Organizer and Chair: Gaye Christoffersen, East-West Center
Discussant: Harry Harding, George Washington University
The study of Chinese foreign policy behavior has historically been done in case studies that focused on conflict and confrontation in strategic and economic issues. Much of this work was confined to crisis behavior and driven by a need to be policy-relevant. The study of Chinese cooperative foreign policy, although less dramatic, is better able to capture theoretically the patterns of everyday interaction between China and the international system. The study of cooperation is not as dramatic as studying confrontation but captures the primary tension in China's foreign relations, the clash between interdependence and sovereignty. International cooperation promotes processes of global integration that invariably impinge on national sovereignty and national identity, thus challenging some of China's core values.
The papers presented on this panel will examine case studies of how Post-cold War international cooperation forces change on Chinese thinking and diplomatic practice in the Asia-Pacific region. China officially accepted the concept of "interdependence" only a little more than a decade ago, and has been slower still in accepting the full implications of that concept in domestic and international arenas. Whether the issue is security, peacekeeping or economic integration, international regimes impose on China rules and norms that require modifications of past practices and traditional views. The extent to which China complies, or feigns compliance, with international rules and norms provides some measure of Chinese learning in international regimes.
Cooperative Security and the Chinese Response
Rosemary Foot, Oxford University
Estimates about China's future external behavior have recently received increased attention in the international relations literature. The weight of scholarship tends to emphasize China's state-centric, realist approach to world politics, and its belief that security is dependent on the maintenance of traditional balances of power. However, the security framework that is emerging in the Asia-Pacific is one that appears to be contrary to China's traditional approach. Embryonic institutions, such as the ASEAN Regional Forum, and of which China is a part, have been giving primacy to ideas of cooperative security. Through an examination of a number of Beijing's relationships in the area this paper assesses whether China has shown any sign of moving away from conventional balance of power practice and towards behavior associated with cooperative approaches to security.
China's Cooperative Diplomacy in the Cambodian Conflict
Jianwei Wang, East-West Center
China's post-Tiananmen diplomacy has adopted a more cooperative approach than was predicted by many scholars who expected a more assertive and belligerent diplomacy linked to domestic political repression after 1989. China's policy toward the Cambodian conflict exemplifies this new orientation with three diplomatic firsts: China backed a "second generation" UN peacekeeping operation which was the most intrusive in terms of managing a country's internal affairs; China sent the PLA as peacekeepers to a foreign country; and China systematically supported the UN effort to hold a free and fair election in a war-torn country. China effectively abandoned the Khmer Rouge, its last revolutionary client in the third world. This paper will examine the evolution of China's cooperative diplomacy toward Cambodia during 1990-93 and its significance to the pattern of China's post-Cold War foreign policy.
Opening to the North: Heilongjiang in China's Northeast Asian Economic
Cooperation Policy
Gaye Christoffersen, East-West Center
Scholarly work on Northeast Asian economic cooperation has too narrowly focused on participating countries as unitary actors, ignoring the extent to which local governments form transnational alliances, bargain with the center as a representative of local societal forces, and ultimately shape the nature of the regional regime. This paper examines the impact of Chinese foreign economic cooperation in the Tumen River Development Program on Heilongjiang and Heilongjiang's input into this regional regime.