
very much Western-centric, if not U.S.-centric. While many are based on extensive
interviews with observers and government officials in the region, they certainly
have not captured the whole picture. The voices of scholars, often with first-hand
knowledge about the policy-formulating process of their governments and the
grassroots shift of attitude toward China among the populace, provide a special
perspective on how the U.S.-China relationship affects the interaction of regional
states with both China and the United States. While the U.S.-China relationship—
not surprisingly—features prominently as many regional states calculate their
China policy, their calculations also seem to be quite different from those of either
Washington or Beijing, as Amitav Acharya notes in his concluding chapter.
In the rest of this introduction, I first underscore the questions and the
approaches taken in this volume. I then extract some common themes that have
emerged from the individual chapters, with the conviction that these common
themes can serve as possible guidance for building cooperation among states and
a foundation for more theory building. Next, I summarize the major findings of
the individual chapters. A brief concluding section follows.
Questions and Approaches
This volume is broadly interested in three sets of questions. How have regional
states and China interacted? How has this dynamic interaction between China
and regional states shaped China, regional states, and the region itself? What
lessons can we learn from these interactions? Such an enterprise emphatically
requires an empirical approach toward the problem of “living with China.”
To distinguish our volume from the existing literature, that is, Western inter-
national relations (IR) theory-driven approach or a general historical survey,
our project takes a unique case-studies approach. Each contributor from a
regional state is to select two or three major crises or turning points in his or
her country’s interaction with China. Crises can be cases in which China and a
particular regional state work together to resolve, exacerbate, or even take
advantage of the crisis (for good and bad reasons), and turning points can be
for better or worse. We justify this approach not only to differentiate this
volume from the existing literature on living with China but also because crises
and turning points are more telling cases for understanding how China and
regional states have managed to live with each other.
