Rebranding China: Contested Status Signaling in the Changing Global Order

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Pu, Xiaoyu, author.

Title: Rebranding China : contested status signaling in the changing global order / Xiaoyu Pu.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2019. | Series: Studies in Asian security | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018035350 (print) | LCCN 2018036823 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503607866 (e-book) | ISBN 9781503606838 (cloth : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: China—Foreign relations—21st century.

Classification: LCC DS779.47 (ebook) | LCC DS779.47 .P83 2018 (print) | DDC 327.51009/05—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018035350

Typeset by Newgen in 10/13 Bembo

Cover photos: (left) Pudong, Shanghai, by night. Raffaele Nicolussi, via Panoramio | Wikimedia Commons; (right) sugar cane on a tricycle, Xinhui district, Jiangmen, Guangdong. Tongde3Lu | Wikimedia Commons

Rebranding China

CONTESTED STATUS SIGNALING IN THE CHANGING GLOBAL ORDER

Xiaoyu Pu

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

SERIES EDITORS

Amitav Acharya, Chief Editor

American University

Alastair Iain Johnston

Harvard University

David Leheny, Chief Editor

Waseda University

Randall Schweller

The Ohio State University

INTERNATIONAL BOARD

Rajesh M. Basrur

Nanyang Technological University

Barry Buzan

London School of Economics

Victor D. Cha

Georgetown University

Thomas J. Christensen

Princeton University

Stephen P. Cohen

The Brookings Institution

Chu Yun-han

Academia Sinica

Rosemary Foot

University of Oxford

Aaron L. Friedberg

Princeton University

Sumit Ganguly

Indiana University, Bloomington

Avery Goldstein

University of Pennsylvania

Michael J. Green

Georgetown University

Stephan M. Haggard

University of California, San Diego

G. John Ikenberry

Princeton University

Takashi Inoguchi

Chuo University

Brian L. Job

University of British Columbia

Miles Kahler

University of California, San Diego

Peter J. Katzenstein

Cornell University

KhongYuen Foong

Oxford University

Byung-Kook Kim

Korea University

Michael Mastanduno

Dartmouth College

Mike Mochizuki

The George Washington University

Katherine H. S. Moon

Wellesley College

Qin Yaqing

China Foreign Affairs University

Christian Reus-Smit

Australian National University

Etel Solingen

University of California, Irvine

Varun Sahni

Jawaharlal Nehru University

Rizal Sukma

CSIS, Jakarta

Wu Xinbo

Fudan University

Studies in Asian Security

The Studies in Asian Security book series promotes analysis, understanding, and explanation of the dynamics of domestic, transnational, and international security challenges in Asia. The peer-reviewed publications in the series analyze contemporary security issues and problems to clarify debates in the scholarly community, provide new insights and perspectives, and identify new research and policy directions. Security is defined broadly to include the traditional political and military dimensions as well as nontraditional dimensions that affect the survival and well-being of political communities. Asia, too, is defined broadly to include Northeast, Southeast, South, and Central Asia.

Designed to encourage original and rigorous scholarship, books in the Studies in Asian Security series seek to engage scholars, educators, and practitioners. Wide-ranging in scope and method, the series is receptive to all paradigms, programs, and traditions and to an extensive array of methodologies now employed in the social sciences.

In memory of my father, who inspired and supported me for years but didn’t stay long enough in this world to read my first book

Contents

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction

2. Status Signaling in International Relations

3. China on the World Stage: Multiple Audiences, Competing Expectations

4. Domestic Audience, Nationalism, and Weapons of Mass Consumption

5. Red Mask and White Mask: The Charm Offensive, Selective Coercion, and China’s Regional Diplomacy

6. Lying Low or Striving for Achievement: Global Financial Crisis and Spin Doctoring in Beijing

7. Conclusion

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

I am thankful for many mentors at Ohio State University, including Bear Braumoeller, Rick Herrmann, Ted Hopf, Bill Liddle, Jennifer Mizzen, Alex Thompson, Alex Wendt, and especially Randy Schweller. I have appreciated all the suggestions from my peers, particularly Bentley Allan, Zoltán Búzás, Austin Carson, Erin Graham, Eric Grynaviski, Marcus Holmes, Jason Keiber, Joshua D. Kertzer, Nina Kollars, Tim Luecke, John Oates, David Traven, Fernando Nunez-Mietz, Jiwon Suh, Joshua Wu, and Chaekwang You.

