China's Territorial Disputes (43 page)

Students of Chinese foreign policy have always realized that the lack of transparency in the foreign policy making process and the strategic thinking of Beijing, has created problems of assessment and given rise to widely different, even competing, interpretations of events and occurrences. This problem is compounded by the fact that Chinese writings and opinions in the primary sources very often follow closely to summit communiques, government reports, and official correspondence occasionally released by the Chinese government, and so do not reveal much new information or perspectives. Perhaps this is all done in the best tradition of Chinese historiography, in which history is written to maintain a “standard” or official viewpoint to serve current state interests. The relative paucity and typical one-sidedness of information from Chinese sources with regard to foreign policy making or territorial questions involving China means that scholars often have to rely on non-Chinese sources as “reflecting mirrors” to fathom the mode of Chinese interaction with foreigners; hence my reliance on a large number of non-Chinese source materials. Despite these difficulties, students of Chinese foreign policy also know that thorough consideration of the domestic circumstances under which foreign policy decisions are made is the key to understanding and predicting Chinese foreign policy behavior. Indeed, we can surmise from the cases presented that, although security concerns and economic calculations did affect China’s approaches to its island territorial disputes, they were by no means its only consideration, nor indeed its most important ones. Researchers would have to dig deeper into China’s deep structures - domestic politics, cultural proclivities and historical sensitivities - to find the answer to the puzzles and paradoxes of Chinese foreign policy making.

The two-level approach to negotiations privileges the domestic content of international politics, and by implication a nation’s culture, by highlighting a people’s self-perception and the roles it plays or believes it should play in the world, which is a major shaper or determinant of the behavior of its leaders. If James Lilley, former US ambassador to China, is correct, and sovereignty is the mantra of the Chinese leadership,
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then the “cultural” or “moral” basis of Chinese foreign policy posture must also be taken into account, especially in discussing the “pattern” of Chinese negotiating behavior and management or mismanagement of territorial sovereignty disputes. In essence, the moral or cultural factor explains why, at certain times, the Chinese government has appeared unwilling to resolve certain territorial disputes, and even to have raised them in the first place, while at other times Beijing seemed to have desired a quick resolution to these disputes, depending on the Chinese elite’s changing selfperception of China’s identity and international role, and how it wanted others to perceive China.

The changing perception and self-perception of China，s role and identity

While quarrels within the same socialist ideological paradigm aggravated boundary and other tensions between China and the Soviet Union, having different political systems and the absence of ideological disputes were precisely what allowed China and Japan to draw together against the Soviet Union. With the end of the Cold War, state-to-state diplomacy on the basis of common national interests permitted both China and Russia to settle their outstanding border dispute. Paradoxically, it is the mismatching role expectations that China and Japan have of each other as world ideologies waned that is creating territorial and other problems between the two East Asian nation-states. Thus we may say that, while the Zhenbao/Damansky conflict was a product of ideology, which was solved or largely made irrelevant when international relations become “de-ideologized,” the Diaoyu/Tiaoyutai/Senkaku dispute could no longer be swept under the carpet once the basis of international tension had changed from ideological disagreement to conflicting nation-state interests. The latter is true as much of China’s relations with Japan, as of Taiwan’s relations with Japan and China, as we have seen. Indeed, one risk factor threatening regional stability arises from “the suspected renaissance of historical ambitions for regional dominance between China and Japan,”
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and the apprehension of this has led many smaller states in the region to call for a sustained US presence and commitment to the region. The otherwise straightforward border dispute between China and India, if left unresolved in the next few decades, may provide China with a pretext to enhance its strategic presence in the Indian Ocean, to India’s detriment.

