CHINA'S QUEST FOR SECURITY IN THE POST-COLD WAR WORLD

Samuel S. Kim

July 29, 1996
ii

*******

The views expressed in this monograph are those of the

author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or

position of the Department of the Army, the Department of

Defense, or the U.S. Government. This report is cleared for

public release; distribution is unlimited.

*******

Comments pertaining to this monograph are invited and should

be forwarded to: Director, Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army

War College, Carlisle Barracks, PA 17013-5244. Comments also may

be conveyed directly to the Conference Organizer, Dr. Earl H.

Tilford, Jr., by calling commercial (717) 245-4086 or DSN 242-

4086.

*******

This monograph was originally presented at the U.S. Army War

College Seventh Annual Strategy Conference held April 23-25,

1996, with the assistance of the Office of Net Assessment. The

Strategic Studies Institute is pleased to publish the paper as

part of its Conference Series.

*******

All 1995 and later Strategic Studies Institute (SSI)

monographs are available on the Strategic Studies Institute

Homepage for electronic dissemination. SSI's Homepage address is:

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iii

FOREWORD

In April 1996, the Army War College's Strategic Studies

Institute held its Seventh Annual Strategy Conference. This

year's theme was, "China Into the 21st Century: Strategic Partner

and . . . or Peer Competitor."

Dr. Samuel S. Kim of Columbia University argues in this

monograph that, while post-Tiananmen China is a growing regional

military power, it is, almost paradoxically, a weak state both

pretending and trying to be a strong one. By flexing its muscles

with its weaker neighbors, China, is largely compensating for

self-doubts about its national image and strength.

What the world sees in China, a modernizing, economically

robust, and assertive regional hegemon and world power "want-tobe," is, Dr. Kim asserts, at least in part a facade. Although

China has made remarkable economic progress in the past few

years, those who trumpet its rise do not consider its massive

internal contradictions involving social, political, demographic,

and environmental problems. Dr. Kim makes the point that

weaknesses in those areas cannot be overcome by purchasing modern

weapons, even those high-tech weapons that bolster a nation's

claim to being a major military power.

 The United States is, and in all likelihood will remain, a

Pacific power. China, despite the limitations Dr. Kim examines

herein, will be an immense factor in the strategic balance of

power in the Pacific region. For that reason, I commend this

monograph to you.

RICHARD H. WITHERSPOON

Colonel, U.S. Army

Director, Strategic Studies Institute
iv

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE AUTHOR

SAMUEL S. KIM is a senior research scholar at the East Asian

Institute of Columbia University. He was formerly a professor at

Princeton University. Dr. Kim has written widely on Chinese

foreign policy, East Asian international relations, and world

order. He is the author of many books, most recently, China and

the World: Chinese Foreign Relations in the Post-Cold War Era,

published in 1994.
1

CHINA'S QUEST FOR SECURITY IN THE POST-COLD WAR WORLD

INTRODUCTION

China's security behavior, riddled with contradictions and

paradoxes, seemed made to order for challenging scholars and

policymakers concerned about the shape of things to come in postCold War international life. With the progressive removal of the

Soviet threat from China's expansive security parameters from

Southeast Asia, through South Asia and Central Asia, to Northeast

Asia, coupled with the growing engagement in international

economic and security institutions, came perhaps the most benign

external strategic environment and the greatest international

interdependence that China has ever enjoyed in its checkered

international relations. Despite the deterioration of SinoAmerican relations in the past 2 years, most Chinese strategic

analysts do not believe the United States poses a clear and

present military threat. Indeed, there has been no shortage of

upbeat assessments of China's post-Cold War security environment

to be, on balance, the least threatening since the founding of

the People's Republic in 1949.1

 And yet Beijing has been acting

in recent years in a highly provocative manner as if it were

faced with the greatest threat. For good or otherwise, Beijing

managed to capture global prime time with the "rise of China"

chorus in the global marketplace suddenly turning into the "rise

of China threat" debate in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond.

All the same, Beijing seemed determined enough to proceed with

all deliberate speed to beef up its military power projection

capabilities, especially air and blue-water naval power, with the

real military spending increasing at double-digit rates even as

global military spending, especially those of all the other

members of the Perm Five in the United Nations (U.N.) Security

Council, began to fall sharply since 1992.2 The revealing paradox

of the capitalist world economy is that "market Leninist China,"

with the fastest growing economy--China's GDP in 1994 reached 

almost $3 trillion on a purchasing power parity (PPP) basis,

making it the second-largest economy in the world after the

United States3--is, at the same time, the fastest-growing emitter

of greenhouse gases and the largest recipient of multilateral aid

from the World Bank and of bilateral aid from Japan!

What matters most is not so much the growth of Chinese

capability as how Beijing uses its new military strength. Through

a series of provocative actions, China has cast a long shadow

over the strategic landscape of the Asia-Pacific region. The

demonstration of China's military muscle as an up-and-coming

naval power is all the more unsettling, as the Asia-Pacific

region is a primarily maritime theater with several major flash

points. In recent years Beijing expanded its dominion in the geostrategically vital and geo-economically contested South China

Sea, test-launched its first mobile intercontinental ballistic
2

missile, and continued to defy the post-Cold War moratorium on

nuclear testing. China's southward creeping expansionism from the

Paracels to the Spratlys to Mischief Reef is a stark reminder of

Beijing's growing naval power--and its willingness to use it if

necessary--in a resource-rich area of more than 3.6 million

square kilometers. Only China, among the five recognized nuclear

powers (with the short-lived exception of France), defied the

post-Cold War moratorium on nuclear testing that has been in

place since October 1992. Then came a series of missile-firing

military exercises toward various target areas near Taiwan in

July and August 1995. The latest third round of saber-rattling

missile diplomacy started March 19, 1996, following 9 days of

live-ammunition air and naval maneuvers and ballistic missile

testings to stop Taiwan's accelerated march toward democracy only

to help people on Island China to forge a more distinct Taiwanese

identity. As well, this latest (mis)guided missile embargo caused

ripples throughout the region and beyond.

SECURITY, LEGITIMACY AND IDENTITY

What, then, accounts for the puzzle of an ascent postTiananmen China and its post-Cold War international demarche in

the seemingly benign external security environment? This is not

an easy question to answer, but one thing seems relatively

certain. With the clarity and simplicity of East-West conflict

gone and the collapse of Marxist-Leninist ideology as the

legitimizing prop, Beijing is seemingly unsure of its place in a

world no longer dominated by superpower rivalry, and the

communist regime is in the grip of an unprecedented legitimationcum-identify crisis. Not since the founding of the People's

Republic in 1949 have the questions of internal and external

legitimacy--catalyzed by the Tiananmen carnage and the collapse

of global communism--been as conflated as in the early post-Cold

War years. As a result, the Chinese leadership is compelled to

shift from charismatic and ideological legitimation to

performance-based legitimation (economic growth). As well, the

regime has turned with greater urgency to hypernationalism based

on a new amalgam of ethnonational appeals to the ancient,

glorious Confucian past and the greatness of Chinese civilization

and people. Such national identity enactment may be seen as a

necessary compensatory-searching behavior, a function of a regime

with weak legitimacy trying hard to bring about national

reunification and restore what Chinese of every ideological

coloration believe to be their natural and inalienable right to

great power status. Herein lies the logic of China

exceptionalism, seeking China-specific exemption in the

international human rights regime and China- specific entitlement

in international security and economic institutions, all in the

service of restoring China's great-power status. Nonetheless, the

decay of the legitimizing prop of socialism and the rise of Han

chauvinism can be expected to have far-reaching impacts on
3

Beijing's quest for security as well as on the peace and

stability of the Asia-Pacific region and beyond.

CHINA'S CONCEPT OF SECURITY

The traditional Chinese concept of security is captured in

an old Chinese aphorism--"The country that has no enemy in mind

will perish." Likewise, the opening lines of volume one of

Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung read: "Who are our enemies? Who

are our friends? This is a question of the first importance for

the revolution. The basic reason why all previous revolutionary

struggles in China achieved so little was their failure to unite

with real friends in order to attack real enemies."4 Security in

traditional (pre-modern) China, Johnston concludes in his welldocumented study of Imperial China's strategic culture and grand

military strategy, was a "product of superior military

preparations, the application of violence, and the destruction of

the adversary."5

 The historical experience of Western and

Japanese imperialism during the century of national humiliation

(1839-1945) seems to have endowed the Chinese with the 19th

century conception of absolute state sovereignty and taught the

lesson of the importance of power politics in international

relations and its corollary--that China could not be respected

without power. The same experiential logic of the Korean War

seemed to be on Mao's mind when he said in 1956: "If we are not

to be bullied in the present-day world, we cannot do without the

[atomic] bomb."6 In short, China's concept of security at a given

point in time can be seen as made manifest in the concept of

power, the definition of the external security environment

(including the identification of the enemy), and the evolution of

military doctrines.