I participated in the Status in World Politics project co-led by Deborah Welch Larson, T. V. Paul, and William Wohlforth, and I appreciated comments from them as well as from David Kang, David Lake, Iver B. Neumann, and Alexei Shevchenko. Thomas Christensen and Alastair Iain Johnston awarded me a fellowship in the Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program (CWP), and I presented this book project at the CWP annual workshop at Harvard in 2013. I appreciated comments from all participants of the workshop, especially Andrew Erickson, Taylor Fravel, Courtney J. Fung, Todd Hall, He Kai, Scott Kastner, Manjari Chatterjee Miller, Dawn Murphy, Qin Yaqing, Phillip Stalley, Wang Jisi, Xu Xin, and Zheng Yu. Providing valuable feedback for my book proposal were Yong Deng, Ted Hopf, Yinan He, Deborah Welch Larson, Zhiqun Zhu, Jessica Chen Weiss, Robert Jervis, and Randy Schweller. Many more provided comments in different stages of the project: Nhung Bui, Chen Dingding, Chen Yong, Chen Zheng, Chen Zhirui, John Chin, Ja-Ian Chong, Clay Cleveland, John Delury, Lin Minwang, Men Honghua, Han Zhaoying, Andy Wei Hao, Richard W. X. Hu, Tongfi Kim, Cheng-Chwee Kuik, Qu Bo, Li Wei, Liu Feng, John Mearsheimer, Fang Changping, Rosemary Foot, Avery Goldstein, Evelyn Goh, Greg Moore, Tudor Onea, Michael Reese, Ren Xiao, Yul Sohn, Matias Spektor, Oliver Stuenkel, Sun Xuefeng, James T. H. Tang, Tang Min, Jeremy Wallace, Wang Chengli, Wang Chuanxing, Wang Cungang, Wei Zongyou, Yin Jiwu, Xu Bin, Xu Jin, Xue Li, Wu Xinbo, Wu Wencheng, Joel Wuthnow, Yan Xuetong, Zhang Qingmin, Zhou Fangyin, and Zuo Xiying. (I apologize if I have accidentally left anyone’s name off this list.) Tang Shiping has been a constant source of good advice and encouragement. I am indebted to the many scholars who taught me in my early years, especially Steve Brown, Steve Hook, Zhang Ruizhuang, and Zhu Guanglei.

Since 2006, I have been hosting a global scholarly Listserv on China’s international relations, and I thank each of the four hundred scholars participating from around the globe. I appreciate Quansheng Zhao for inviting me to join the Global Forum of Chinese Political Scientists, which is a wonderful source of new ideas and inspirations. I am grateful to the many scholars, policy analysts, and officials I interviewed during my fieldtrips in China and Brazil. I am particularly grateful for the grants and fellowships from the Mershon Center of the Ohio State University; Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation; International Activities Committee of the University of Nevada, Reno; and the Center for International Relations at Fundação Getulio Vargas in Brazil.

Amitav Acharya and David Leheny are terrific editors for the Studies in Asian Security book series. I thank them, as well as the two anonymous reviewers, for their suggestions. Alan Harvey and Leah Pennywark from Stanford University Press provided guidance during the final stage of the project. Eve Baker and Eric Shibuya read the manuscript, and they also provided helpful comments.

The University of Nevada, Reno, has been my home institution since 2013. I am grateful for the collegiality and support from all my colleagues, especially Berch Berberoglu, Bill Eubank, Eric Herzik, Bob Ostergard, Hugh Shapiro, and John Scire. I also thank Ty Cobb for advice and encouragement over the years.

Finally, I thank my family. My wife, Hou Ying, and my in-laws, Hou Guangzhong and Liu Mingxiang, have provided enduring support and encouragement. I am indebted to my elder brother, Pu Guoyong, who has shouldered disproportionately greater responsibility in our family. My parents, Pu Jiaxu and Li Sirong, stimulated my curiosity for academic research early on and have supported my aspirations throughout the years. I regret that I haven’t been able to celebrate the Chinese New Year with them for so long.

1

Introduction

China is not a superpower; nor will it ever seek to be one. If one day China should change its color and turn into a superpower . . . the people of the world should expose it, oppose it and work together with the Chinese people to overthrow it.

