China and the emerging regional order in the South Pacific

As China rises, it has become increasingly aggressive in applying its soft power in the Pacific. What does China's arrival mean for the emerging regional order in the Pacific? What is it up to in the strategic backwater of the Pacific, which has traditionally been regarded as an ‘American lake’ and Australia's ‘special patch’? Setting my analysis in the broad context of China's new global diplomacy, I argue that the pattern of China's assertive behaviour in the Pacific is no different from its approach to other regions in the global South. I further argue that with only limited strategic, diplomatic and economic investment in the Pacific, China has become a regional power by default. The arrival of China, therefore, is unlikely to provoke any new round of great power competition. Rather, it offers opportunities for the world's second most formidable development challenge.     

Economic statecraft in China's new overseas special economic zones: soft power,business or resource security?

China's rapidly growing economic engagement with other developing countries has aroused intense debates, but these debates have often generated more heat than light. The Chinese government is clearly pushing its companies to move offshore in greater numbers, and state‐owned firms figure prominently in many of the major investments abroad. Yet relatively little research exists on when, how and why the Chinese government intervenes in the overseas economic activities of its firms. China's state‐sponsored economic diplomacy in other developing countries could play three major strategic roles: strengthening resource security, enhancing political relationships and soft power, and boosting commercial opportunities for national firms. This article examines China's programme to establish overseas special economic zones as one tool of Beijing's economic statecraft. It traces the process by which they were established and implemented, and investigates the characteristics of the 19 zones initially selected in a competitive tender process. The article concludes that even in countries rich in natural resources, the overseas zones were overwhelmingly positioned as commercial projects. Particularly in the Asian zones, China is following in the footsteps of Japan. The zone programme, and the Chinese foreign investment it hoped to foster, represents a clear case of the international projection of China's developmental state. However, in Africa (but not generally elsewhere) discourse surrounding the zones publicly positions them as a transfer of China's own development success, thus potentially enhancing China's political relationships and soft power on the continent.     

Index to Volume L—2009

A U. S.-based geographer investigates how decentralization, a central component of China's fiscal reforms in the 1980s and 1990s, has altered the foundation of underlying economic inequalities among its regions. More specifically, the paper examines the evolution of China's fiscal system during the reform era and corresponding changes in the character of central-local fiscal relations. It focuses on analyzing how patterns in regional fiscal disparities at multiple geographic levels have changed over time, laying the groundwork for further research on China's uneven regional development.     

China's "Dash for Gas": Challenges and Potential Impacts on Global Markets

Two UK-based researchers examine the significant recent growth in China's demand for natural gas, a fuel not long ago considered of marginal importance but now viewed as critical for the country's future economic growth. Based on a range of databases as well as industry and media reports, the authors demonstrate how rapid demand growth since 2005 has transformed China from a minor, self-sufficient gas producer to a major buyer on international gas markets. They also analyze projections for future demand growth (25 years), showing China's demand for gas will grow faster that anywhere else in the world, and explore the potential for development of China's substantial domestic gas reserves to mitigate import demand over the short to medium term. The study concludes with an assessment of China's potential impact on global gas markets over short, intermediate, and long time horizons.     

Japan's response to China's rise: regional engagement, global containment, dangers of collision

Japan and China's ability to manage their bilateral relationship is crucial for the stability of the East Asian region. It also has a global impact on the security and economic development of other regions. For just as China's rise has inevitably involved an expansion of its global reach, so Japan's responses to the challenges posed by China have increasingly taken a global form, seeking to incorporate new partners and frameworks outside East Asia. Japan's preferred response to China's regional and global rise in the post‐Cold War period has remained one of default engagement. Japan is intent on promoting China's external engagement with the East Asia region and its internal domestic reform, through upgrading extant bilateral and Japan–China–US trilateral frameworks for dialogue and cooperation, and by emphasizing the importance of economic power to influence China. Japan is deliberately seeking to proliferate regional frameworks for cooperation in East Asia in order to dilute, constrain and ultimately engage China's rising power. However, Japan's engagement strategy also contains the potential to tilt towards default containment. Japan's domestic political basis for engagement is becoming increasingly precarious as China's rise stimulates Japanese revisionism and nationalism. Japan also appears increasingly to be looking to contain China on a global scale by forging new strategic links in Russia and Central Asia, with a ‘concert of democracies’ involving India, Australia and the US, by competing for resources with China in Africa and the Middle East, and by attempting to articulate a values‐based diplomacy to check the so‐called ‘Beijing consensus’. Nevertheless, Japan's perceived inability to channel China's rise either through regional engagement or through global containment carries a further risk of pushing Japan to resort to the strengthening of its military power in an attempt to guarantee its essential national interests. It is in this instance that Japan and China run the danger of a military collision.     