Despite the quantitative explosion of IR literature in the

post-Mao era, a corollary of the globalization of Chinese foreign

relations in the 1980s, there is a paucity of articles and books

specifically keyed to China's own concept of security.7 One

interesting and revealing exception is a commissioned monograph

entitled "On China's Concept of Security," written in 1985 or

1986 by Ms. Song Yimin, Head for the Studies of World Politics,

Institute of International Studies, Beijing, for the United

Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR). This

monograph may be accepted as reflecting the semi-official party

line of the mid-1980s and, as such, a point of departure for

examining China's concept of security as evolved and made

manifest in numerous official and scholarly definitions of the

changing international situation and the evolution of military

doctrines.8

The post-Mao Chinese concept of security, as expounded by

Song, is broad and multidimensional, involving not only military

considerations but also political and economic factors.
4

Obviously, China's security requires and demands a strong

national defense, but it also implies political stability and

unity as well as a sound and prosperous economy. More strikingly,

there is no identification of the enemy as she advances the

notion of global interdependence as China's security "is [circa

mid-1980s] inseparably linked to world peace": "In the world

today, economic interaction and interdependence are greater and

more evident than ever before . . . The world has become one. No

country can afford to seal itself from the outside."9 To sum up:

China's security = military strength + domestic political

stability + national unification + prosperous economy + world

peace. To reverse the formula, world peace depends on a strong

China: "The more China develops, the greater the restraint for

war, the greater the assurance for [world] peace."10 Here we find

China's late 19th century reformers' notion of "a rich state and

a strong army" (fu guo qiang bing)--actually borrowed from

Japan's Meiji reformers--as revised and updated to form a

comprehensive yet materialist notion of security. What is also

made loud and clear in Song's exposition of the Chinese concept

of security is a kind of "hegemonic stability theory" with

Chinese characteristics: world peace and stability depends on a

strong China. As paramount leader Deng Xiaoping succinctly put

it, "The stronger China grows, the better the chances are for

preserving world peace."11 Still, we need to accept Song's

exposition as a time-specific (pre-Tiananmen) and a situationspecific (for the U.N. audience) conception of Chinese security.

What has remained unchanged in the post-Cold War era is the

notion that a strong, stable and prosperous China is an

irreducible prerequisite to world peace. Such thinking has found

its way into various blends of Pax Sinica proposals in the course

of China's first-ever grand debate on world order in the early

1990s.12 What has changed is the Chinese concept of power, a

subtle but significant shift from a normative to a material

direction. Mao repeatedly stressed justice (normative power) as a

critical component in the equation of national and international

power. During the Maoist era, there was a recurring propensity to

make a virtue out of weakness by defining Chinese power as a sum

total of both material and normative power: "Though, for the time

being, the output of some products is smaller on our side than in

the imperialist countries, yet, since we are on the side of

socialism, the socialist system plus a certain level of material

strength gives us superiority in the entire balance of power."13

Faced with the demise of the strategic triangle, the end of

the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Gulf War, and

the clear and present danger of the "new world order" all coming

in rapid succession, the 14th Party Congress in late 1992

signaled an official closure to the decade-long debate about the

structural reality of the international situation. Bipolarity is

now pronounced to have ended as the international system is
5

heading rapidly towards multipolarity. A multipolarizing world is

cast in a new light as giving rise to new geopolitical alignments

in the Asia-Pacific region and, concomitantly, intensified

rivalry for "comprehensive national strength" (CNS, zonghe

guoli), now the official party line on China's national

security.14 The CNS line easily translates itself into the

definition of the post-Cold War world as a dangerous neoDarwinian jungle where China's national security interests are

best protected through unilateral security. Whether a country can

succeed in global competition is said to depend upon the

development of its high-tech industries. If China is to become a

world power, it must attend to these industries, as it once did

to the development of nuclear weapons and satellite programs.15

There is no escape from this high-tech rat race if China is ever

to regain its proper place in the post-Cold War world. China has

to be competitive with more powerful military/industrial powers

if it is to beat them at their own game. Indeed, some strategic

analysts see the relatively benign post-Cold War security

environment as the unprecedented opportunity for accelerating the

military modernization drive--and thus narrowing the military gap

with Russia and the United States--without diverting too many

resources from economic development. As two military analysts put

it: "The relatively peaceful international climate and our

friendly relations with our neighbors are providing fine external

conditions for PLA weapons development."16

Despite the situation-specific changes and shifts in Chinese

definitions of the regional and global orders, then, there

remains at the core a fundamentally Realpolitik view of the

outside world as essentially conflictual where antagonistic

contradictions and rivalries are the norm. At the same time,

global debate on the new world order is said to be symptomatic of

the emerging neo-Darwinian contest for an all-out struggle for

power in which every major state actor jockeys for a favorable

position during the process of tumultuous change.

Even during the "world peace/development line" period (mid1984 to mid-1989), the Chinese leadership was ambivalent about

the concept of global interdependence even as Chinese

representatives made repeated references to the concept in global

institutions. The CCP has never directly and explicitly endorsed

the concept of global interdependence. In the post-Cold War and

post-Tiananmen era, however, the concept of global

interdependence came under assault. President Bush's espousal of

"a new world order" was attacked as the invisible integrationist

hand of the conspiratorial peaceful evolution strategy that seeks

to establish a "‘free' federation or a federation of ‘democratic

countries' on the basis of a common principle and common outlook

and values (an integration similar to the Federation of Great

Britain)." The Chinese came to view such a scheme as having a

global reach that extends to Asia, Africa, and Latin America;
6

that is, the United States "aims at bringing the entire world

under its rule."17 The revised definition of the world situation,

according to a classified Communist party document, rejects the

core assumptions of the world peace/development line, warning

instead that world politics has entered a new phase of "the

struggle between the two systems." Although varying "in its form,

intensity and the tactics employed," we are told, the two-system

struggle "will be sharper, more complex and more intense than

before."18 The major challenge that China will have to face and

respond to in the next 15 years (1995-2010) is not one of

managing global interdependence but a concerted Western plot to

split and weaken China by giving support to separatists in

minority localities, by exaggerating and taking advantage of the

center/periphery contradictions, intraparty policy differences,

state/society chasm, and by exerting pressure on such issues as

"democracy" and "human rights."19

Some international relations scholars have even resurrected

the Maoist line espoused in the United Nations in the early 1970s

that interdependence in the contemporary world economic system

amounted to no more than an asymmetrical interdependence "between

a horseman and his mount." In the post-Cold War era

interdependence in a world without a world government (anarchy)

can fuel and accentuate zero-sum power politics by trampling on

the sovereignty of weak states, by preventing weak states from

controlling their economic, military and political resources, and

by providing more opportunities for some states to interfere in

the internal affairs of others.20 Consider and contrast, for

instance, Zhao Ziyang's "world peace and development line"

replete with the global interdependence theme in the mid-1980s

with Jiang Zemin's CNS line in 1992 challenging the military

"should enhance combat strength in an all-around way; should more

successfully shoulder the lofty mission of defending the

country's territorial sovereignty over the land and in the air,

as well as its rights and interests on the sea; and should

safeguard the unification and security of the motherland."21

Consider and contrast as well what Wang Jisi, Director of the

Institute of American Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social

Sciences, had to say on this matter in 1994, compared to what

Song Yimin said in 1986:

In essence, China's leading political analysts doubt

the virtue of what is referred to in the West as

interdependence and globalization. They tend to see the

world as increasingly chaotic and assertive nationalism

and fierce economic competition as the main features

of international relations. In their eyes world

politics continues to involve a zero-sum game, and a

hierarchy of power inevitably exists within which the

more powerful nations dominate the weak.22
7

Military power as the most important component of the CNS is

viewed as indispensable for China to regain its status as a

leading world power and to defend against any threats, actual or

imagined, to Chinese sovereignty and integrity. Without

sufficient military power, according to China's strategic

analysts, it will not be possible to successfully enact China's

national identity as a world power or to play a decisive role in

global politics. Chinese Defense Minister Chi Haotian spelled out

without any prioritization the PLA's wish list: "We must have

whatever other big powers have already had in their inventory."23

The proposition that sufficient military power buys both

deterrence and status reflects and effects internal debates about

why China needs more and better high-tech weapons systems

including nuclear weapons. "What has not changed in the post-Cold

War era," as Johnston argues, "is a deeply rooted hard

realpolitik worldview that nuclear weapons buy both soft power

(international status and influence) and hard power (military

operational power)."24 Similarly, advocates of blue-water naval

modernization speak not only of protecting oceanic shipping

lanes, fishing grounds, and resources, but also of increasing

China's "national awesomeness" (guo wei) and expanding "political

influence" (zhengzhi yingxiang).25

All the same, the post-Cold War global situation is defined

in terms of how it affects China's internal security as well as

threats near abroad. Indeed, the blurring of the domestic and

external divide is now acknowledged as one of the defining

features of international relations in the post-Cold War era.26

Of particular concern to China as a multinational state is that

local and regional ethnonational conflicts, previously

overshadowed and repressed by the global superpower contention,

are breaking out in many parts of the world. Of the 89 armed

conflicts between 1989 and 1992, all but three were, or are,

"internal conflicts" and "state-formation" conflicts. Wars of

national identity mobilization have emerged as the primacy

species of regional conflict in the post-Cold War setting.27 With

the demise of the threat of direct military invasion, according

to Yan Xuetong, a leading strategic analyst, China, too, is now

plagued by ethnic separatism and border disputes, with "hypernationalism" (jiduan minzuzhuyi) having already made extensive

inroads among China's separatists in the post-Cold War setting.28

China is "home" to about 16 million Muslims of various

ethnonational minorities in the strategically vital province of

Xinjiang (where Lop Nor nuclear test site is located) and as such

acutely sensitive to the dangers of Muslim separatism fueled by

worldwide Islamic fundamentalism. In the five-nation treaty of

April 1996, China, Russia, and three former Soviet Central Asian

 republics (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan) have reached

an understanding to join forces to combat the spread of

fundamentalist Islamic movements within their respective borders.
8

The question as to what country presents the clear and

present threat to China's security--hence the enemy-- remains

unclarified in Chinese policy pronouncements. The evidence from

internal discussions is ambiguous and contradictory. According to

some secret reports from the Central Military Commission (CMC),

leaked to and published in Hong Kong, a strong military

cooperation with Russia is believed to be essential for breaking

the Western embargo on military technology. In April 1993,

Admiral Liu Huaqing, a standing committee member of the

Politburo, was reported to have mobilized 50 top military

officers to send an anti-U.S. petition in which the military

"strongly oppose bartering away [China's] principled criteria for

state-to-state relations in exchange for bilateral trade."29 In a

meeting with President Jiang Zemin on September 8, 1993,

according to a Hong Kong journal with close ties with Beijing,

eight senior generals led by Defense Minister Chi Haotian were

said to have presented President Jiang with a petition signed by

180 high-ranking officers demanding that China "take a solemn and

just stand" against the United States.30 In early September 1993,

two top-secret documents underscored the importance of building a

new type of relations with Russia as "a new strategic move to

prevent U.S. hegemonism from subverting China and intervening in

the internal affairs of other Asian countries."31 And yet, a

major PLA conference held in late 1993 to debate and determine

China's primary security threat was reported to have reached no

consensus, only varying estimates, with about 50 percent of the

participants believing the primary threat in the next century to

be Japan, 40 percent believed the United States, while only 10

percent believed it would be a resurgent Russia.32 As one

People's Daily commentator noted:

