East Asian Security in the Post-Cold War Era by Sheldon W. Simon

Author:Sheldon W. Simon [Simon, Sheldon W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781563242380
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 1993-08-31T00:00:00+00:00

6

China’s Asian Policy in the 1990s: Adjusting to the Post–Cold War Environment*

Paul H.B. Godwin

China and the Cold War: Adversaries, Allies, and the Balance of Power

The emergence of the Sino-Soviet dispute in the late 1950s was a seminal development in the Cold War, for it tore apart one of the most feared alliances in the East–West global conflict. The rupture led to a pattern in Beijing's security analyses where the balance of power between the United States and the Soviet Union became the principal determinant of Chinese foreign and defense policies. Nonetheless, the Moscow–Beijing rift was not static, but constantly evolved, adding new components as the dynamics of the international system and the East–West confrontation intersected with China's internal politics and Beijing's interpretation of its security environment. It was this evolution over the duration of the Cold War that restructured the strategic balance between the United States and the Soviet Union in the early 1970s, with China playing a central role. By the mid-1980s, however, changes in the leadership of both the USSR and the United States combined with changes in China's interpretation of the global balance of power led to yet another permutation of China's basic security strategy. China moved from tilting toward the United States to a position more definitely self-reliant in anticipation of an increasingly multipolar global distribution of power.1

By the early 1990s, however, Beijing faced a totally unanticipated set of events. Detente between the United States and the Soviet Union, the collapse of the East European communist regimes, and disintegration of the Warsaw Pact were accompanied by political and economic stresses in the USSR that ultimately led to the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself. Entering the 1990s, Chinese security analysts face a condition where the United States and its coalition of industrialized Western democracies, including Japan, are preeminent in the international system. The balance of power in the international system, Chinese strategists fear, is tending more toward unipolarity than multipolarity.

In brief, removal of the East–West dimension from both historical and incipient conflicts in the Asia Pacific Region (APR) is interpreted by Beijing as potentially creating less rather than more regional stability. In the analyses of Chinese security strategists, the absence of superpower competition permits local conflicts to arise where previously they had been suppressed by the dominant East–West pattern of conflict. To this dilemma Chinese analysts in the 1990s had to add the potential effect of a unipolar international system dominated by a United States–led coalition of Western industrialized democratic states.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.