Current Literature

A noted specialist on China's urban and economic geography investigates the processes underlying the massive and occasionally wasteful practice of land development that has accompanied China's rapid economic advance. By critically juxtaposing elements of conventional neoliberal economic theory (e.g., the so-called "tragedy of the commons") with the actual exercise of land property rights and the practice of land development in transitional China, he argues that, contrary to Western experience, land property rights have evolved from the bottom up and thus functioned not as a bundle of standardized and uniform legal prerogatives but rather as a diverse set of local practices adaptable to regional conditions. The author illustrates these processes though a thorough review of Chinese laws and regulations as well as a case study of land development in a province (Guangdong) in which land development has been allowed to proceed more rapidly under a special economic regime and exposure to global forces. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: P260, Q150, R140, R520. 2 figures, 1 table, 95 references.     

Regional Analysis of China's Green GDP

A Chinese economist and U.S.-based economic geographer investigate China's move toward introducing "greener" measures of economic output to better assess the environmental costs associated with the country's recent economic development. More specifically, the authors applied a model of green gross regional product (GGRP) that adjusts for the costs of growth arising from negative environmental externalities. They then conduct a spatial analysis of the indicator's distribution across China's provinces in 2007 in an attempt to better understand the factors explaining its patterns. The analysis indicates that once environmental externalities in the form of industrial wastes are accounted for, the coastal—inland divide that traditionally describes China's geography of income inequality is much less obvious. Rather a more diffuse pattern emerges, in which some poor provinces are found to be relatively efficient regional producers whereas certain wealthier ones are not.     

Spatial Disparities and Economic Development in China, 1953-92: A Comparative Study

It seems to be widely accepted that China's interior development during the Maoist period was based on ‘equality’ considerations, which narrowed Chinese regional disparities. By contrast, the recent coastal development during Deng's reform era has been coined as ‘uneven’ and ‘undesirable’, because it has created tremendous inequalities across the country. However, the findings of this study suggest that the question may not be that simple. This article examines the spatial disparities of economic development in China between 1953 and 1992, focusing on a time-series comparison between the development policies of Mao and Deng, their outcomes and the resulting changes. By using provincial and regional economic and investment data, the article elaborates why Mao's interior development did not lead to a more equitable outcome than Deng's uneven strategy of’ east coastal development’. The findings provide an insight into some of the unexpected outcomes of more than forty years of socialist development, in the realm of economic growth and disparity.     

The limits to China's non-interference foreign policy: pro-state interventionism and the rescaling of economic governance

China's foreign policy has been long committed to a principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign countries. While one could easily point out past and present-day inconsistencies in its implementation, this article argues that defenders and critics of the principle both rely on a limited interpretation of ‘interference’ or ‘intervention’ based on an ideology of Westphalian sovereignty. Particularly problematic is the conceptual distinction between the ‘political’ or ‘diplomatic’, on the one hand, and the ‘economic’, on the other. As Polanyi's concept of embeddedness reminds us, markets, society and politics occur simultaneously, and can only act as discrete realms in epistemological abstractions. It is thus argued that non-interference is a semi-formal institution that governs China's diplomatic engagements and affects its economic activities. While the totality of China's interactions with the world has diverse and sometimes contradictory impacts on global governance, non-interference itself has apparent consequences for the rescaling of regional economic governance. Specifically, this article contends that Chinese non-interference results in the empowerment of political elites at national levels, and thus in the (re-)emergence of the nation state as a gatekeeper and facilitator of the advancement of capitalist enterprises. As a result, through non-intervention, China's foreign policy undermines supranational regulatory approaches and fosters state-based regional architectures.     

China's strategic partnership with Latin America: a fulcrum in China's rise

China has over the last two decades been committed to creating a strategic partnership with Latin American states by persistently extending its economic and political involvement in the continent. China's efforts in this regard reflect not only its desire to intensify its economic cooperation and political relations with nations in Latin America, but also its strategic goals of creating its own sphere of influence in the region and enhancing its ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power in order to elevate China's status at the systemic level. With access to Latin American markets, resources and investment destinations, China may sustain its economic and social progress that bases its long cherished dream of restoring its past glory of fuqiang (wealth and power) and rise as a global power capable of reshaping the current world system. The enormous economic benefits deriving from their economic cooperation and trade may persuade Latin American nations to accept the basic premise of China's economic strategy: that China's rise is not a threat, but an opportunity to gain wealth and prosperity. This will help China gain more ‘soft’ power in and leverage over its economic partners in Latin America, and thereby help it to rise in the global power hierarchy.     