Gone are the days when a clear line between friend and

foe could be drawn and confrontation between groups

could be seen. A new picture, more complicated and

characterized by a condition in which one is neither

friend or foe or both friend and foe has emerged.

Proceeding from their own basic interests, Russia, the

United States, and other major Western powers attack,

defend, charge, and retreat in the big chess board of

international politics.33

With the sharp downturn in Sino-American relations since

mid-1995, the conspiracy school seems to have gained ascendancy

in China's assessments of the international security environment.

Many strategic analysts now argue that America's China policy is

"engagement" in word but "containment" in deed. Still, America's

"containment policy" is viewed in more political and ideological

than military and strategic terms. Jiang Zemin's 1992

authoritative assessment of China's external security 

environment as "never been more satisfactory since the founding

of the Republic" still remains largely unrevised.
9

The Gulf War demonstrated with particular clarity the type

of warfare with which the Chinese armed forces would be tasked,

triggering a doctrinal shift from the Dengist strategy of

fighting people's war under modern conditions to a high-tech

strategy of achieving a quick, decisive military victory in a

matter of days. This shift to fighting and winning local wars

under post-Cold War high-tech conditions was also aimed at

developing a mobile, rapid-reaction, high-tech military force

that is able to fight small "low intensity" border or near abroad

conflicts. In keeping with the shift in general military

doctrine, China has, from the late 1980s onward, moved toward a

more flexible warfighting doctrine of limited nuclear deterrence

requiring sufficient counterforce and countervalue tactical,

theater, and strategic nuclear forces to deter the escalation of

conventional or nuclear war.34

One of the most remarkable and potentially dangerous

developments in the post-Cold War era is the rise of "haiyang

guotu guan" (concept of sea as national territory). The Chinese

people have been prodded to cultivate and cherish haiyang guotu

guan so as to direct their attention to the unpleasant fact that

it is China's maritime interests that have been encroached upon

most alarmingly in recent history: "Territorial claims laid by

foreign countries over China's maritime territory amounts up to

one million square kilometers, ten times the size of China's

disputed land border. By now, over thirty Chinese islands with

surrounding waters are still in the hands of foreigners. Losses

in maritime interests are really to be grieved and they call for

our serious consideration."35 As well, Chinese strategists now

speak of the need for "survival space" (shengcun kongjian)--and

for strategic frontiers that extend horizontally into the Indian

Ocean, the South China and East China Seas, and vertically into

space. A recent internal Chinese document states that the

disputed island groups in the South China Sea, some of them

situated nearly 1,000 kilometers south of China's Hainan island

province and most of them subject to conflicting jurisdictional

claims, could provide lebensraum for the Chinese people.36

Consonant with such a concept of sea as national territory and

China's lebensraum in the coming years, China's naval military

doctrine has shifted from the coastal defense of the mainland to

active defense of maritime economic, resource, and strategic

interests. Based on such doctrinal ground, China's naval

exercises and gunboat operations have extended progressively

further away from coastal waters in the 1990s.

CHINA'S SECURITY BEHAVIOR

The point central to understanding China's quest for

security and identity is to recognize that, since the collapse of

the traditional Sinocentric world order in the late 19th century,
10

this proud and frustrated Asian giant has had enormous difficulty

finding a comfortable niche as an equal member state in the

family of nation-states. Even during the Cold War years,

Beijing's security behavior was beyond compare. Beijing has had

difficulties in maintaining enduring friendship with any Asian

state. Beijing has established by choice or by necessity a track

record that no other country could possibly match: it had an

alliance as well as a Cold War relationship with the socialist

superpower, both of which proved to be inconclusive; it had a war

and a quasi-alliance relationship with the capitalist superpower,

both of which proved to be short-lived. Beijing's relations with

New Delhi also shifted from the accommodative friendship of the

mid-1950s to the Sino-Indian border war in 1962. In the mid1960s, Sino-Indonesian relations abruptly veered from nearalliance to extreme hostility, and in the late 1970s, SinoVietnamese relations rather unexpectedly deteriorated from

"boundless affection and assistance" to hot and then cold war.

Thus, the People's Republic succumbed to wild swings of national

identity enactment, mutating through a series of roles: selfsacrificing junior partner in the Soviet-led socialist world;

self-reliant hermit completely divorced from and fighting both

superpowers; the revolutionary vanguard of an alternative United

Nations; self-styled Third World champion of a New International

Economic Order; status quo-maintaining "partner" of NATO and

favored recipient of largess at the World Bank; and, now, lone

socialist global power in a postcommunist world. None of these

identities has much to do with Asian regional identity. The vast

gap between being and becoming in the drive for status--and the

contradiction between being a regional power and having global

aspirations--have introduced a fundamental paradox in the

prioritization of China's multiple identities.

Regional Security Behavior.

China's regional security behavior seems to be propelled by

unilateralism in bilateral clothing with little Asian

regionalism. Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's Pacific

overtures in 1986-88 for a comprehensive cooperative security

system for the entire Asia-Pacific region were countermanded and

scaled back to the bilateral negotiating level in order to

pressure the Soviets to meet China's three security demands (the

so-called Three Obstacles) as the price for renormalizing SinoSoviet relations. Beijing quashed Australian, Canadian, and

Japanese proposals for a multilateral Asia-Pacific security

conference--a sort of Conference on Security and Cooperation in

Asia (CSCA). Likewise, Beijing categorically rejected any

international conference, let alone the establishment of a

multilateral regime for handling territorial disputes,

maintaining instead that disputes should be resolved by the

countries directly involved on a bilateral basis. The
11

multinational conflict over the Paracel (Xisha in Chinese) and

Spratly (Nansha in Chinese) Island groups in the South China Sea

underlines the dialectics of Chinese conflict-making and

conflict-coping behavior. While Chinese diplomats often talk

about international cooperation for the pacific settlement of

disputes, Chinese strategists reject the proposition that the

seabed resources of disputed areas in the South China Sea should

be jointly developed, while shelving the issue of sovereignty.

The disputed Paracel and Spratly Island groups have become a

dangerous flashpoint in the Asia-Pacific region. No less than six

states--Brunei, China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and

Vietnam--have competing jurisdictional claims over the

potentially oil-rich Spratly Islands. China, Taiwan, and Vietnam

lay claim to all the Spratly Islands, while the Philippines,

Malaysia, and Brunei claim parts of them. The Spratly and Paracel

Islands also straddle sea lanes vital to Asia-Pacific states,

adding geo-strategic and geo-economic dimensions to the simmering

conflict. China, Taiwan, and Japan are also locked in dispute

over the Diaoyu (Senkaku in Japanese) Islands farther north in

the East China Sea. To possess the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, which

comprise five islands some 166 km northeast of Taiwan, is to have

legal jurisdiction over about 21,645 square kilometers of the

continental shelf which is believed to be one of the last

unexplored hydrocarbon resource areas in the world.

The conventional wisdom that Beijing would leave ASEAN

countries alone in its southward expansionism in the South China

Sea, concentrating all of its shots at the weakest link--Vietnam,

was shattered on February 8, 1995, when Filipinos woke up to find

a Chinese flag fluttering on Mischief Reef just 200 or so

kilometers from Palawan Island. Although the reef is well within

Manila's 200-mile exclusive economic zone--recognized by the

United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) that

entered into force in 1994--the best President Fidel Ramos could

do was to come up with the "right is might" normative response as

well as to depict the Chinese "might is right" occupation as a

multilateral, not bilateral, challenge for the ASEAN to deal

with. The Chinese raid on Mischief Reef has been made all the

more shocking by China's separate claim to some of Indonesia's

gas fields. In 1994 Indonesia discovered that, according to

China's cartography, its Natuna gas field, well within its 200-

mile exclusive economic zone, now lies within Chinese waters.

Apparently, quiet behind-the-scenes bilateral probing met only

Chinese stonewalling. On April 10, 1995, Jakarta went public on

this issue, apparently triggered by China's occupation of

Mischief Reef and ASEAN's strongest statement yet on the South

China Sea 3 weeks later.

