The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order by Rush Doshi

Author:Rush Doshi [Doshi, Rush]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780197527917
Google: K4k4EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021-06-25T00:29:21.819552+00:00

Building Order

AIIB offers several benefits for China’s order-building strategy. It (1) provides China coercive ability to constrain its neighbors; (2) helps China set rules and strike consensual bargains; and (3) provides China legitimacy.

First, AIIB institutionalizes China’s coercive capacity, providing it some plausible deniability when it is exercised and reducing some of the friction otherwise generated by its nakedly unilateral use. China’s control over AIIB’s membership, veto, and bank staff—and the relative autonomy of the staff and president over loan disbursements—creates the possibility for economic statecraft. And if AIIB adopts some forms of conditionality, either explicit or implicit, that involve criteria in line with China’s own political or economic preferences, it would constrain autonomy for Asia’s developing states and increase the likelihood that they might align their foreign policies more closely to China’s in order to access capital. Indeed, some Chinese officials and scholars privately suggest that countries with disputes with China will be less likely to access funds from AIIB.73 Others have observed the dichotomy between a growing “economic dependence on China and a security reliance on the United States” and argued that economic inducements will enhance China’s freedom of maneuver.74

China has previously wielded its influence in multilateral organizations against others. For example, it refused to approve the ADB’s multilateral development plan for India because some funds would be used in Arunachal Pradesh, which China claims.75 AIIB also offers opportunities for giving others important roles within Chinese order. Already, the decisions regarding which countries hold AIIB vice presidencies is assumed to be linked to China’s political interests. South Korea was promised one of AIIB’s vice presidencies because of its early support for AIIB, but it lost that slot to France in a decision linked to Seoul’s deployment of US missile defense systems.”76 China privately offered Australia a senior role in AIIB if it signed the October 2014 MOU, but then retracted that offer when Australia’s hesitance was perceived as flowing from US and Japanese pressure.77 And even when AIIB is not used in this way, it can still help build economic flows that would tie Asian neighbors to China’s own economy and create coercive capacity in the future. Writing on these motivations, Fudan University Professor and former Chinese diplomat Ren Xiao argues that “geo-economics and geopolitics are constantly working” together, that “it is not true that China is simply altruistic,” and that through AIIB China believes it can “win friends and influence in the region” and “make nearby countries more attractive as suppliers to Chinese manufacturers and as consumers of Chinese-made goods.”78 Finally, the rules and standard-setting power AIIB generates can affect the fates of Asian economies. Australian officials were concerned that AIIB’s draft guidelines did not seem to reference coal technology, and requirements regulating who might participate in lucrative infrastructure projects also offer China constraining power over its neighbors.79 Just as Japan and the United States used development banks to advance political goals, so too can China.

Second, AIIB provides a foundation not only for coercion but for consensual order-building.

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.