The emergence of NGOs in China and their transnational linkages: implications for domestic reform

In addressing the question of how China's rapid socioeconomic transformation is changing the nature of its international engagement we need to move beyond a traditional focus on state-centric analysis. Obviously a major stimulus for China's international engagement over the past 25 years of reform and opening has come from non-state economic activity. Growing economic interdependence, accelerated after China's accession into the World Trade Organization, provides the strongest argument in favour of a peaceful rise of China scenario in which both regional and global security are enhanced rather than threatened. Far less attention, however, has been given to the role and influence of Chinese non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and their transnational linkages. I argue in this article that in order to obtain a more comprehensive picture of China's ongoing process of reform and opening to the outside world we need to incorporate a civil society dimension into our analysis. This is of particular relevance to ongoing foreign policy debates over democracy and human rights promotion in China. Indeed, in the absence of a more detailed understanding of current developments taking place at the grassroots, international support for progressive reform runs the risk of undermining positive change from below.     

A China Paradox: Migrant Labor Shortage amidst Rural Labor Supply Abundance

A U.S. geographer and noted authority on China's urbanization seeks to explain the apparent paradox between reported recent shortages of migrant labor in cities in eastern China's export-oriented manufacturing belt and the abundant supply of labor in China's rural areas. He examines important socioeconomic contexts often overlooked in the debate over whether China has reached the Lewis turning point (when dual rural-urban labor markets begin to merge and a labor surplus economy is transformed into a full-employment economy), which make possible the existence of such shortages over the short term and in local areas. These include the special characteristics of China's export industrialization (e.g., preference for workers in the age category 16-30); its immense migrant labor force, constrained under the hukou system; the short-term impacts of China's economic stimulus program launched in early 2009 in the wake of the global economic crisis; and cycles in the global economy that support or impede export production.     

The (Ineffective) Financial Statecraft of China's Bilateral Swap Agreements

Since 2008, the People's Bank of China has signed bilateral swap agreements (BSAs) with 35 foreign central banks. Collectively, these deals amount to nearly US$ 500 billion in Chinese renminbi (RMB) available to Beijing's foreign partners. What has led China to be so aggressive in its efforts to sign so many swap agreements? What are the political economic implications of the swap programme for the US‐centric global economic order? China's BSAs can be understood as a form of financial statecraft: the use of national financial and monetary capabilities to achieve foreign policy ends. China has deployed BSAs for both defensive and offensive reasons. Defensively, Beijing has sought to use BSAs to promote trade settlement in RMB thereby reducing China's vulnerability to the dollar's structural dominance in trade. Yet, as explained in this article, they have been ineffective in this regard. Offensively, Beijing has used BSAs as a short‐term liquidity backstop outside of the Bretton Woods institutions for partner countries in need. Here, there is greater potential for BSAs to impact the status quo economic order by enhancing Chinese economic influence. However, their potential is dependent on Beijing's willingness to act as a unilateral crisis lender and its ability to further internationalize the RMB.     

Peaceful development: China's policy of reassurance

The rise of China has aroused much concern and anxiety around the world. This has complicated China's foreign policy objective of securing a peaceful international environment for domestic reforms and development. Accordingly, reassuring the world of the benign nature of China's rise has become a central feature of China's foreign policy. This paper describes and analyses China's efforts in this regard. First, it outlines the central features of such efforts which constitute a policy of reassurance. Then it explores the major factors shaping the policy. Finally it tries to assess the result of the policy and speculate about its future development. It is hoped that this will help gain a better understanding of China's foreign policy.     

An empirical study on the modification of China's current urban social security system

This study challenges the conventional correlation between economic performance and the level of the development of social security systems. By focusing on China's urban areas, we provide an overview of the components and benefits, from a comparative perspective, of China's current social security system. We also create a comprehensive and generally applicable method using factors such as economics and population, among others, as standards to evaluate the efficacy of China's system. In order to demonstrate our primary hypothesis – that the Chinese Communist Party government has to modify its social security system to adapt to or bring about changes in the basis of its legitimacy – we analyse Chinese social security records and other related data after 1949 by statistical methods. The formula we provide in this study can be used to forecast China's expenditure on its urban social security system, and other scholars can apply our methods to countries in which conditions are broadly similar.     

