Nov 16, 2023
A considerable body of research on Chinese foreign policy has attempted to decode China's objectives, strategies, and implementation (or lack thereof) of its plans. These endeavours have yielded sophisticated analyses, offering insights into different facets of Chinese international conduct. However, there appears to be a growing divergence in the conclusions reached by various analysts and scholars.
Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford, and Director of the University of Oxford’s China Centre, Professor Todd Hall, gave a lecture at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (LKYSPP) on 28 August 2023. The lecture sought to make sense of the diversity in views on Chinese foreign policy, suggesting that there may be more complementarity among these approaches than initially apparent. Part of the Hong Siew Ching Speaker Series, the discussion was chaired by the LKYSPP’s Co-Director of the Centre on Asia and Globalisation and Li Ka Shing Professor in Political Science, Professor Khong Yuen Foong.
Professor Hall noted a startling divergence in the opinions and arguments of scholars analysing China’s behaviour on the international stage. He made his point by comparing the work of Rush Doshi’s The Long Game and Lee Jones’ Fractured China. The former uncovers China’s insidious long-term plans to “displace American order” while the latter argues that China is a “very disaggregated, very fragmented system.”
These vastly different interpretations of China’s patterns of behaviour have invoked four broad approaches to China’s foreign policy making processes. Professor Hall asserted that these four approaches offer different insights, and they are not mutually exclusive worldviews, especially not when applied to a system like China, whose foreign policy displays numerous levels of complexity.
How do we make sense of the variation?
Professor Hall shared that his paper co-authored with Andrea Ghiselli of Fudan University found that two key questions help to bring clarity to where analysts diverge, the first being: “Is China distinctive in the history of civilisation?” and the second as: “Is China a unified entity?” When placed side-by-side, the combination of answers to these two questions give rise to four broad approaches:
1. Exceptionalism: China is like no other government or entity we’ve seen before in history. China is both unitary and distinctive.
2. Universalism: China is facing the same structures and pressures that any rising power today would face and reacting to them in the same way. China is unitary, but not distinctive.
3. Particularism: China’s policies are fashioned by a multitude of moving parts that function independently. China is not unitary, but distinctive.
4. Comparativism: China’s leadership and domestic politics can be considered against more general theories of governing logic. China is neither unitary nor distinctive.
Each approach has scholars that promote its views. Views that seek to apply the logic of rising and falling powers fall within the universalist camp. Those that argue that the PRC is different from Western powers fall into the exceptionalist group. Those who counter that there is an authoritarian logic to the PRC’s foreign policy can be categorised as comparitivists. While those who focus on leadership personalities and internal power struggles can be labelled particularists.
What defines a scholar’s view on China?
In his early work on China, Professor Hall found himself subscribing to comparativism at first. But he gradually realised that other approaches also held valid insights. At first he sought to pursue the question of different scholars took different positions, and the answers were multiple: their basic ontology, their worldviews, their methodologies, their sources. But in the end he came to realise that the more productive question was one that asked when and where different approaches were applicable. Some parts of PRC foreign policy may be unique or unitary, others disunified or similar to other states. A policy that involves numerous actors—like the BRI, for instance—is more likely not to be unified than a domain with clear lines of command and control, like central propaganda messaging.
In response to a question about the justification of this four-system framework, Professor Hall suggested that it was devised to prevent scholars from extrapolating their findings from one area of their studies on China’s policies to another, from economic statecraft to military diplomacy, for instance.
A lot of scholarship is inevitably framed by the scholar’s preconceptions, and Professor Hall suggests that extrapolation might give more meaning to an event or a particular policy than is actually there.
Professor Hall questioned the source and motivations for each transmission of ideas about Chinese foreign policy: “Who are you engaging with? Who's telling you what stories, what sources are you using? Your methodologies, for example; it is very hard to peel back and understand what the bureaucratic politics are.” These assumptions need to be questioned by the scholar in the context of where they do or do not apply in their analysis of Chinese foreign policy.
How can scholars respond to this divergence?
The other reason for why scholarship on Chinese foreign policy is diverging in thought is because China itself is dynamic and continues to behave in ways that warrant multiple explanations. Professor Hall said that Xi Jinping’s regime is also becoming very opaque and the extent to which centralisation has occurred in the government is not known. Consequently, questions about these aspects of the way the Chinese government functions cannot be easily answered.
Professor Hall gave the example of China’s behaviour with regards to territorial disputes in the South China Sea, where the opacity of policy means that there might be a lot of “bureaucratic struggles fighting for resources,” or decision making may be coming from the centre. The opacity means that it is hard to know in the first instance as a situation is unfolding.
Professor Hall cautioned that policies need to be considered with a lot more nuance, and with more humility to admit multiple explanations for a single situation. Only then can they tackle the ambiguous and probably multifaceted nature of China’s policy making process.