Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014. xv, 175 pp. (Figures, tables.) US$29.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8014-5265-9.
This well-organized book assesses China’s military, infrastructure and commercial assistance to its ally, Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime of Democratic Kampuchea (DK). Chapter 1 offers a succinct overview of China’s relations with DK. Chapter 2 describes in detail the Khmer Rouge bureaucracy, informing the reader that authority relations in DK were constantly in flux and that specific responsibilities of an individual or office were based on the trust of the system’s top members: Pol Pot or his chief lieutenants. We also learn that while commercial functions were controlled from top-down, the Kampong Som petroleum refinery project was a decentralized policy area which came under the purview of the local zone commander. Chapter 3 explains the bureaucratic structure and process of Chinese assistance to DK, giving the Kampong Som case as illustration.
The book’s central argument, that China’s aid provision bought it little influence in DK due to bureaucratic fragmentation in China combined with an institutional matrix in Cambodia either strong enough or too weak to resist Chinese demands, are expanded upon in chapters 4, 5 and 6. Chapter 4 deals with Chinese military assistance to DK, the argument here being Chinese influence was curtailed due to the strength of the DK military. Chapter 5 addresses the Kampong Som project, in which it is maintained that Chinese investments brought even smaller returns because of the fragmentation of Chinese bureaucracies. Chapter 6 takes up the issue of Chinese assistance to DK’s international trade and commerce. The seventh and last chapter attempts to extend the study to present-day policy making by Chinese bureaucracies.
The author refers to the military airfield complex of Krang Leav as an unqualified success of Chinese infrastructure aid to DK. As such, it is all the more curious for Mertha to assert that, “even if China wanted to, it was unable to influence DK in implementation of policy” (97). More likely, by not insisting that radar stations or the military airfield be sited near the coast or the Thai border, China had given way to DK’s military concerns and priorities, particularly in helping to construct Krang Leav near the border with Vietnam, although the Chinese had initial qualms about appearing provocative to the Vietnamese (84–85). Of the three cases, only Kampong Som could really be considered a failure. Although Mertha argued that a major problem was that the Chinese institutions involved were fragmented into overlapping jurisdictions and organizational mandates, and incapable of effective planning and coordination with numerous contracting and subcontracting parties and agencies, he stressed no less that the mass killing of Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge authorities and its fratricidal purges largely deprived the country of skilled personnel to handle the tasks assigned to them by the Chinese. In the case of trade, while the Chinese bureaucracies were said to have clear functional delineations of responsibility without the need to rely on “a constellation of subordinate units” (125), the DK Ministry of Commerce was described as “institutionally complex and fragmented” (120), yet had enough influence with the top leadership to function as a trading unit.
The central question of the book is: “Why was a powerful state like China unable to influence its far weaker and ostensibly dependent client state”(3)? Mertha refers to Sophie Richardson’s China, Cambodia and the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009) in which she argued that Beijing subordinated its own interests to the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other states and their domestic priorities, but then brushes her argument aside. Perhaps Mertha could have entertained the notion that China was not so much unable, but rather unwilling, to assert influence over Cambodia, particularly on issues that were not the priorities of the leadership of either China or Cambodia. While defense and trade were vital to the survival of DK as China’s client state, “the Chinese-retrofitted Kampong Som oil refinery would have made DK reliant on crude oil from China” (99), and the Pol Pot leadership was obsessed with achieving self-sufficiency.
The period that the Khmer Rouge was in power, from April 1975 to the end of 1978, witnessed tumultuous changes in Chinese politics, with the purge of Vice-Premier Deng Xiaoping, death of Premier Zhou Enlai and Chairman Mao Zedong, arrest of the leftist “Gang of Four” faction, succession by Hua Guofeng to Mao’s position, and the return to power of Deng and his setting aside of Mao’s autarkic economic policy in favour of reform and opening. As such, the analysis should have been extended from the bureaucratic fragmentation hypothesis to investigate whether changes or instabilities in the leaderships of the various ministries, bureaus, institutes or agencies on the Chinese side might have affected their relationships with the DK authorities or their operations in Cambodia.
The author’s use of bureaucratic fragmentation in a previous work to shed light on the politics and policy making of hydroelectric dam constructions in China—where energy bureaucracies are jealous guardians of their own turfs—may be more straightforward than its application for this study, which deals with more than just one country or one issue. Furthermore, the bureaucratic fragmentation argument was never explicitly made for the Cambodian side regarding the failure of Chinese aid projects, although patron-client networks of zone commanders in DK were cited as central to cadres’ decision making (12). Elsewhere, Mertha mentioned the youth of (often teenage) project managers and the political purges in Cambodia (69), and the technical and administrative shortcomings of Cambodian personnel and institutions (57). These were certainly hindrances to the projects, but hardly attributable to institutional failures of fragmented bureaucracies.
The author’s thesis thus leaves much room for debate, particularly since it relies on three case findings that only partially confirm it. Nonetheless, the study is a product of painstaking field work, thorough research and plausible theoretical inference. This reviewer recommends the book to both experts and laymen alike for its insights on Sino-Cambodian relations and China’s aid to developing countries.
Chien-peng Chung
Lingnan University, Hong Kong SAR, China
pp. 263-265