A quest for socialist internationalism

The Zhenbao/Damansky Islands dispute was the logical consequence of a decade-long effort by Maoist China to “shame” the Soviet Union by demonstrating its betrayal of the world Communist movement, by defining the Soviet threat, and then by dramatizing China’s moral commitment to the cause of socialism by standing up to that threat with uncompromising rhetoric against the USSR. The Chinese Communist leadership expected to be treated with neighborly comradeship and equality by the Soviet Union; instead, it watched with horror and detestation as it perceived the Soviet leadership to be sliding into the “moral decay of revisionism.” The Chinese leadership became increasingly perturbed by Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin, his enunciation of the theory of peaceful co-existence with the American imperialists, his muted supported for PRC shelling of the Nationalist-held offshore islands of Kinmen and Matsu, and his criticism of Mao’s utopian Great Leap collectivization program. A dozen years after the alliance between the PRC and the USSR was formalized in 1950, these erstwhile ideological brothers hated each other like mortal enemies.

By authorizing a general attack on India in 1962, Mao had hoped to secure Soviet support to diminish Nehru’s standing in the Third World and hence displace his vision of a non-Communist and non-aligned future for developing countries. When this was not forthcoming, Mao abandoned the “peaceful coexistence” mode of foreign relations conduct often associated with Zhou Enlai, in favor of a militant model for attaining world socialism and anti-colonialism in the Third World, by providing shrill moral rhetoric and even material support for anti-revisionism against the Soviets, and for anti-imperialism against the Americans. Even though the alternative model had attracted very few adherents, or because this was the case, by 1969, China was actively seeking out the USSR as an enemy by provoking tension just short of starting a war. As the Cultural Revolution was nearing its peak of fervor, for both political and psychological reasons, some external target had to be found to re-direct the energy of the permanent revolution. Even as China took steps to normalize relations with the US in the early 1970s, to attract world sympathy it continued to depict itself as a frequent victim of Soviet aggression. By refusing the Soviet offer of the disputed islands on the Amur/Ussuri in order to keep alive the border tension, the Chinese leadership was demonstrating to the world that it had the will and ability to scoff at the Brezhnev Doctrine, which justified the Soviet invasion of socialist countries on the grounds of preventing the collapse of Marxist-Leninist regimes there, even at the risk of war.

After the Zhenbao/Damansky crisis of 1969-1970, China drew nearer to the United States and Japan on the basis of mutual concern about Soviet expansionism in the Asia-Pacific region. The shared perception of threat propelled the strategic and diplomatic realignment in 1972 of China with the West against Moscow. “Hegemonism” had definitely replaced “revisionism” as the main threat to the Chinese leadership from the Soviet Union, and this was to be so until well into the 1980s. A tacit anti-Soviet military alliance with America and Japan was considered so valuable that China provoked the 1978 Diaoyu/Tiaoyutai/Senkaku incident, not to torpedo the on-going Sino-Japanese Peace and Friendship Treaty, but rather to underline to the Soviets and others China’s determination to resist any encroachment on its territorial sovereignty.

By the end of the 1980s, a new relationship was dawning between the USSR and China that was to gradually reduce the ideological content of bilateral diplomacy to zero, to be replaced by statist principles of non-interference in each other’s internal affairs and the separation of economics from politics.
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While Gorbachev’s “new thinking” saw the replacement of class relations with universal humanism, the reduction of force as a viable dimension of national power, and Soviet participation in the growing economic interdependence of Europe, Asia and North America, his attempt to de-ideologize international relations became apparent. With the ascendancy of Yeltsin and the collapse of the Soviet Union, even the content of domestic politics became de-ideologized, and China was left without an ideological sparring partner. Lacking a common diplomatic language save that of state-to-state relations, and fearing that regional instability and fragmentation could affect both countries when they desperately desire a stable regional and domestic environment, both regimes took measures to promote “good-neighbourliness” so as to enhance each other’s economic prospects. The signing of the border agreement in 1991 and its ratification the following year served to demonstrate that, in spite of a change in regime, relations between two countries of different ideological systems will continue on an even keel. The two sides had finally arrested the pendulum that had upset bilateral relations in the past as the two leaderships moved between the extremes of eternal friendship and lasting enmity.
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The history of Sino-Soviet ideological discord has become truly irrelevant.