Beijing's incremental advances into the Spratlys and beyond

seem to proceed based on the logic that occupation is nine-tenths
12

of the law. As one of the world's largest coastal states with a

coastline of approximately 11,000 kilometers and another 10,000

kilometers surrounding its 3,416 islands, China is a major

beneficiary of UNCLOS that accepted and encoded the Latin

American demand for the 200-mile exclusive economic zone (Article

57). That China has yet to ratify the UNCLOS speaks directly to

the politics of unilateral security in the Spratlys.

China's advance into the Spratlys and beyond is primarily an

extension of domestic politics. At the 1991 session of the

National People's Congress (NPC), 31 deputies representing

China's coastal provinces and municipalities signed a motion

calling for the enactment of a "law of the seas" as soon as

possible to protect China's interests and marine resources. China

today regards the disputed but oil-rich Paracel and Spratly

Islands in the South China Sea in terms all too reminiscent of

the Third Reich's lebensraum imperial policy.

The picture that emerges from recent Chinese internal

military writings is that war is still considered preferable to

the appearance of surrendering sovereign claims in the South

China Sea to a group of small Southeast Asian states. Violent

conflict over the resources of the South China Sea is considered

a real possibility in the next 10 years. Against this backdrop,

the NPC adopted on February 25, 1992, "The Law of the People's

Republic of China on Its Territorial Waters and Their Contiguous

Areas" to empower the PRC to exercise "its sovereignty over its

territorial waters and its rights to exercise control over their

adjacent areas, and to safeguard state security as well as its

maritime rights and interests" (Article 1). Article 2 stipulates

China's territorial sovereignty as including "the mainland and

its offshore islands, Taiwan and the various affiliated islands

including Diaoyu [Senkaku] Islands, Penghu Islands, Dongsha

Islands, Xisha [Paracel] Islands, Nansha [Spratly] Islands, and

other islands that belong to the PRC" (Article 2).37 The law

vests the Chinese military with the right to remove by force any

incursion on the stipulated islands and areas. President Jiang

Zemin issued a clarion call that the military "should enhance

combat strength in an all-around way; should more successfully

shoulder the lofty mission of defending the country's territorial

sovereignty over the land and in the air, as well as its rights

and interests on the sea; and should safeguard the unification

and security of the motherland."38 As if to add credibility to

this assertion, Beijing announced in May 1992 that it had signed

a contract with a U.S. oil company, Crestone Energy Corporation,

to explore oil in a block contiguous to an offshore Vietnamese

oil field. The president of Crestone has claimed that the

operation will be protected by the Chinese Navy. In June 1992

China landed troops on a reef claimed by Vietnam and set up a

"sovereignty post."
13

It is reported that some 400 "Chinese scholars completed 10

years of research on the Spratly Islands in late 1994 to prove

historically that China discovered and developed the Spratly

Islands." A group of former American military leaders who visited

China in late 1994 has also reported that China is mobilizing a

limited military force "capable of rapid response" designed to

protect China's claims in the South China Sea as a matter of

national priority. Admiral Liu Huaqing, the only military member

of the ruling standing committee of the Politburo and former

chief of the PLAN, has been a leading advocate for seizing the

rich mineral and fishing grounds of the South China Sea to

support China's burgeoning population.39

For China, in short, there is little room for compromise,

largely because of the conflation of sovereignty, security,

status, and "lateral pressure." With the energy demands rising

and oil supplies falling, China for the first time became in 1993

a net importer of oil. China is in favor of the peaceful

settlement of disputes, we are told, but opposes the

internationalization of the Spratlys issue. Since the Spratly

Islands have been Chinese territory since ancient times, the

possibility of internationalization does not exist. This

unilateralism conjures up the image of China as a determined

irredentist power that has resorted to the use of force outside

its existing borders in more conflicts and more often than any

other East Asian state. China stands out as one of the 10 most

"crisis active states" in the international system during the 50-

year period 1929-79, with all but one of its foreign policy

crises deriving from the core issue of national security and

occurring along the peripheries of what it regards as "sacred

home territory," whether so recognized or not by others. In

contrast with the Guomindang period of 1929-49, the overwhelming

choice of conflict-coping and crisis-managing techniques during

the post-1949 PRC era was violence.40

The broader point is that China has yet to resort to

military force purely on behalf of the communist revolutionary

cause, nor has China used its military power recklessly in a

manner befitting naked aggression. In expounding "principled

stand," Chinese scholars and publicists repeatedly and

categorically state that China will never occupy an inch of

foreign territory, nor will it yield an inch of Chinese

territory. The problem obviously lies in the expansive definition

of Chinese territory. In domestic politics no Chinese leader can

afford to appear soft on such highly-charged nationalistic

issues. Southward gunboat diplomacy may have also been spurred by

the belief that other claimants as well as the global community,

on the basis of past behavior, are unlikely to react strongly

against Chinese coercive diplomacy. Equally significant is the

fact that the post-Cold War strategic environment in this

contested area presents a timely challenge and opportunity for
14

the Chinese military to demonstrate its blue-water naval power

and for the Chinese government to project national identity as

the unstoppable up-and-coming superpower in the Asia-Pacific

region.

Nonetheless, China's gunboat diplomacy has injected new life

into ASEAN as a regional organization, just when the U.N.-

brokered peace settlement in Cambodia seemed to have removed

Vietnam as a common thread that held the six member states

together. The 1992 Manila Declaration was obviously addressed to

China as a rallying point for ASEAN to have its regional security

act together in this unsettling post-Cold War transitional

setting. Faced with the rising chorus of the "China threat

theory" (Zhongguo weixian lun)--Beijing gave birth to this theory

in 1992--and the initiative for East Asian multilateral security

dialogue in the ASEAN countries, China began in 1992 to soften,

slightly and ambiguously, its unilateral security line. While

dismissing a unified multilateral security mechanism such as the

Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) as

completely inappropriate to the diversity of the Asia-Pacific

region, China suggested "to establish gradually a bilateral,

subregional, and regional multichannel and multilayered security

dialogue mechanism so as to hold consultations on the issues

concerned and to strengthen interchange and confidence."41 At the

July 1994 meeting of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), however,

China successfully threw its weight to keep the Spratly issue off

the agenda.

China's strike against the Philippines in 1995 has already

given another shot in the arm of the ARF, bringing China into

direct confrontation not only with a communist neighbor but also,

more importantly, a noncommunist member of ASEAN. China's

"divide-and-conquer" strategy seemed to have received a serious

blow when ASEAN issued a joint statement on March 18, 1995,

calling for a peaceful resolution of the dispute. At the firstever Sino-ASEAN bilateral meeting in April 1995, held in the

Chinese provincial city of Hangzhou, China softened its stand,

giving its assurances about its peaceful intentions and

retreating from its claim to the Natuna Islands. From mid-1995

on, Beijing pursued a Jekyll-and-Hyde diplomacy with Chinese

diplomats abroad, giving assurances that China is now willing to

discuss with parties concerned over the Spratlys dispute "in line

with established principles and international law and modern

maritime law, including the basic principles and rules enshrined

in the UNCLOS,"42 even as the PLAN continues to occupy Mischief

Reef and shows no signs of dismantling its military structures in

the area. Taking advantage of global attention turned to the

crisis in the Taiwan Strait in early 1996, Beijing has quietly

set up more "scientific expedition posts" in the disputed Spratly

Islands.
15

All the same, Chinese strategists began to give more

expansive definitions and claims of China's continental shelf

with a warning: "Greater indoctrination in an ocean concept to

increase awareness of the oceans, to inculcate a strong concept

of the oceans as national territory, and of cherishing every inch

of China's ocean territory is a matter of major importance having

a bearing on the survival and development of China's

posterity."43 With Vietnam's entry into ASEAN in July 1995, the

quiet days of ARF's low-key approach to East Asian security may

well be numbered. An increasingly assertive unilateral China now

encounters the flowering of a much-dreaded balance of coalitionbuilding, not only at the multilateral ARF level but also at the

bilateral level (i.e., the 1995 Indonesia-Australia defense

accord and the 1996 U.S.-Japan Joint Security Declaration).

China's response to the rise of a nascent ARF-based regional

 cooperative security mechanisms seemed Janus-faced. On the one

hand, China's post-Cold War strategy of guaranteeing national

security is said to be a "three-in-one strategy" of strengthening

the modernization of national defense, supporting regional

cooperation in guaranteeing security to reduce the hidden danger

of military conflicts, and developing good-neighborly relations

to increase mutual trust.44 And yet, China's post-Cold War

security strategy, as revealed in an internal document on January

28, 1995, indicates otherwise. According to the document, the

Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and military have agreed to oppose

any idea of establishing an Asian collective security scheme, as

proposed by Japan and other countries. Such a regional collective

security system would increase the possibility that southeast

Asian nations may rehash their arguments over the Chinese threat

theory, especially over the Spratly Islands dispute and thus

impinge too closely on Beijing's expansive regional security zone

for comfort.45

Global Security Behavior.

To a significant extent, the post-Cold War challenge of

preventing, controlling, restraining, weakening, or encapsulating

regional armed conflicts has devolved on the Security Council.

Having extricated itself from the paralysis of East-West

confrontation, the Security Council has decided not to let state

sovereignty get in its way of intervening in certain situations

perceived to be threatening international peace or collective

moral consciousness of the world community. Against this backdrop

and at the request of the first-ever Security Council Summit in

late January 1992, Secretary-General Boutros-Boutros-Ghali issued

6 months later a landmark report entitled "An Agenda for Peace,"

calling upon the Member States, in particular upon the Perm Five,

to redefine state sovereignty to strengthen the world

organization's capacity for preventive diplomacy, peacemaking,
16

peace-keeping, and post-conflict peace- building. While paying

the mandatory lip service to the principle of state sovereignty,

the Secretary-General made it clear what is required for the

world organization to meet the rising demands of people's

security: "The time of absolute and exclusive sovereignty,

however, has passed; its theory was never matched by reality."46

Of the Perm Five, China has jumped the gun by projecting the

most skeptical posture toward Secretary- General Boutros BoutrosGhali's Agenda for Peace.47 Apparently, the Secretary-General's

report contained too many sovereignty-diluting features, thus

provoking Beijing's public opposition: "U.N. reform should

contribute to maintaining the sovereignty of its member states.

