Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Centre Press; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. xiv, 477 pp. US$65.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-4214-1583-3.
This is a newly published book which provides the readers with a very detailed description and in-depth analysis of how China’s economic statecraft, or the use of economic weaponry in diplomacy, evolved during the Cold War years (1949–1991). The author elaborates on the economic statecraft of China, both in the role of aid receiver and aid giver. He argues that in order to regain its “rightful” position in the international community, the PRC was not only on the target side (being sanctioned and aided) but also on the sender side (rendering economic aid and imposing economic sanctions). This is the central argument of this book.
As a well-known Cold War historian, Shu Guang Zhang adopts an international history approach to describe and analyze the PRC’s experiences with economic statecraft during the Cold War years by using recently declassified Chinese and Soviet bloc archives and records, and each chapter of the book (8 chapters in total) deals with one of those experiences. China’s foreign economic statecraft has its origins in 1949 when the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was proclaimed. Shortly after the PRC came into being, the United States and other Western powers imposed restrictions on trade with China. After 1949, the PRC followed Soviet-style economic policy, including foreign trade policy, at least partly as a response to the trade embargo and other economic sanctions by the US and its allies, especially after the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. The PRC had been a target of economic aid from the Soviet Union and the East European countries from 1949 to the early 1960s. At the same time Beijing also adopted a strategy to break the China embargo by simultaneously promoting trade with some non-Communist countries, including the UK and Japan. The PRC was taking a position in China-Soviet economic relations by seeking Soviet aid while resisting Moscow’s influence. The impact of political relations and nationalism on bilateral economic relations was enormous, and as a result, the Soviet Union withdrew all of its advisers from China and imposed economic punishment on China in 1963.
Starting in the mid-1950s, shortly after the end of the Korean War, the PRC, a very poor country in the world, devoted much of its still limited resources to aid select Asian and African countries, shifting from the target to the sender position. Aid diplomacy targeting African and Asian states bore fruit in 1971 when the 26th UN General Assembly passed a resolution which called for the replacement of Taiwan’s seat at the UN with the PRC. China continued to provide aid to the so-called third-world countries in the remaining years of Mao’s rule and in the post-Mao era. In the 1960s and 1970s, North Korea, Mongolia, Albania, and North Vietnam were the four socialist countries which received large amounts of economic aid from China. The PRC aimed to lure those recipients of economic aid away from the USSR or to neutralize them in the Sino-Soviet rivalry, and the four socialist brothers also took great efforts to exploit the difficulty in Sino-Soviet relations to their own advantage. In the end, China’s aid to those countries proved counterproductive to its political objectives. As a result, China even sanctioned Albania and Vietnam by terminating aid to them in the second half of the 1970s. Beginning in the late 1970s with the proclamation of the reform and opening policy, China’s economic statecraft entered a new stage. While continuing to stress the utility of economic aid in accomplishing political and strategic goals, the Chinese leadership under Deng Xiaoping assigned China’s economic diplomacy a new mission: to help promote China’s opening up abroad and economic reforms at home, including economic incentive diplomacy towards Washington, and the expansion of China’s share of the resources and labour markets. At the same time, China also began to collaborate with the United Nations and other international organizations in granting technical assistance.
Although the focus of this book is an account of the more than forty-year evolution of Beijing’s economic diplomacy during the Cold War, the historical interpretation of China’s economic diplomatic behaviour in the past might also provide readers with a better understanding of the current and future economic statecraft of the PRC. As the author points out, Beijing’s past experiences with economic diplomacy might play a role in shaping China’s foreign policy in the coming decades. As China has been rising as a great power, no longer a poor country by any contemporary economic measure, Beijing seems poised to transform its economic might into considerable political influence in world affairs.
Xiaoming Zhang
Peking University, Beijing, China
pp. 411-413