The New Great Game by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2016-02-29T16:00:00+00:00

SOURCE: Rongxing Guo, Understanding the Chinese Economies (Waltham, MA: Academic Press, 2013), 150.

Conclusion

China’s expanding engagement with its five smaller southwestern neighbors is primarily a function of China’s need to ensure peace and development along frontiers inhabited largely by China’s underdeveloped and alienated minorities. This has become an essential part of China’s quest for balanced development and international prestige. In pursuing its objectives in the southwest, China has relied primarily on its rapidly growing economic leverage. This has been its greatest strength but also its primary limitation in engaging its neighbors and assimilating its southwest minorities. Especially in politics, China has been showcasing and not really empowering its minority peoples. That China’s policies remain insufficiently grounded in local sociopolitical rituals, traditions, and wisdom perhaps partly explains why Beijing continues to encounter difficulties in these frontier regions. Another reason is that these five neighboring states lie between China and India and they must remain sensitive to the concerns and ambitions of these large and rapidly rising neighbors.

China’s initiatives also reflect greater appreciation that, in China, economic engagement is the most cost-effective way to address underdevelopment and political unrest along its southwest frontier. But it is also beginning to show China’s growing appreciation of the significance of other cross-border linkages to the development and of the need for mutual respect in assimilation of its own minority peoples. This is at the core of China’s paradigm shift with respect to engaging its smaller neighbors and is part of China’s strategy to ensure that neighboring countries remain comfortable with China taking the lead in efforts to build a subregional development and security architecture. Building such a subregional framework is essential for China’s long-term peaceful rise, which remains premised on continued high economic growth to ensure social stability and regime security. China’s economic rise, therefore, both facilitates and necessitates reviving these historical cross-border linkages with its southwestern frontiers. The smaller countries across these frontiers have begun to appreciate their own growing stakes in engagement with China, but they are also limited by their own historical baggage and internal catharsis. In the longer term, global trends are likely to facilitate more extensive and holistic engagement to advance the interests of both sides.

Notes

1. This chapter does not examine China’s relations with Pakistan and India, which are covered elsewhere in this book.

2. The southwest region of China historically included the scenic regions of the Yunnan-Guizhou plateau, inhabited largely by China’s minorities that today constitute provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan. These were incorporated into China in 230 BC by the Qin dynasty emperor Shi Huangdi. This frontier was extended further during the thirteenth-century Yuan dynasty to also include the Tibetan plateau, which defines China’s current southwest frontiers.

3. See Taylor M. Fravel, Strong Borders, Secure Nation: Cooperation and Conflict in China’s Territorial Disputes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 72; Jeff M. Smith, Cold Peace: China-India Rivalry in the Twenty-First Century (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 58; and Robert F. Ely, Candidate for President (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2013), 207.

4. Fravel, Strong Borders, 72.

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