Sovereign states are the subjects of international law and the

foundation for the formation of the United Nations. The

maintenance of state sovereignty serves as the basis for the

establishment of a new international order."48 More specifically,

China argued that all the activities of the United Nations,

whether in preventive diplomacy or peacemaking, whether in

peacekeeping or post-conflict peace-building, should strictly

observe the principles of state sovereignty and of noninterference in the internal affairs of Member States.49

In practice, China's position on U.N. peacekeeping has

shifted over the years, although within the parameters of state

sovereignty, evolving through three distinct periods: (1)

opposition/nonparticipation (1971-81); (2) support/ participation

(1982-89); and (3) retreat/participation (1990-present). The Gulf

crisis marks the beginning of the retreat/participation period.

Despite the publicly expressed support for U.N. peacekeeping

between 1982 and 1989, the first litmus test showed that the

maxi/mini strategy disguised in the legitimizing principle of

state sovereignty remains the bottom line of China's

indeterminate strategy in the Security Council. In the face of

both America's military victory under the banner of Security

Council Resolution 678 and the growing number of U.N. peacemaking

and state-making activities in 1991-92, China retreated by

redefining its stand in a contingent manner. Suddenly, it is now

argued that peacekeeping operations can only be established and

conducted in compliance with the principle of non-interference in

internal affairs as the U.N. Charter does not authorize

involvement in the internal disputes of its member states.50

Tellingly, China has exerted considerable influence not by

hyperactive positive engagement but by following an indeterminate

reactive strategy vacillating between tacit cooperation and

aloofness. Except on the issues of Taiwan's U.N. bid (national

identity), North Korea (sanctions and strategic interest), and

Rwanda (genocide), the Chinese have been passive and reactive to

a fault waiting to see what positions other states take before

staking out its own position, usually in the end game of a
17

negotiating process. For post-Tiananmen China, afflicted with the

twin legitimation crises at home and abroad, international

sanctions, especially U.S.-sponsored sanctions against North

Korea, triggers the sound and fury response of state sovereignty.

There is another logic driving Chinese behavior on the North

Korean issue in the Security Council. As one Security Council

representative put it,

And they [PRC representatives] used the North Korean

debate as a case to illustrate a deeper point--If you

can't force the North Koreans to do what you want, how

do you imagine you could ever force the Chinese to do

anything? Nothing can be done against the Chinese . . .

We lobbied them as part of the NAM (Non-Aligned

Movement) countries on the Bosnia and the Haiti

missions. Again, they believe in bilateral dealing,

they come, they smile, they leave.51

China's voting behavior in the Security Council is closely

keyed to and conditioned by its maxi-mini diplomacy. Despite its

"principled opposition" to a wide range of issues in the Security

Council, China has consistently expressed its opposition in the

form of "nonparticipation in the vote" in the early post-entry

years and abstention in recent years. From 1990 to 1994, China

abstained 22 times, voted affirmatively with reservations 10

times, and voted affirmatively on the remainder of Security

Council resolutions (of which some were passed under Chapter

VII), without exercising its veto even once. Of the 22

resolutions in which China abstained, 13 were explicitly Chapter

VII enforcement measures. Thus, China is sometimes forced to

affirm a resolution (as in the case of resolution 827 on

international war crimes tribunal in Bosnia) which violates its

most cherished principle of the nonviolability of state

sovereignty with nothing more than the habit-driven pronouncement

of "principled position."52 The most obvious explanation for such

behavior is the desire to retain its maximum leverage believed to

be inherent in its indeterminate strategy of becoming all things

to all nations on all serious threats to international peace and

security. To abstain is to apply the Chinese code of conduct of

being firm in principle but flexible in application or to find a

face-saving exit with voice in cases where they pose conflicting

Realpolitik geopolitical interests and Idealpolitik normative

concerns for international reputation. In short, the pattern that

emerges with respect to China's voting behavior in the Council,

particularly abstentions on Chapter VII enforcement resolutions,

is neither positive engagement nor destructive obstruction, but

one of pursuing the maxi-mini strategy in a situation-specific

and self-serving way.

Despite the habitual claim that support for and solidity

with the Third World is a basic principle in Chinese foreign
18

policy, China has emerged as the most independent self-centered

actor in global group politics, a veritable Group of 1 (G-1).

Even in such a multilateral setting, China makes its preference

for bilateralism over multilateralism loud and clear. While

giving rhetorical support to the idea of a nuclear-free Korean

peninsula (who doesn't?), Beijing has repeatedly denied any role

or responsibility as the Korean nuclear issue is said to be

directly and exclusively a dispute between the DPRK on the one

hand, and the United States, IAEA, and ROK on the other. At the

same time, Foreign Minister Qian Qichen made it clear on many

occasions that his government is not only opposed to economic

sanctions, but also against bringing up the issue at all in the

IAEA and the Security Council. What intensifies Beijing's

security concern and its opposition to the unification-byabsorption scenario is the perception of U.S. strategy on the

Korean nuclear issue. "To put it bluntly," as one pro-PRC

newspaper in Hong Kong writes, "the United States wants to use

this chance to topple the DPRK, and this is a component of U.S.

strategy to carry out peaceful evolution in the socialist

countries." And the United States "will practice a strategy of

destruction against North Korea--the last Stalinist regime in the

world--with the aim of enabling South Korea to gobble up North

Korea, like West Germany gobbling up East Germany." Such U.S.

strategy poses not only an ideological challenge but, more

significantly, a strategic threat as "China regards the Korean

region as an important buffer zone between China and the United

States."53

The nature of the Chinese position on the question of U.N.

institutional reform, especially on the expansion of Security

Council membership, has remained cautious, noncommital, and

reactive. The logic of defensive mechanisms is obvious. Beijing

has a vested symbolic and real interest in keeping the Security

Council exactly as it is. Not only would an increase in the

number of permanent membership dilute its own influence, but any

changes in the use of veto power would also reduce its leverage.

China often gets what it wants through the threat to use its veto

power. Any successful expansion of permanent membership would

inevitably emasculate its status and leverage as the only nonWestern, Third World country in the cockpit of U.N. politics. One

Chinese international relations scholar goes as far as echoing

the Soviet party line in the 1970s--since the veto is the

keystone of the existence of the United Nations, it should not be

tampered with or even restricted in its usage.54

With the demise of the strategic triangle and the growing

marginalization of the China factor in the normative domain of

global politics, China's permanent membership in the Security

Council remains the only diplomatic way it can portray itself as

a global power. As well, the veto power serves as a fungible

instrument of renewable influence and leverage in the service of
19

China-specific interests. Like nuclear weapons, the real power of

the veto lies not so much in its actual use as in the threat to

use or not to use. Paradoxically, the Taiwan factor in Beijing's

quest for absolute legitimation expands the limits of the

possible and permissible in widening China's own official

diplomatic network. The unusually swift recognition of 12 newly

minted independent states in the wake of the collapse of the

Soviet Union in December 1991 was prompted by fear that Taiwan

would jump the gun. The single greatest leverage Beijing had in

this connection was its veto power in the Security Council and

the threat to use it in blocking the entry of any of these newly

formed states into the world organization--no prior acceptance of

the Beijing formula for its absolute legitimation, no U.N.

entry.55

There is also a sense in which such a pro forma

establishment of diplomatic networking is to make a virtue of

necessity, bespeaking a deep anxiety about the viability of one

sovereign, unified, multinational Chinese state amid turbulent

global politics and growing ethnonational conflicts in many

trouble spots of the world. With the recent revival of Taiwan's

U.N. bid, Beijing's veto power has been publicly touted as the

powerful sword and impregnable shield that defend the integrity

of People's China as the only legitimate Chinese government in

the United Nations. It seems that the United Nations in general,

 and the Security Council in particular, have suddenly become

important in direct proportion to the diminution of Beijing's

internal security and external reputation. Thanks to Beijing's

solo obstructive behavior in the Haitian case in the Security

Council in late February 1996, the image of the self-styled

champion for the Third World got burned beyond easy repair. As

one participant put it, "It was conduct unbecoming a permanent

council member and was especially galling because China portrays

itself as the champion of the downtrodden and a leader of

developing nations, which it stiffed throughout."63

China's security behavior in the highly sensitive domain of

arms control and disarmament (ACD) is fraught with 56biguities

and contradictions inherent in its balancing act between

Realpolitik interests and idealpolitik concerns.57 In 25 years of

U.N. participation, Beijing's public position has progressively

shifted from initial dismissive non- participation (the 1970s),

to reluctant selective participation (the 1980s), to

comprehensive entrapped participation (the 1990s) in various ACD

regimes, especially in the Conference on Disarmament (CD) in

Geneva. As if to demonstrate that there is more than meets the

suspicious eye in such posturing, however, China in 1982-92 has

acceded to 10 of the 12 multilateral ACD conventions.58 During

the first half of the 1990s, China officially acceded to the NPT

(March 1992), finally signaled in September 1993 its willingness

to directly participate in negotiations for a Comprehensive Test
20

Ban Treaty (CTBT), indicated a willingness to conclude the treaty

by the end of 1996, and accepted strict parameters of the Missile

Technology Control Regime (MTCR) regarding sale of missiles

through a bilateral agreement with the United States in October

1994.