A statist conception of an East Asian regional order

The years between the aftermath of the 1969 conflicts with the USSR and the 1972 normalization with the United States were not only a period of strategic reorientation for China. They also marked the beginning of China’s return from a quest for socialist internationalism to a statist conception of the East Asian order; a readjustment from a strictly continental imperative to a more maritime focus; and since the late 1970s, reorientation from autarky to economic opening-up. From the time of normalization with the US and Japan until the ascendancy of Gorbachev, the Chinese understood that their economic interests were heavily tied to trade with and investment from Japan, and that the PRC’s security posture was quite tied to that of the US role in the Asia-Pacific. However, while the Soviet Union was the target of Chinese frustration as the latter sought to replace the former as leader of the socialist camp, after the Cold War, Japan became a focal point for China’s expression of sovereignty following the selfdiscovery of its identity as an East Asian country with regional interests and concerns.

Although relations with the US were more or less on an even keel up till the end of the 1980s because of a common security interest against the USSR, the Chinese were welcoming but also resentful of Japanese efforts to involve itself in China’s economic development. Japan’s help in bringing China out of its selfimposed isolation and back to the East Asian political-economic order was perceived as explicitly or implicitly denying China’s natural role as leader or “big brother” of the region. As for the Japanese, although they were initially very enthusiastic about political stability and business opportunities in China, by the late 1970s their initial optimism had been dampened considerably by the economic retrenchment leading to the collapse of the showcase Sino-Japanese Baoshan Iron and Steel joint venture in 1981; the low educational and productivity level of managers and workers in China; widespread corruption among Chinese officials; and the trade imbalance between Japan and China. When a reported revision of Japanese school textbooks took place in 1982, in which the Japanese invasion of China was referred to as an “advance,” and Japanese cabinet ministers visited the Yasakuni shrine for the war dead in 1985, the Chinese loudly protested against revival of Japanese “militarism.” Militarism is not only incompatible with China’s concept of a just world, based on familial relations involving neighboring nations of the same culture and racial-stock, which would make the more ancient civilization of China the “elder brother” to Japan; it also reminds the Chinese of a time when China was helplessly pillaged by the “top-dog” of the “East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere,” a sentiment kept alive by Japan’s refusal to issue a formal apology for atrocities against the Chinese committed during World War II.

Even though the Chinese feel that the problem is rooted in small groups of nationalistic agitators, and most Japanese would agree, actions such as the Diaoyu/Tiaoyutai/Senkaku incidents are seen as attempts by nationalists to create a tendency which could sabotage Sino-Japanese friendship and assert Japanese superiority and dominance. On the Diaoyu/Tiaoyutai/Senkaku issue, the Chinese authorities were at pains to show their goodwill by keeping silent for as long as they could bear, for they are also under pressure by home-grown and overseas Chinese nationalist activists to take a stand on sovereignty. As it is, a poll conducted not long before Jiang Zemin’s November 1998 visit to Japan revealed that 82 percent of PRC citizens are opposed to government policy toward Japan, noting that the government has departed from principle in not holding firm on such issues as the Diaoyu Islands’ sovereignty, Japan’s compensation for its aggression against China, and the restriction of the Japan-US Security Treaty to the defense of Japan.
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However, they also want the Japanese side to know that they can continue to demonstrate goodwill only as long as political factions agree not to cash in on this issue, which, given the democratic politics of Japan and lately Taiwan, will not be an easy task. Historical tensions between China and Japan are especially intractable because they exist between peoples, not governments.

The PRC’s preferred strategy for dealing with outstanding territorial issues is to keep all options open while emphasizing a stable international environment conducive to economic growth and an open-door policy. However, in this new Chinese age of statist nationalism, China’s government cannot afford the implication that economic relations are more important than diplomatic rectitude if Japanese forces make a bold grab for the disputed islands. China will not be able to convince others and itself that it is truly independent and a power to be reckoned with if it cannot even resist a minor, marginal and nominal violation of sovereignty claim of great psychological value, let alone recover Taiwan. The increasingly active role played by a more powerful, sophisticated and maritime-orientated PLA in influencing Chinese foreign policy, in tandem with the PRC’s search for diplomatic weight and sea-bed resources in China’s littoral seas, will make it all the more difficult for Chinese leaders in the twenty-first century to turn their back on, or even place on the back-burner, touchy territorial issues in the East and South China seas.