Restraining Great Powers by T. V. Paul

Author:T. V. Paul
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300228489
Publisher: Yale University Press

S • I • X

Rising China and Soft Balancing

If secondary states have used soft balancing to constrain the power of the United States, we should also expect to see both hard and soft balancing used against other states, especially rising powers. And so we do: in the post–Cold War era, soft balancing has been adopted by affected states against both China and a resurgent Russia—both of which are responding with hard- and soft-balancing efforts of their own.

From the 1990s until 2009, soft balancing was the dominant approach of the affected states toward a rising China and its security policies in the Asia-Pacific region. More recently, soft balancing has been supplemented by limited hard balancing and diplomatic engagement. In a limited sign of bandwagoning, some smaller Asian states have also shown a willingness to support China in exchange for economic carrots from Beijing, but there is little evidence they endorse China’s policies of territorial expansion in the oceans. China’s dramatic rise in the era of intensified economic globalization has created considerable challenges for its neighbors in the Asia-Pacific as well as for the United States. Rarely in history has a major state grown so economically powerful so quickly, and it is rarer still that one would do so with no balancing coalition directed against it. The closest parallel is Germany’s meteoric rise in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but that generated intense hard balancing by other European powers.

China’s rise is occurring in the context of several facilitating conditions that seem to affect state behavior: an unprecedented level of economic globalization that has produced significant interdependence both within Asia and between China and other states; the difficulties of exercising coercive military force to arrest or accelerate change in the global system; the primacy of defense and deterrence over offense in military technology, making rapid territorial gains difficult or impossible for an expansionist power; and the exponential rise of nationalism among smaller states, which makes direct territorial conquest costly if not unthinkable. Finally, none of the rising powers currently displays an intense expansionist ideology as previous rising powers such as Germany and Japan did. These constraints mean that a rising power has to devise different strategies, other than military expansion or forming military alliances, to achieve its strategic goals.

In 2017, in the face of possible retrenchment by the United States, China emerged as the foremost defender of globalization and free trade. Drawing a metaphor from an old Chinese poem, President Xi Jinping told the 2017 Davos World Economic Forum: “Honey melons hang on bitter vines; sweet dates grow on thistles and thorns.” He explained that “economic globalization has created new problems, but this is no justification to write off economic globalization completely. Rather, we should adapt to and guide economic globalization, cushion its negative impact, and deliver its benefits to all countries and all nations.” Of China’s own approach, he said: “There was a time when China also had doubts about economic globalization, and was not sure whether it should join the World Trade Organization.

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