Still, the unstated code of conduct guiding China's

consecutive and simultaneous participation in multiple security

games on multiple chessboards is a maxi/mini axiom--the

maximization of security benefits via free-riding and/or

defection strategies and the minimization of normative (image)

costs. Since its entry into global ACD regimes and negotiations

in the early 1980s, China translated its self-help realpolitik

into the espousal of differentiated rights and responsibilities

in the global ACD processes, assiduously avoiding commitments

that would place constraints on its own nuclear weapons development.59 Since the two superpowers account for the bulk of nuclear

weapons, it is they who must bear the primary responsibility by

drastically reducing their nuclear arsenals before other nuclear

weapons states can join the disarmament process. The Strategic

Arms Reduction Treaty (START-I) and START-II that will reduce

each nuclear superpower's strategic arsenal by about threefourths (to fewer than 3,5000 warheads) seem to have no

discernable impact on China's ACD behavior. While acknowledging

and characterizing these treaties as "some initial progress,"

China insists that such progress is still preliminary and

limited, and that the two nuclear superpowers still have a long

way go in the process of nuclear disarmament. Pending the

realization of

complete prohibition and thorough destruction of

nuclear weapons, however, all nuclear-weapon states

should undertake the following commitments: 1) not to

be the first to use nuclear weapons and conclude an

international agreement on the no-first-use principle;

2) not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons

against non-nuclear-weapon States and nuclear weaponfree zones and conclude an international agreement in

this regard; and 3) to support the proposals for the

establishment of nuclear-weapon-free zones, and

undertake the corresponding obligations.60

In this way, China projects its role as a constructive and

positive player in the U.N. disarmament game without constraining

its own nuclear development. Not surprisingly, the Third World's

long-standing demand to halve all nuclear tests fell on China's

deaf ears until 1993. Since a comprehensive nuclear test ban and

nuclear disarmament are linked, the United States and Russia

"have the obligation to take the lead in halting all nuclear

tests and carrying out drastic nuclear disarmament so as to

create conditions for a comprehensive ban on nuclear tests."61
21

In light of such free-riding/defection strategy, Beijing's

declaration of its willingness to participate in CTBT

negotiations in the fall of 1993 constitutes, potentially, a

significant shift from unilateral security to security

interdependence and an important constraint on the further

development and testing of its nuclear weapons program. Yet, once

inside the CTBT negotiation processes, China has been behaving in

a realist self-help fashion, trying hard to slow, divert, and

delay the completion of the CTBT that would constrain its nuclear

testing program. China, in the home stretch of a negotiating

process, has injected several preconditions for successful

completion of the treaty that are not acceptable to other

participants in the CTBT negotiations, i.e., (1) the right of

declared nuclear weapons states to conduct peaceful nuclear

explosions (PNEs), (2) no first use pledge (NFU), and (3)

negative security com- mitments (NSC) by the nuclear weapons

states. The official position is that China will put an end to

its nuclear tests once the consensually-arrived treaty enters

into effect. Having thus committed to halting its nuclear tests

after the treaty comes into effect, China has proposed a lengthy

ratification procedure leading to entry into effect of the CTBT

following its signing, arousing suspicions among many states that

Beijing is determined to delay CTBT negotiations as long as

possible and with as many preconditions and delaying tactics as

possible, so as to allow its military to complete as many

underground nuclear tests as possible for the accelerated

modernization of its nuclear warheads. Indeed, on March 29, 1996,

hopes of the 38-member CD to wrap up 2-year CTBT negotiations by

June 1996 and send a consensus treaty to the U.N. General

Assembly by September 1996 more or less collapsed. The CD

adjourned for a recess of more than 6 weeks due largely to 

China's PNEs demand at odds with the other four declared nuclear

weapons states, even as Chinese disarmament ambassador Sha Zukang

publicly declared that "no country can impose its will on China

under any circumstances."62 Faced with President Yeltsin's

jawboning to sign the CTBT, China came up with a new escape

clause--"mankind needs to keep developing ‘peaceful' nuclear

weapons in case a giant asteroid is discovered careering through

space on a collision course with the earth."63

The pattern of Chinese ACD behavior in the implementation

process is one of "who me?" denial, double-talk, and

responsibility shifting. In selling proscribed weapons of mass

destruction to rogue regimes, Beijing takes extraordinary

precautions to elude international detection. Only in the face of

irrefutable evidence directly linking Beijing to Third World

customers, has it confirmed missile or nuclear technology sales.

Once such evidence is uncovered, Beijing either cites its

nonproliferation pledges since 1984 or, more recently, its

accession to the NPT regime as prima facie evidence of its full
22

compliance with the regime norms, or insists that what have been

sold are for peaceful uses only. China then seeks to shift

responsibility for ensuring the peaceful uses of its nuclear

technology to its customers and the IAEA. All the same, China

often makes a broad liberal construction of the regime rules and

norms that its NPT commitment cannot take effect retroactively

and/or that the specifications of the missiles which it has sold

fall outside the scope of the regime norms. China even insists on

the redefining the Middle East for purposes of arms sales

limitations so as to exclude its own major customers (Algeria and

Libya) but to include Turkey (a major U.S. customer).64

With the collapse of the strategic triangle, the temptation

to use, by way of substitution, whatever other instrumentalities

Beijing possessed became well-nigh irresistible. It was in this

context of the post-Cold War and post-communist world politics

that the Chinese leadership found the arms sales, especially in

the nuclear and missile field, as another way of demonstrating

its status as a global power, and that festering regional

conflicts in the Third World, especially in the Middle East,

could not be resolved without China's participation and tacit

cooperation. The conventional view that Chinese arms sales

patterns and directions follow the logic of market demand factor-

-and that economic power in post-Mao China grows out of cash

sales on the arms barrelhead--is not so much wrong as it is

incomplete. China's missile sales to Saudi Arabia--Dong Feng 3

(CSS-2) intermediate-range ballistic missiles-- earned not only

hard currency but also a much-sought diplomatic switch from

Taipei to Beijing (on July 21, 1990). Despite its refusal to

recognize Israel until the Palestinian question is solved,

Beijing has maintained covert military ties with that country

since 1980 and finally recognized and established official

diplomatic relations in early 1992. It is widely believed that

Israel has emerged in the post-Tiananmen years as China's

leading foreign supplier of advanced technology, becoming in

effect China's "back door" to U.S. technology.65

CONCLUSIONS

The preceding analysis of China's quest for security in the

post-Cold War world leads to one obvious and somewhat paradoxical

conclusion. Despite the ritualistic and habit-driven assault on

"power politics," Beijing has emerged as perhaps the most

unabashed practitioner of power politics in the post-Cold War

setting. Beijing's own security thinking and behavior seemed

firmly embedded in the realpolitik track, allowing only

hypernationalist calculus to play a dominant role, with a smaller

role for international security interdependence and no role for

common security.66 Despite the participation in the Security

Council and global ACD fora for more than two decades, there is

little evidence of any fundamental paradigm shift from unilateral
23

to cooperative security. The notion of security interdependence

in an increasingly interactive and interdependent world that one

state's security is increased, not reduced, only when other

neighboring states also feel secure, or that China's own

unilateral self-help behavior could not easily escape from the

reactive--and self-fulfilling--dynamics, remains yet to find its

way clear to China's security thinking and behavior in the postCold War world.

This is not to deny the rise of an ACD policy community at

home and the dramatic increase in China's participation in and

commitment to multilateral ACD conventions including the NPT. But

all the policy shifts in the 1980s and 1990s can be better seen

as adaptive realpolitik rather than a fundamental change in the

strategic paradigm or worldview. China has exploited, and will

probably continue to exploit, its participation in international

ACD regimes and negotiations as a more cost-effective way of

learning how to defect or free-ride within, rather than without,

these regimes. In attempting to reconcile the seemingly

irreconcilable--unilateral realpolitik security interests versus

idealpolitik concerns for its international reputation--Beijing

latches itself onto the declarations of its antihegemonism and

no-first-use pledge as both necessary and sufficient conditions

for peace and stability in the region, indeed as the surest and

shortest pathway to global peace. In this way China projects its

"principled stand" on a range of ACD issues, asking others to

follow what China says, not what China actually does.

The driving force for such realpolitik behavior is not any

sense of a military threat from any external power but the

leadership's resolve to project its national identity as an upand-coming superpower in the Asia-Pacific region, so as to make

up for the growing domestic legitimation and security deficits.

The dogged determination to enact and legitimize national

identity in terms of state sovereignty, state status, and state

security defines the parameters of China's quest for security in

the post-Cold War setting, conditioning Beijing's response to

regional and global cooperative security mechanisms and

processes. The mounting international outcry against China's

perfidious behavior on human rights abuses at home, nuclear

weapons or missile proliferation, maritime expansionism in the

South China Sea, and missile diplomacy against Taiwan is

increasingly viewed as a Western conspiracy led by Washington to

carry out a "peaceful evolution" (heping yanbian) or "divide-andconquer" strategy of winning war without firing a single shot and

thus arresting China's accelerated march to the promised land of

superpowerdom.

