Category Archives: China

A ‘Confucian Long Peace’ among East Asian States (1): Does Shared Culture Stop War?

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confucius 2

(For part 2 of this post, click here.)

This article is an excellent introduction to the tangle of East Asian security problems today. Chung-in Moon and Seung-won Suh lay out all the nasty problems of territory, nationalism, and historical imperialism that make EA a powderkeg. There is a running debate in IR theory about how peaceful EA actually is. A lot of it focuses on China. Aaron Friedberg and John Mearsheimer worry that China’s growing strength sets it on a collision course with other Asian states, and eventually the US. David Kang thinks that China’s claim to a ‘peaceful rise’ is real. He notes that for all the sound and fury in EA about nationalism or territorial disputes, there is no serious anti-Chinese coalition forming, nor has their been a major war out here since Vietnam and Cambodia in the 70s. This is a historically and theoretically rich debate; you should read about it if you can.

But I want to focus on remarks by Moon and Suh about how peaceful Asia’s IR was before the arrival of the West. The issue of today’s security dilemmas and tensions in Asia are hyperresearched. Everyone out here goes to one conference after another about Asian security. (I will attend 6 by year’s end, with 2 more scheduled already for next year.) But the counterpoint between Asia and Europe’s earlier history is far more fascinating, because no one ever talks about it. There is a vague argument that while European states were destroying themselves in early modern warfare, Asian states were getting along reasonably well under a Chinese umbrella of soft hegemony. Moon and Suh use the terms ‘long peace’ and ‘Confucian peace’ to describe EA IR until the late 19th C. This is woefully underresearched; there is a great dissertation here.

The “Long Peace” is an uncontroversial idea in IR theory. It says that it is pretty remarkable that there has been no global general war or systemic conflict since WWII. That was the last time all the big global powers lined up on one side or the other and destroyed one another. We are now in the 64th year of the Long Peace. And that does seem like quite an achievement… from a Eurocentric view of the world system. Kang has written a lot to convince me that actually Asian IR was a lot more peaceful than European IR before the Europeans arrived in force in the late 19th C and brought the strict state sovereignty system with them. Kang, Moon, and Suh all suggest that East Asia was a characterized by a much longer (as in centuries) “Confucian Peace.”

The deep cultural and historical details of the confucian peace really need to be researched a  lot more. But here is what I pull from Moon, Suh, and Kang. The ‘confucian’ peace suggests that nations/states in the confucian zone (that means China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam) shared a lot of values and cultural similarity. This sharing acted to slow the march to war; that is shared Confucianism has a war-dampening effect. The specific causal mechanisms are Confucianism’s emphasis on 1. respect for the older and more educated, 2. social harmony, and 3. social hierarchy.  China, as the oldest, most culturally ‘advanced’ state in the region, enjoyed formal superiority to Korea, Japan and Vietnam, but allowed them substantial informal leeway. War violated harmony and order and showed disrespect to the older brother (China). Think of this as ‘feudalism that works’ (unlike in Europe where vassals routinely rebelled). So causal arrow goes from shared culture to the specific war-dampening cultural aspects of Confucianism to peace. Someone needs to write a good IR history of this idea and whether or not it was really true. I have 3 criticisms: Go To Part 2.

China Keeping North Korea Afloat…Again

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1262846776-north-korea-s-kim-woos-china-s-wen

I must be a dumb foreigner, because I just cannot understand Koreans’ continuing affinity for China over Japan or the US. I have repeatedly argued (here and here) that China is the single biggest obstacle to single most important aspiration in South Korean politics – unification. This week I feel justified. Once again the PRC threw NK a lifeline. Once again, China has violated the spirit of its publicly stated diplomatic commitment to Korean unification. Once again China set back Asian peace, prosperity, and stability by another 3 to 5 years. Now we must wait further for NK to collapse. *Sigh* How thoroughly unhelpful this visit was to just about everyone out here.

The new aid package will certainly help the regime stumble along for another few years. And it almost certainly includes unmentioned personal goodies for Kim Jong Il himself – whiskey, insulin, porn, cigars, home theater, and the rest. The Chinese should be downright embarrassed. Kim and his cronies are just gangsters now. Kim Il Sung probably believed in the socialist experiment, but the son clearly doesn’t care a wit for it or his people. This is larceny raised to an art form. Kim is just a governmental version of the Somali pirates.