From ‘motherland’ to ‘daddy state’: A genealogical analysis of the gender undertone in China's nationalist discourses

This article examines the gender undertone of China's nationalist discourses, especially in familial metaphors of nationalism, and how such an undertone shapes people's understandings of state authority and state-citizen relations. Conventional nationalist discourse of the ‘motherland’ evokes the image of an insulted and raped mother as the symbol of national humiliation and calls for actions from patriots (masculinised in the discourse). In recent years, however, we have seen the emergence of a new discourse that depicts the nation-state as a rich, powerful and masculine ‘daddy’. Using discourse analysis and Foucauldian genealogical methods, this article argues that the discursive development has to be analysed against China's historical backgrounds, especially considering new standards of masculinity and femininity in the era of economic reform. Capital is equated to masculinity and righteousness, whereas femininity is shaped by the middle-class values of consumerism and political disengagement. The ‘daddy state’ discourse conjures strong paternalistic power from China's economic capacity that can be projected onto challengers of state authority, while also constructing the nationalist public as feminised consumers whose consumerist enjoyment relies on patriarchal state protection.     

The sustainability and some consequences of Chinese economic growth

During the past 27 years, China's economy and relationship with the outside world has been transformed. The magnitude of annual economic growth and rapid increase in the volume of output of goods and services raise unsettling questions about potential threats to the sustainability of current growth levels and implications for economic and political stability. This paper examines the sources of economic growth and concludes the strong state system, high rates of saving and investment and demographic structure will sustain growth. Chinese authorities must be aware that a failure to maintain the process of financial and political institutional reform or to address the widening regional income inequalities poses potential domestic threats to sustainable growth. Tensions remain in China's international relationships, forcing China to consider further adjustment and accommodation in its regional security and economic relationships.     

The economic factor in the Sino-Vietnamese split, 1972–75: An analysis of Vietnamese archival sources

Relying on so far untapped Vietnamese archival sources, this article examines the impact of China's gradual curtailment of its economic assistance to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam's (DRV) war and economic recovery efforts and its implications for Sino-Vietnamese relations between 1972 and 1975. While Beijing's gradual reduction of aid to the DRV during this period was primarily motivated by the declining importance of North Vietnam to China's strategic security combined with the reality of China's domestic economic hardship which largely resulted from the disastrous Cultural Revolution of 1966–69, Hanoi's reactions and policy responses were driven by their deep-rooted perception of Beijing's insincerity and hidden intention to keep Vietnam weak. The Sino-Vietnamese conflict that ensued after 1975 was not inevitable; Hanoi's leaders launched concerted diplomatic efforts to improve economic relations with Beijing throughout 1975 because they clearly recognised the importance of China's continued economic assistance and preferential trade agreements to its first five year plan (1976–80). However, Beijing's unchanged position and hasty decision to totally cut off aid to Vietnam and additionally take punitive economic measures against Vietnam's first five-year plan in late 1975 while at the same time increasing economic and military aid to the Democratic Kampuchea compelled Hanoi to tilt closer towards Moscow.     

An overview of recent research on modern Chinese economic history

China formally adopted the policy of reform and opening up to the outside world in 1978. Since then, both economic practice and economic theory in China have undergone profound changes, and the academic study of modern Chinese economic history has been encouraged to expand its research horizons under the rubric of “liberating the mind and seeking truth in the facts”. A number of important monographs and essays have been produced and the study of modern Chinese economic history has entered a flourishing period. Current research focuses on two major topics: China's New Democratic economy and the planned economy during the period 1949–78; and, China's socialist market economy from 1978–2006. The study of these two areas shows numerous interconnections, points of comparison and causal links. The many and important lessons to be drawn from these studies both exhibit Chinese characteristics and have universal implications.     

Crossing Khorgos: Soft power,security, and suspect loyalties at the Sino-Kazakh boundary

As China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) development projects deepen connections across Eurasia, the Sino-Kazakh border has been rematerialized in a manner that complicates the exercise of Chinese BRI soft power. On the one hand, the border city of Khorgos is being rebuilt as a bridgehead to facilitate trade and development between the countries; new infrastructure and spectacle at Khorgos and beyond works to entice Kazakhs to cross the border in pursuit of economic opportunities. At the same time, recent crackdowns on Muslims in China's Xinjiang Province has led to the detention and harassment of cross-border migrants with differentiated migrant statuses. Chinese security forces' continued anxieties about separatism in its borderlands imperil the developmental horizons the BRI project uses to entice Kazakhs. It also threatens the translocal development that a border conductive to mobility has provided for Kazakhs over the past thirty years. I argue that the BRI in northwest China fuses soft power rhetoric with territorial security practices in a way that is proving to be counter-productive. This is because border hardening can reactivate borders as “difference condensers” that draw from imperial and national legacies to reinscribe the othering of spaces and peoples beyond the border.