Appeasing China

China's continuing rapid economic growth and expanding involvement in global affairs pose major implications for the power structure of the international system. To more accurately and fully assess the significance of China's emergence for the United States and the global community, it is necessary to gain a more complete understanding of Chinese security thought and behavior. This study addresses such questions as: What are China's most fundamental national security objectives? How has the Chinese state employed force and diplomacy in the pursuit of these objectives over the centuries? What security strategy does China pursue today and how will it evolve in the future? The study asserts that Chinese history, the behavior of earlier rising powers, and the basic structure and logic of international power relations all suggest that, although a strong China will likely become more assertive globally, this possibility is unlikely to emerge before 2015-2020 at the earliest. To handle this situation, the study argues that the United States should adopt a policy of realistic engagement with China that combines efforts to pursue cooperation whenever possible; to prevent, if necessary, the acquisition by China of capabilities that would threaten America's core national security interests; and to remain prepared to cope with the consequences of a more assertive China.

Increasing tensions in the South China Sea have propelled the dispute to the top of the Asia-Pacific’s security agenda. Fuelled by rising nationalism over ownership of disputed atolls, growing competition over natural resources, strident assertions of their maritime rights by China and the Southeast Asian claimants, the rapid modernization of regional armed forces and worsening geopolitical rivalries among the Great Powers, the South China Sea will remain an area of diplomatic wrangling and potential conflict for the foreseeable future. Featuring some of the world’s leading experts on Asian security, this volume explores the central drivers of the dispute and examines the positions and policies of the main actors including China, Taiwan, the Southeast Asian claimants, America and Japan. The South China Sea Dispute: Navigating Diplomatic and Strategic Tensions provides readers with the key to understanding how this most complex and contentious dispute is shaping the regional security environment.

Though a US China conflict is far from inevitable, major tensions are building in the Asia-Pacific region. These strains are the result of historical enmity, cultural divergence, and deep ideological estrangement, not to mention apprehensions fueled by geopolitical competition and the closely related “security dilemma.” Despite worrying signs of intensifying rivalry, few observers have provided concrete paradigms to lead this troubled relationship away from disaster. This book is dramatically different in that Lyle J. Goldstein’s focus is on laying bare both US and Chinese perceptions of where their interests clash and proposing new paths to ease bilateral tensions through compromise. Each chapter contains a “cooperation spiral” —the opposite of an escalation spiral—to illustrate these policy proposals. Goldstein makes one hundred policy proposals over the course of this book to inaugurate a genuine debate regarding cooperative policy solutions to the most vexing problems in US-China relations. Goldstein not only parses findings from American scholarship but also breaks new ground by analyzing hundreds of Chinese-language sources, including military publications, never before evaluated by Western experts. Meeting China Halfway, new in paperback, remains a refreshing and unique contribution to the study of the world’s most important bilateral relationship.

At the end of the Cold War, commentators were pondering how far Western ideas would spread; today, the debate seems to be how far Chinese ideas will reach. This volume examines Chinese international relations thought and practices, identifying the extent to which China's rise has provoked fresh geo-strategic and intellectual shifts within Asia.

China has traditionally viewed her frontier regions--Zxinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Yunnan--as buffer zones. Yet their importance as commercial and cosmopolitan hubs, intimately involved in the transmission of goods, peoples and ideas between China and it west and southwest has meant they are crucial for China's ongoing development. The resurgence of China under Deng Xiaoping's policy of 'reform and opening' has therefore led to a focus on integrating these regions into the PRC (People's Republic of China). This has important implications not only for the frontier regions themselves but also for the neighbouring states, with which they have strong cultural, religious, linguistic and economic ties. China's Frontier Regions explores the challenges presented by this integrationist policy, both for domestic relations and for diplomatic and foreign policy relations with the countries abutting their frontier regions.

This book analyzes Russian and Chinese revisionism in the face of US and Western post-Cold War liberal international order building and asks why both powers have turned revisionist in the late 2000s. The study develops a neoclassical realist model of international order building and contestation and posits to view revisionism as a strategic choice. States go revisionist if the status quo international order threatens their vital security needs (broadly defined not only as territorial security, but also political, economic, normative and ontological) and if they have the means to challenge the undesirable status quo. Russia and China were both unhappy with the post-Cold War international order of American designs, but had to opt for accommodation in the 1990s and early 2000s (“strategic accommodation” in the Chinese case, “resentful accommodation” in the Russian case), before revisionism became even more of a necessity and a real policy option from the late 2000s onward (“constructive revisionism” in the Chinese case, “destructive revisionism” in the Russian case). The author calls for a policy of neo-containment to counter Moscow’s and Beijing’s efforts to game and erode the international order.