—Deng Xiaoping, speech at United Nations General Assembly, 1974

In November 2015, China was trumpeting its arrival as one of the world’s great economic powers as the International Monetary Fund elevated the [Chinese] renminbi to the ranks of leading currencies, alongside the dollar, euro, yen and British pound. Many Chinese elites celebrated the elevated status of the renminbi as another milestone of China’s rise to great power status. Yet a few days later, during the Paris Climate Change Conference, China insisted on its developing country status as Chinese officials noted that hundreds of millions of people in China are still very poor.¹ Fast-forward to 2017. As protectionist sentiment rises in many parts of the world, Chinese President Xi Jinping actively defends economic globalization on international forums.² Largely abandoning Deng Xiaoping’s low-profile approach in global affairs, Xi Jinping has implemented a much more ambitious foreign policy, proposing new international institutions and hosting high-profile summit meetings. Some Chinese diplomats have started to talk about China’s leadership in global governance more explicitly. In January 2017, senior Chinese diplomat Zhang Jun commented that China [would] assume world leadership if needed.³ A month later, however, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi cautioned against an inflated expectation of China’s global role: China has no intention to lead anyone, nor does it intend to replace anyone. . . . As the largest developing country, China is moving to work tirelessly for upholding the legitimate rise and interest of the developing countries.⁴ During his speech at the Summit Meeting for the Belt Road Initiative in May 2017, Xi Jinping expressed China’s intention to contribute more to global development, but Xi also reassured his international audience, In pursuing the Belt and Road Initiative, China has no intention to form a small group detrimental to stability.⁵ In a speech later that year at the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, Xi Jinping laid out an ambitious blueprint for China’s national rejuvenation, describing China as a great power (daguo) or a strong power (qiangguo) twenty-six times.⁶ But Xi also emphasized that China’s international status as the world’s largest developing country has not changed. Xi envisions China becoming a global leader in innovation, composite national strength, and international influence in the coming decades. He also declared, however, No matter what stage of development it reaches, China will never seek hegemony or engage in expansion.⁷

These declarations are part of a long series of contradictory signals that China has transmitted to the world regarding its preferred status. On the one hand, China continues to struggle for more recognition as a rising great power; on the other hand, China emphasizes its developing country status, sometimes complaining about other nations’ over-recognition of its rise in the international system. The existing research invariably assumes that China wants to have more status, and the duality of China’s status struggle has received little attention.⁸

Rising powers are expected to be eager to advance their status and prestige. In the late 1990s, the British strategist Gerald Segal said, At best, China is a second-rank, middle power that has mastered the diplomatic art of theater: it has us willingly suspending our disbelief in its strength.⁹ In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, China carefully crafted its image as a strong nation through high-profile projects such as the Beijing Olympic Games, the Shanghai Expo, and the Belt Road Initiative. With the lofty aspiration of a Chinese Dream, President Xi Jinping aims to rejuvenate the Chinese nation. Additionally, in the South China and East China Seas, China has strengthened its maritime claims. According to Admiral Harry Harris, the commander of US Pacific Command, China is seeking regional hegemony in East Asia.¹⁰ According to Liu Mingfu, a professor at China’s National Defense University, China and the United States will pursue an Olympic-style competition for global leadership.¹¹ Michael Pillsbury, a former Pentagon official, claims that China has a secret strategy to replace the United States as the leading world power.¹² When asked if Chinese leaders are serious about displacing the United States as the number-one power, Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of Singapore and one of the most insightful observers of China, replied, Of course. . . . How could they not aspire to be number one in Asia, and in time the world?¹³ From these perspectives, it appears that the status competition between China and the United States is inevitable.

China’s diplomatic art of theater includes another side, however: Beijing sometimes tries to avoid taking a high-profile role. In 2014, the International Comparison Program of the World Bank estimated that China’s economy, on the basis of purchasing power parity (PPP), was likely to surpass that of the United States in size in 2014.¹⁴ Instead of celebrating its coronation as the world’s number-one economy, China’s National Bureau of Statistics said that the result was not from official statistics.¹⁵ The Chinese media, far from trumpeting the news of China’s expected elevation to the world’s largest economy, downplayed or ignored the announcement altogether.¹⁶ In multilateral forums such as the UN General Assembly, Chinese leaders continue to emphasize China’s status as a developing country. While the international audience increasingly views China as an emerging superpower that should take a leadership role, many Chinese elites and the public still hold that China is a developing country and that China should not be eager to take a leadership role in global affairs.¹⁷ According to Cui Tiankai, the Chinese ambassador to the United States, We have been elevated [in the eyes of others] against our will. We have no intention to compete for global leadership.¹⁸ This problem of status over-recognition is not unique to China. The foreign policy expert Manjari Chatterjee Miller says India has a similar problem. While many international observers fret about the pace of India’s rise, the foreign policy elite within India shy away from any talk of the country’s rising status. According to a senior Indian official, There is a hysterical sense, encouraged by the West, about India’s rise.¹⁹

