Contemporary Chinese Studies. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2023. US$56.00, cloth. ISBN 9780774868112
Huang Yuxing’s monograph offers a fresh historical retrospective on twentieth-century great power competition by conceptualizing China’s geopolitical perspective of events occurring during successive episodes of the Cold War, as played out across Asia. Huang makes two vital contributions to the extant literature here. First, this manuscript advances a novel theoretical interpretation (emanating from neorealism) of Chinese great power politics and its rivalry with other great powers (the United States and the Soviet Union) in the shape of regional competition theory. Second, by applying process tracing to empirically support this innovative conceptual framework, Huang produces three gripping case studies: great power rivalry in East Asia (1955–1965), South Asia (1955–1963), and Indochina (1962–1975), in which each study comprises original and underexplored archival material as drawn from a slew of highly credible sources. In the book’s penultimate chapter, Huang fast-forwards the application of his study beyond the confines of the Cold War to more recent times, allowing him to draw some highly nuanced findings regarding Sino-US and Sino-Russian rapprochement/rivalry in these three aforementioned regions. Doing this works wonders for his manuscript and will undoubtedly make it a firm favourite with political scientists, commentators, and policy-makers alike, especially how Huang is able to subtly showcase critical discrepancies, notably in relation to modern-day ties binding Beijing and Moscow.
In sum, China’s Asymmetic Statecraft offers a fascinating medium through which to learn about large swathes of contemporary Chinese geopolitical history. Although the author covers mainstream components of twentieth century Chinese foreign policy, he also takes the reader places which usually receive scant attention such as China’s dealings with post-war Japan, Afghanistan, and Burma (Myanmar) amongst others. This allows the reader not only to draw parallels with the breadth and depth of China’s reemergence as a great power in the making in the twenty-first century, but thanks to Huang’s honing of the concept of asymmetric statecraft, he is able to etch out the essence of these relationships for China during the bulk of the Cold War. In effect, the level of historical detail observable across each of the empirical chapters, added to the novelty of the analytical framework, makes for a difficult book to put down—so much so that one almost feels a sense of insufficient closure when the empirical chapters come to an abrupt end.
In addition, there is much to be said for Huang’s apt decision to opt for the application of regional competition theory. Built on the foundational tenets of neorealism, as Huang successfully argues, regional competition theory offers a more “dynamic” (155) model than external threat theories as well as domestic/ideological lenses, more akin respectively to offensive/defensive realism and neoclassical realism. Instead, regional competition theory offers a framework that invites a greater degree of nuance and flexibility in an almost Putnam-esque application of a two-level game theory model. As Huang’s research posits: “the number of a great power’s regional competitors and its alignment relationships shape its asymmetric statecraft, with respect to uniform strategies or selective strategies towards multiple weaker neighbours” (35). As a result, rather than limit his analysis to successive studies of bilateral relationships and rivalries over select time periods, the regional competition theory framework grants Huang the ability to simultaneously assess multiple shifting strategies (accommodation, coercion, uniform maintenance, etc.) towards a plethora of weaker states (sometimes going as high as five in the case of South Asia) in response to the emergence of a recognized threat from one, or at times two, great powers in a given region. This study is thus truly holistic in nature and allows Huang to measure with minutiae the asymmetric alignment and non-alignment strategies of a great power (in this case China) in response to an evolving regional geopolitical dynamic.
Of course, as with any neorealist framework, Huang is obliged, for feasibility’s sake, to draw on questionable heuristics. For instance, the regional competition framework is premised on a binary between great powers and weak states, typically split around metrics such as military strength/spending and the ability to disburse foreign aid. In so doing, this distinction intrinsically restricts the degree of analytical nuance on display, and this book is no different. For one, many of the weak states actually go on to display diplomatic agency which betrays their so-called weakness.
Furthermore, there are also question marks around whether the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) is always worthy of the great power status afforded to it through the entirety of the period (1955–1972) that makes up the three case studies. Indeed, it is difficult to always conceive the PRC in this way especially when for part of this period it is embroiled in its own brutal Cultural Revolution, at a time when even some of its own leaders considered it backwards in relation to other great powers. By relying too much upon these metrics, Huang somewhat attributes less space to the study of the agency of Chinese decision-makers (principally Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai) themselves. In hindsight, what is quite striking from the archival material unearthed by Huang is the PRC leadership’s overconfidence in its own foresight, which has often resulted in the regime blindsiding itself and thus having to compensate by doubling-back on its initial diplomatic strategies. This also begs the question about the extent to which strategy-making in the context of the regional competition framework is rationally undertaken ex ante or is in fact oftentimes ad hoc and largely responsive in scope? The above critiques though take nothing away from the value of Huang’s contribution to the literature in what is a captivating account of China’s shifting Cold War statecraft in Asia.
Benjamin Robin Barton
University of Nottingham Malaysia, Semenyih