Most observers have attributed China’s recent aggressive diplomatic behavior on matters of trade, the South China Sea… and the Korean penninsula to be a direct result of confidence in China’s economic power and status as a “rising power”. Perhaps. China has been “rising” for a long time. That’s not new. The real novelty is Chinese incompetence in foreign affairs, an area where Chinese leaders have been admirably astute for decades since the “China opening” of the Nixon-Mao meeting. Chinese statesmanship has previously been noteworthy for it’s uber-realistic calculation of power relationships and strategic opportunities.Mark correctly identifies a shift in Chinese behavior over the the past year or so. Where Mark’s analysis falls short lies in presuming that incompetence or short-sighted factions are responsible for this shift. The international relations theory of power cycles offers a richer way of understanding China’s position in the international system and how that has produced a change in its behavior.
Briefly, China’s relative rate of growth has begun to slow. After roughly 30 years of (accelerating) relatively faster growth than the major powers in the system, this trend has reversed itself. This is confusing, since in absolute terms China continues to grow and - by these same absolute measures - it came through the global financial crisis much better than the U.S. In tension with these trends, however, are a host of systemic factors that are constraining its growth (including demographic shifts, environmental degradation and inefficient capital allocations). The transition from early to late stage growth (or from labor-intensive to extensive or innovation-based growth) confronts China with new challenges. It becomes harder to accurately discern its place in the system and its trajectory of growth. This leads to more internal dissent among leaders trying to interpret these disparate trends and creates incentives to discard the cautionary policies of Deng (hide brightness, nourish obscurity). Before the first inflection point, time was on China’s side. A post-first inflection point China, on the other hand, begins to feel pressure to realize some of its ambitions before its window of opportunity closes. Hence, we begin to see cracks forming in the implementation of Deng’s strategy.
So, yes, China has shifted its behavior in some ways that have frightened its neighbors and made them much more interested in hedging against it. That shift, however, is an emergent effect from a complex system and not a simple result of incompetent leadership or factionalism (factionalism, by the way, is another emergent effect of the difficulty of managing the first inflection point). For some related content to all of this, see Brock Tessman’s latest [1].
[1] Brock F. Tessman, “The Evolution of Chinese Foreign Policy: New Incentives with Slowing Growth,” Asian Security 5, no. 3 (2009): 296.