China sends contradictory signals about its status and role in the twenty-first century. An assertive China demands greater accommodation of what it considers its core interests in Taiwan, Tibet, and the South China Sea, and leaders of a shirking China urge international audiences to see, not an up-and-coming superpower, but a still relatively poor developing country. How a country projects an image of its preferred status is important, and miscommunication of these signals can have serious consequences. The nature and content of the international order in coming decades will partially depend on what roles the emerging powers, especially China, decide to play.²⁰ Is China a challenger or a supporter of the existing global order? Is China a free rider as described by President Barack Obama?²¹ A key element for a peaceful transition of power is the transparency of intentions that allows the established power to accept the greater role played by the rising power. Signaling by China and recognition of China’s status are therefore crucial. China’s status signaling shapes how China deals with many international issues. For instance, should China primarily position itself as a developing country or a responsible great power in the climate change negotiations? China’s complex roles in the international arena led to some inconsistencies that plagued its position during the Copenhagen climate negotiations.²² Historically, rising powers and established powers have had conflictual relationships, partially driven by competition over status. In international politics, status competition between rising and established powers is often thought to be a zero-sum game. China’s signaling could influence perceptions of China among its audiences, and those perceptions will influence how other countries respond to China’s changing position. For instance, if China were seeking to grow within the existing order, the Sino-American relationship may not be a zero-sum game, and the United States could largely be willing to accommodate China’s rise.²³ If China were seeking to replace the United States as a new superpower, however, a Sino-American conflict might be inevitable.²⁴ In particular, if international status is viewed as positional good, it is a scarce resource that cannot be shared by all nations.²⁵ In recent years, China’s more assertive posturing has partially contributed to rethinking by the United States of its strategy toward China.²⁶

Rebranding of a Conflicted China

Beijing’s intentional downplaying of its status, when viewed through the lens of existing international relations theories, appears puzzling; however, the debates in China about its status and role in the world partially explain the puzzle. In the early 1990s, Deng Xiaoping set a guiding principle for China’s diplomacy, emphasizing that China should hide its capabilities and bide its time, a low-profile approach known as the tao guang yang hui strategy in China.²⁷ More recently, the Chinese foreign policy community has been debating what China should signal to both domestic and international audiences.²⁸ Systematic analysis is needed to deepen our understanding of China’s international positioning. Some Chinese scholars conceptualize China’s zaidingwei (repositioning) as an issue of diplomatic transformation (waijiaozhuanxing).²⁹ They debate whether China should play a more active role on the world stage.³⁰ Questions related to these debates include: Is China an emerging superpower or a developing country? Should China continue maintaining a low-profile approach in global affairs? How should China manage its status and responsibilities on the global stage? How should China deal with the US-led global order?³¹

According to Wang Jisi and Cai Tuo, two of the most influential international relations thinkers in China, the heated debates over China’s dingwei (positioning) or zaidingwei within China’s foreign policy community are unique because the broader literature of international politics contains no systemic studies of repositioning.³² While Wang’s and Cai’s assessments of the Chinese scholarly literature may be accurate, I argue that repositioning can be analyzed from a more theoretical perspective. The challenge of how a great power adapts to its new status is not unique to China. According to a comparative study of several shaper nations, such as Germany, India, China, and Brazil, their national strategy is often distorted by domestic politics, national identity, and economic concerns, making it difficult to develop a coherent strategy to advance their power and status on the global stage.³³ Japan has been struggling for status and prestige, measuring its standing against other major powers.³⁴ Russia’s long-term relationship with the West has been shaped by its perceptions of honor: when Russia perceives its honor is recognized, it cooperates with the West; without such recognition Russia pursues independent policies defensively or assertively.³⁵ In international history, rising and declining powers often have difficulty in objectively evaluating their shifting power and how to accordingly adjust policy. Not only does the inherent uncertainty and complexity in the international system constrain the objective assessment of power and status at a national level.³⁶ Domestic politics also complicates the process of strategic adjustments, leading to pathologies such as underexpansion, overexpansion, or underbalance.³⁷ In the late nineteenth century, domestic political fragmentation inhibited the ability of a declining Britain to assess its relative power position accurately.³⁸ Under what conditions will a rising power pursue an overexpansion policy? When and why will a rising power pursue a shirking policy?³⁹ Furthermore, viewed in