So now more Chinese aid means we must go back to same merry-go-round of brinksmanship with North Korea. With this new dollop of aid and Kim’s improved health, it’s back to the six party talks for more haggling, more photo-ops that allow Kim to pretend he is a world leader, more goodies in exchange for vague promises, more wasted time and effort. As usual nothing will come of it; nothing has changed in NK. And we will all continue to wait, wait, and wait for NK to finally implode. We will all hope that this headline really is finally correct this time. When I first started blogging, I wrote that I was amazed how little NK matters in everyday life in SK; instead, South Koreans have just become used to it, bored by it, and frustrated by it. Now I understand. It took me about 15 months living here to get the same way.

The Chinese are just liars on this issue. All year, I have gone to conferences on Northeast Asian security where Chinese participants tell everybody all about how the want to help and be constructive. How they admire Korea’s economic miracle and want good relations. How they support unification. My foot. The photo above tells you the real story. The Chinese are using the North. They like that it boxes in the South, terrifies the Japanese, and distracts the US. The care not a wit for the Korean people.

If this analysis is right, then I just don’t understand why Koreans don’t more openly balance against China. Kang says this is evidence that Koreans implicitly accept a sinocentric/Confucian hierarchy. Maybe. Or maybe Koreans are just so scared of China’s size, that they shut up? Whatever the reason, my students and friends here are far more comfortable complaining about Japan’s past than China’s present, or that the US military should redeploy in Korea, pay for military environmental damage, and discipline its soldiers better. All this is true of course, but isn’t it overlooking the 800 pound gorilla in the room? China is subsidizing the DPRK! China carries a growing part of the blame that Seoul lies catastrophic nuclear jeopardy, NK populace is horrendously brutalized, and unification is unfulfilled. I just don’t get it…

China is Feeling Its New Strength – and It will Structure Korean Unification

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I have been to four conferences on East Asian (EA) security this year. All have had Chinese colleagues. This has been hugely helpful in my thinking on Asian security. In the US, I rarely met Chinese scholars. Studying Asia from a distance reduced it to a pool of cases to rummage through for evidence of this or that theory. Living here has given me a much greater sense of sharpness of the local disagreements, and especially of the punchy, rising strength of China.

David Kang has argued repeatedly that China’s rise is not spurring counter-balancing behavior in EA and that predictions that Europe’s past (nationalism, sharp territorial disputes, war) will be Asia’s future are overblown. I am certainly not the Asia expert he is, and in the US, I agreed with him. But after living here 15 months and going to these conferences and teaching Chinese (and Korean) students on these issues, I am really starting to think he is wrong.

Instead, I think this op-ed by Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times really nails it. (Rachman is excellent. You should read him regularly.) I think he really catches how much more assertive the Chinese are becoming, including toward the US (which we deserve, of course, because we can’t get our house in order). I certainly see the ‘rising China’ vibe here when I listen to the Chinese scholars at the conferences. At the last one, three Chinese participants all stressed how the US was becoming dependent on China and that China was becoming “rich and strong.” I should say that the scholars I meet are usually polite and pleasant in personal conversation over a beer or dinner, but in the presentations, they talk with new found, newly enjoyable strength given US troubles and China’s continuing growth through even this Great Recession. In August I attended a panel entitled ‘China is Back!: East Asia after the Beijing Olympics.’ That sums up the vibe quite well.

After hearing this now for a year, I worked it into an argument about Korean foreign policy in Seoul two weeks ago (see my last 3 blog posts). The Chinese think they are on the up-and-up. They see the US in decline. And they are ready to push harder now for “our legitimate national security interests in Asia.” In the Korean case, I think this means the Chinese are going to become heavily involved in the structuring any final settlement on the Korean peninsula. When NK does finally explode/implode/collapse/whatever, it seems increasingly unlikely to me that SK alone will set the terms of unification. China is growing, and it seems natural that they do not want a democratic, nationalist, unified, American-allied Korea on their border. China already has Russia to the north, India to the south, Japan and the US to the east. It is reasonable therefore to expect them to prop up NK as long as possible (which is what they are doing), and when the inevitable unification does come, they will clearly push to formulate its terms to their liking as much as possible.

Instructive here is the German re-unification case. The USSR was falling apart, and the US was at a peak of postwar relative power. West Germany was a great power with a larger economy than the Soviet Union’s. This balance of forces clearly favored German unification on West German and US terms. In the end, unified Germany was kept in NATO. The USSR had wanted its neutralization, but it was too weak to get it, and West Germany basically bought Soviet compliance.

Little of this applies in Korea. China is rising, and the US is in real trouble. The USSR was dependent on western credit and oil sales; today, the US is dependent on Chinese credit (purchases of US debt). And South Korea does not have nearly the strength that West Germany has. So if China pushes for unified Korean neutralization, as the USSR pushed for it in Germany, the Chinese are lot more likely than the Soviets to get their way. I argued this publicly two weeks ago, and it was controversial enough that it landed in Korea’s foremost newspaper. But honestly, I am surprised. Doesn’t it seem obvious that big, rising, neighboring China would try to structure Korean unification to fit its preferences?