Paradoxically, post-Tiananmen China is at one and the same

time a growing regional military power--and a major non-status

quo power--with extensive irredentist claims to territories and
24

islands along and beyond its periphery throughout the AsiaPacific region as well as an insecure and weak status quo state

at home. Contrary to the popular notion, the PRC today is a weak

state pretending and trying desperately to be a strong state. The

defining and differentiating feature of a weak state is the lack

of a unifying national ethic or legitimizing ideology and the

correspondingly high level of violence or power to cope with

domestically generated threats to the security of the

government.67 Faced with such a legitimacy-cum-identity crisis,

the CCP leadership has shifted toward perform-ance-based

legitimation to enhance system effectiveness via "market

Leninism" and flexing its military muscle power "near abroad"

(the Spratlys and Taiwan). That is, the post-Tiananmen leadership

is seizing geo-economic and geo-strategic opportunities abroad

(the global marketplace and the power vacuum in the post-Cold War

Asia-Pacific region) to cope with legitimation and identity

threats at home (fragmentation). When the PRC's official national

identity and legitimation are blocked in one domain, as earlier

postulated, the leadership seeks to compensate in another. Hypermilitarism, hyper-nationalism, and mercantile diplomacy are

synergistically linked to form a tripod of security policy in the

post-Cold War era, buying performance-based legitimation. In

short, as China becomes more insecure and fragmented at home, it

feels more compelled to demonstrate its toughness abroad.

The legitimation-cum-identity crisis has been accentuated as

well by a deep anxiety about other competing processes of

national identity mobilization among Muslims in Xinjiang, Mongols

in inner Mongolia, Tibetans in Tibet, Chinese in Hong Kong, and

island-born Taiwanese in Taiwan. What makes the sound and fury of

state sovereignty all the more compelling, yet problematic in the

Chinese case, is the unresolved unification problem coupled with

the twin challenges of globalization from above and without and

substate ethnonational fragmentation from below and within.

Lacking charismatic and rational-legal legitimacy, the postTiananmen third-generation leadership instinctively invokes the

party-state's last remaining source of--and indeed its ultimate

claim to--legitimacy grounded in the national-identity enacting

mission of restoring China's great-power status in the world.

Chinese hypernationalism disguised as state sovereignty has

become a sword with which to cope with a host of domestic threats

and a shield with which to ward off any external normative

challenge. Thus, the Chinese leadership seemed unable and

unwilling to manage the rising tension between nationalism and

internationalism or to make the necessary compromises on issues

of sovereignty relating to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang,

Spratlys, Senkakus, and the remaining irredentist claims to

territory held by many of China's 16 neighboring countries.

Yet fighting ethnonatinalist separatist fire with Han

hypernationalist fire can easily backfire. China's basic security
25

dilemma here is not only ethnonationally charged but geostrategically entangled, as more than 80 million minority

nationality people (or about 8 percent of the total population),

reside in the strategically sensitive but politically

"autonomous" regions that account for roughly 64 percent of

Chinese territory. The image of sovereign Kazahks, Kyrgyz,

Uzbeks, Taijiks, and Mongols in the post-Cold War setting of

substate fragmentation and rising ethnonationalism could prove

too inspiring for the non-Han peoples in Xinjiang, Inner

Mongolia, and Tibet to put up with their suppressed national

identities.

Clearly, China encounters here a "too little, too much"

dilemma in its domestic/foreign policy. The latest round of

coercive missile diplomacy against Taiwan may well have been

catalyzed by the belief in a domino theory with Chinese

characteristics--if Taiwan goes its separate way, what next?

Today's Russia may not necessarily be tomorrow's China, but the

challenge of transforming multiple "Chinas"-- Taiwan, Hong Kong,

Macao, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and more--into one

unified, coherent and stable multinational state, with two or

more systems, without much bloodletting or federalism seems like

a mission nearly impossible.

There is little doubt that the rise of the China chorus made

possible by China's remarkable economic growth and assertive

nationalism has bought some political legitimacy for the Chinese

leadership. And yet, paradoxically, the rise of China thesis

comes at a time of a rapid deterioration of the coherence of the

Chinese state. State sovereignty no longer provides the center

with security or control, as domestic, social, political,

demographic, and environmental problems in Beijing's march to the

promised land of superpowerdom are becoming legion. How can the

wobbly edifice of the Chinese national security state survive the

multiplying threats from within? Despite the unpre- cedented

economic growth and an all-time global record in doubling per

capita output in the shortest time period in the history of the

global political economy (1977-87),68 hundreds of thousands of

Chinese are escaping from their homeland in search of better

economic opportunities and political freedom in foreign

countries--a very obvious stye in China's national identity

projection. Irrespective of the amount of violence power at its

command, such a repressive state is ipso facto a weak state. No

state, certainly not a huge multinational state, can be held

together for too long without a legitimizing democratic system,

as dramatically shown by the collapse of what was widely and

wrongly perceived to be a strong state in the former Soviet

Union.

Can a weak, insecure, and fragmenting state be expected to

be or act as a responsible and peace-loving great power? Only
26

time will tell whether my reading of China's security behavior as

more domestically driven and as more conflict prone is correct.

As it is, the once widely shared image of a China in

disintegration and of a dragon rampant in neighboring Asian

states seems to be moving perilously close to the reality.

ENDNOTES

1. In his political report to the 14th CCP Party Congress,

Jiang Zemin offers such an upbeat assessment of the external

security environment as having "never been more satisfactory

since the founding of the Republic," coupled with a rationale for

strengthening the military. See the full text of the report in

Foreign Broadcast Information Service: Daily Report: China

[hereafter cited as FBIS-China], October 21, 1992, pp. 1-21,

especially at pp. 15-16 [hereafter cited as Jiang's Political

Report]. See also Chen Qimao, "New Approaches in China's Foreign

Policy: The Post-Cold War Era," Asian Survey 33:3, March 1993:

237-251, especially at p. 239.

2. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI),

SIPRI Yearbook 1993: World Armaments and Disarmament, New York:

Oxford University Press, 1993, p. 10.

3. The Economist, January 27-February 2, 1996: 102.

4. Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, Vol. I, Peking: Foreign

Languages Press, 1965, p. 13.

5. Alastair Iain Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic

Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History, Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 1995, p. 250.

6. "On the Ten Major Relationships, April 25, 1956," in

Selected Works of Mao Tsetung, Vol. 5, Beijing: Foreign Languages

Press, 1977, p. 288.

7. This reflects the general characteristic and trend of

post-Mao Chinese international relations scholarship. Despite the

plethora of publications on international relations and the

Marxist proclivity to theorize on almost every subject, IR

scholarship in post-Mao China is marked by the poverty of

theorizing and the paucity of scholarly writings on China's own

international relations. For further elaboration of this point,

see Samuel S. Kim, China In and Out of the Changing World Order, Princeton, NJ: Center of International Studies, 1991, pp. 5-12.

8. Yimin Song, On China's Concept of Security, UNIDIR,

Geneva, 1986; U.N. Publication Sales No. GV.E.86.0.1.

 9. Ibid., p. 2.
27

10. Ibid., p. 34.

11. Deng Xiaoping, Fundamental Issues in Present-Day China,

Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1987, p. 97.

12. See Kim, China In and Out of the Changing World Order,

pp. 66-74.

13. Renmin ribao, editorial, November 25, 1957, p. 1.

14. For discussions on the concept of comprehensive national

strength that preceded the 14th Party Congress, see Renmin ribao,

February 26, 1990, p. 2, based on an interview with Huang

Shoufeng, China's leading military expert on the subject; and Li

Tianran, "Guanyu zonghe guoli wenti," ["On the Question of

Comprehensive National Strength,"] Guoji wenti yanjiu [Journal of

International Studies] No. 2, April 1990: 52-58.

15. Renmin ribao, June 6, 1991, p. 2.

16. Ma Fajing and Dan Yuntian, "Discussion of PLA Weapons

Development Problems," Xiandai bingqi [Modern Ordinance], No. 6,

June 1993, in JPRS-CAR-93-075, October 12, 1993: 34.

17. Xin Peihe, "Foundation Stone for ‘New World Order':

Brief Analysis on Baker's ‘Europe-Atlantic Integration'," Shijie

zhishi [World Knowledge] 16, August 16, 1991, in FBIS-China, September 5, 1991, p. 7.

18. Quoted in The New York Times, November 11, 1990, pp. 1,

11.

19. Yan Xuetong and Li Zhongcheng, "Zhanwang xia shiji chu

guoji zhengzhi," ["Prospects for International Politics at the

Beginning of Next Century,"] Xiandai guoji guanxi No. 6, 1995: 7.

20. See Gu Yan, "Duli zizhu shi Mao Zedong waijiao sixiang

de linghun," ["Maintaining Independence is the Spirit of Mao

Zedong's Foreign Policy Thinking,"] Shijie jingji yu zhengzhi

[World Economics and Politics], No. 2, 1994: 30-33; and Zhao

Huaipu and Lu Yang, "Quanli zhengzhi yu xianghu yicun," ["Power

Politics and Interdependence,"] Shijie jingji yu zhangzhi, No. 7,

1993: 36-41.

21. See Jiang's Political Report, pp. 15-16.

22. Wang Jisi, "Pragmatic Nationalism: China Seeks a New

Role in World Affairs," The Oxford International Review, Winter

1994: 29.
28

23. Cited in You Ji, "The PLA's Military Modernization in

the 1990s," in Stuart Harris and Gary Klintworth, eds., China as

a Great Power: Myths, Realities and Challenges in the AsiaPacific Region, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995, p. 249.

24. Alastair Iain Johnston, "China's New ‘Old Thinking': The

Concept of Limited Deterrence," International Security 20:3,

Winter 1995/96: 5.

25. Johnston, "Realisms and Chinese Security Policy . . .,"

p. 35.

26. See "Qian Qichen on the World Situation," Beijing Review

33:3, January 15-21, 1990: 16; and Song Yimin, "Sifang dui

nengzhan hou shijie de zai renshi he dangqian guoji xingshi de

jige xin tedian," ["The West's Second Thoughts on the Post-Cold

War World and Some New Characteristics of the Current

International Situation,"] Guoji wenti yanjiu No. 3, July 1993:

1-8.

27. See Peter Wallensteen and Karin Axell, "Armed Conflict

At the End of the Cold, War, 1989-92," Journal of Peace Research

30, August 1993: 331-46; see also Renmin ribao, December 23,

1994, p. 6.

28. Yan Xuetong, "Lengzhan hou Zhongguo de duiwai anquan

zhanlüe," ["China's Post-Cold War External Security Strategy,"]

Xiandai guoji guanxi [Contemporary International Relations], No.

8, 1995: 24. The Chinese term, "minzu" that gained currency in

the 1980s and 1990s is an elusive term to translate into English,

as it can mean "nation," "race," or "people." "Jiduan minzushuyi"

which I translate here as "hyper-nationalism" literally means

"extreme ethnonationalism."

29. Quoted in Lincoln Kaye, "China: Role Reversal," Far

Eastern Economic Review, May 27, 1993: 11.

30. See Patrick E. Tyler, "China's Military Regards U.S. As

Main Enemy in the Future," The New York Times, November 16, 1993,

p. A5.

31. Cheng Ming, Hong Kong, November 1, 1993, in FBIS-China, November 5, 1993, pp. 1-2.

32. Zong Lanhai, "Zong gong yiding guoji tou hao diren,"

["The Chinese Communists Determine Their Main International

Adversary"] Cheng Ming, Hong Kong, No. 195, January 1994: 16-18.

33. Renmin ribao, 4 June 1994, p. 6.

34. Johnston, "China's New ‘Old Thinking'."
29

35. Peng Guangqian et al., Deng Xiaoping zhanlue sixiang lun

[On Deng Xiaoping's Strategic Thought], Beijing: Military Science

Press, 1994, p. 112.

36. See the cover story, "South China Sea: Treacherous

Shoals," Far Eastern Economic Review, August 13, 1992: 14-20; and

John W. Garver, "China's Push Through the South China Sea: The

Interaction of Bureaucratic and National Interests," China

Quarterly, No. 132, December 1992: 999-1028.

37. Xinhua, February 25, 1992, in FBIS-China, February 28,

1992, p. 2; emphasis added.

38. Jiang's Political Report, pp. 15-16.

39. New York Times, January 2, 1995, p. 2.

40. A crisis active state or a crisis actor is defined as "a

state whose decision-makers perceive a threat to one or more

basic values, finite time for response and a high probability of

involvement in military hostilities." See Michael Brecher,

Jonathan Wilkenfeld, and Sheila Moser, Crises in the Twentieth

Century, Vol. 2, Handbook of Foreign Policy Crises, Oxford:

Pergamon Press, 1988, pp. 2, 51, 160-164.

41. See Renmin ribao, March 24, 1992, p. 4.

42. For Chinese Ambassador Guang Dengming's statement to

this effect, see The Manila Chronicle, September 29, 1995, p. 9.

43. Jiefangjun bao [Liberation Army Daily], August 22, 1995,

in FBIS-China, August 22, 1995.

44. Yan, "Lengzhan hou Zhongguo de duiwai anquan zhanlüe,"

p. 27.

45. See FBIS-China, January 30, 1995, pp. 1-2.

46. "An Agenda for Peace: Preventive Diplomacy, Peacemaking

and Peace-Keeping," U.N. Docs. A/47/277 and S/24111, June 17,

1992, p. 5.

47. Paul Lewis, "U.N. Set To Debate Peacemaking Role," New

York Times, September 6, 1992, p. 7.

48. This point is made in Foreign Minister Qian Qichen's

major speech at the 46th Session of the General Assembly, which

comes close to being China's annual state of the world report.

For an English text of the speech, see FBIS-China, October 1,

1992, pp. 4-8; quote at p.7.
30

49. U.N. Doc. A/47/PV.37, October 28, 1992.

50. Hu Yumin, "UN's Role in a New World Order," Beijing

Review 34:23, June 10-16, 1991, pp. 12-14.

51. I owe this point to Dinah Lee Kung who conducted

extensive field interviews with a cross-national sample of the

Security Council representatives in January 1996 for the Council

on Foreign Relations' "Constructive Engagement with China"

project. For a more detailed analysis of China's behavior in the

Security Council, see Samuel S. Kim, "China and the United

Nations," which is a part of the project and will be published in

late 1996 or early 1997.

52. For a more detailed analysis, see Nigel Thalakada, "The

Antinomies of Chinese Foreign Policy: China's Voting Pattern in

the UN Security Council, 1990-1994," Unpublished paper, New

Haven: Yale University, May 1995.

53. See Hsin Pao, Hong Kong, April 8, 1994, p. 24, in FBISChina, April 12, 1994, 13-15; and Hsin Pao, June 24, 1994, p. 25,

in FBIS-China, June 24, 1994, pp. 7-8; quotes respectively at p.

14 and p. 7.

54. Yu Huizhe, "Zouxiang 21 shiji de Lianheguo--Lienheguo

jizhi he gaige wenti yantao hui" ["Toward Twenty-First Century

United Nations--Symposium on the Problems of UN Mechanisms and

Reforms,"], Shijie jingji yu zhengzhi, No. 2, 1994, pp. 55-59,

especially at p. 59.

55. Latvian Foreign Minister Janis Jurkans specifically

mentioned this point during his visit to Taipei in December 1991.

See James L. Tyson, "Taiwan, Besting China, Sets Up Ties to

Baltics," The Christian Science Monitor, December 27, 1991, p. 8;

Free China Journal, Taipei, January 31, 1992: 1.

 56. Cited in Barbara Crossette, "U.N. Mission to Haiti is

Reprieved," The New York Times, March 1, 1996, p. A8.

57. For detailed analyses and explanations of China's ACD

behavior, see Banning N. Garrett and Bonnie S. Glaser, "Chinese

Perspectives on Nuclear Arms Control," International Security

20:3, Winter 1995/96: 43-78; Alastair Iain Johnston, "Learning

versus Adaptation: Explaining Change in Chinese Arms Control

Policy," The China Journal, January 1996, forthcoming; and

Michael Swaine, "China and Arms Control," Paper for prepared for

the Council on Foreign Relations "Constructive Engagement with

China" Project, April 9, 1996.

58. See SIPRI Yearbook 1992: World Armaments and
31

Disarmament, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 600-

615.

59. For China's evolving stand on ACD issues in recent

years, see the following: U.N. Docs. A/CN.10/95, May 8, 1987;

A/CN.10/116, May 9, 1989; A/CN. 10/118, May 12, 1989;

A/CN.10/146, April 25, 1991; A/CN. 10/150, April 26, 1991;

A/CN.10/152, April 29, 1991; "Working Paper: China's Basic

Position on the Process of Nuclear Disarmament in the Framework

of International Peace and Security, with the Objective of the

Elimination of Nuclear Weapons" (hereafter cited as Working

Paper), U.N. Doc. A/CN.10/166, April 24, 1992; and Li Weiguo,

"Tiaozheng zhong de hei zhanlue yu hei caijun zhong de xin wenti"

["New Issues in the Readjustment of Nuclear Strategies and

Nuclear Disarmament"], Guoji wenti yanjiu, No. 3, July 1992: 42-

47.

60. See "Working Paper," p. 4.

61. "Working Paper," p. 3; emphasis added.

62. Reuters on line, March 28, 1996.

63. Patrick E. Tyler, "Chinese Seek Atom Options to Fend Off

Asteroids," The New York Times, April 27, 1996, p. 4.

64. John Calabrese, "Peaceful or Dangerous Collaborators?

China's Relations with the Gulf Countries," Pacific Affairs 65:4,

Winter 1992-93: 471-85; John W. Lewis, Hua Di, and Xue Litai,

"Beijing's Defense Establishment: Solving the Arms-Export

Enigma," International Security 15:4, Spring 1991: 87-109;

Shirley Kan, "China's Arms Sales: Overview and Outlook for the

1990s," in Joint Economic Committee, China's Economic Dilemmas in

the 1990s, Vol. 2, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing

Office, 1991, pp. 696-711; and Lincoln Kaye, "Back in the Game,"

Far Eastern Economic Review, June 11, 1992: 9.

65. Richard A. Bitzinger, "Arms To Go: Chinese Arms Sales to

the Third World," International Security 17:2, Fall 1992: 84-111.

66. For full discussion on the more synergistic and multilevel notion of "common security," see Independent Commission on

Disarmament and Security Issues, Common Security: A Blueprint for

Survival, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982; Burns H. Weston,

ed., Alternative Security, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990;

and Michael T. Klare and Daniel C. Thomas, eds., World Security:

Trends and Challenges at Century's End, New York: St. Martin's

Press, 1991.

67. For further elaboration on the "weak state" theory, see

Buzan, People, States and Fear, pp. 96-107.
32

68. See World Bank, World Development Report 1991: The

Challenge of Development, New York: Oxford University Press,

1991, Figure 1.1, p. 12.
U.S. ARMY WAR COLLEGE

Major General Richard A. Chilcoat

Commandant

*****

STRATEGIC STUDIES INSTITUTE

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Author

Dr. Samuel S. Kim

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Ms. Marianne P. Cowling

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Mrs. Mary Jane Semple

Cover Artist

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