Anyway, Rachman is right. The Chinese are getting stronger, and they are starting to talk that way to the rest of us. They are feeling their oats and starting to throw their weight around. Of course, that will hardly stop the US suicide course of borrowing $20 billion a month from them. *Sigh* We’ve been warned.

“Forging Autonomy in a Tough Neighborhood: Korea’s Foreign Policy Struggle” (3)

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This is the conclusion of my last two posts. It is the oral synopsis of a conference paper on Korea’s strategies to escape its harsh geopolitical neighborhood.

“Finally, what is the likely future course of Korean foreign policy? For the South, the answer is easy. Barring unification, the Southern Republic will almost certainly retain the US alliance as the ultimate guarantor of its autonomy. Going your own way is hugely risky, as NK will find out if the 5 other parties of the 6 party talks can ever coordinate a common front against it. Striking out independently from the US risks Chinese subordination. President Roh’s brief flirtation with China (2004-2007) was more to flatter South Korean ego that the country was a ‘player’ or ‘mediator’ between the US and China. The Chinese blithely rebuffed this, and their Dongbei Manchurian history project and treatment of NK refugees quickly drove the South back to the US under the current conservative President Lee.

The North is clearly much more exposed. Going it alone is extraordinarily difficult for small states, and NK’s economic contraction makes this even harder. Clearly the nuclear program is an extreme measure to preserve autonomy from Chinese encroachment particularly. Unlike the SK’s US alliance, if the NK bandwagons openly and clearly with China, it will be absorbed or dominated. The Chinese have neither the geographic distance nor the democratic scruples to preserve NK autonomy.

A unified Korea would change these calculations. I see two possibilities. One, a unified ROK could aspire to stand on its own, particularly if Russia and Japan continue their relative decline. Massive demobilization would follow unification – the NK People’s Army alone has one million soldiers. That newly freed manpower could fuel a production and baby boom that could put a unified ROK within striking distance of still struggling Russia and Japan.

But that still leaves China, rising China. So possibility two is the increasing likelihood that the Chinese price for unification will be the finlandization of united Korea – strict neutralism. Given the US’ relative decline vis-à-vis China, it is unlikely the US will be able to counterbalance this pressure. When Germany unified, West Germany was stronger than South Korea, and East Germany was not as bad off as North Korea. The US was stronger then than now, and the USSR was much weaker than China is now. So the balance of forces today favors a more sinified outcome, and the likely Chinese price for unification is the termination of the US alliance and the withdrawal of the USFK.”

This conference got some press coverage, as have the others I participated in here. That is quite a change from the US, where no really seems to care much about academic conferences.

My argument that the Chinese will likely force Korea to choose between unity and the US alliance went down badly. People didn’t seem to like that, but the Chinese are certainly taking a a tougher line on Korea. I have been to four of these sorts of conferences with Chinese colleagues this year, and the vibe is increasingly: ‘the Olympics went well; the US is a mess; we’re on the up and up; you will need to start to account for us.’ In fact, one of the Chinese scholars at this conference bluntly said in the discussion, “We are big and rich now. Why should we listen to the US?” By extension, that would include Japan and Korea.

NORTH-EAST ASIAN NATIONAL POWER STATISTICS 

Country Population(Millions) Birth Rate Land Mass(km2) Gross Domestic Product (GDP in billions of US Dollars) GDP(Purchasing Power Parity in billions of USD) Economic Growth Rate Budget(in billions of USD) Military Spending (% of GDP & absolute value in billions of USD) Military Manpower(millions) Army Manpower(millions)
China 1,350 +0.7% 9,569,901 $4,300 $8,000 9% $900 4-4.5%      $200 3 2.2
Japan 127 -0.2% 364,485 $4,900 $4,400 0% $1800 1%              $50 0.250 0.148
Russia 140 -0.5% 16,377,742 $1,800 $2,300 6% $275 4%              $80 1 0.4
ROK 48.6 +0.3 96,920 $900 $1300 2.5% $222 2.7%          $24 0.65 0.5
DPRK 22.6 +0.4 120,408 $26 $40 -2.3% $3 N/A 1.2 1

“Forging Autonomy in a Tough Neighborhood: Korea’s Foreign Policy Struggle” (2)

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This is the continuation of my last post. It is the oral synopsis of a conference paper on Korea’s strategies to escape is harsh geopolitical neighborhood.

“If this seems gloomy, it is instructive to note how many other states have wrestled with this dilemma and fared far worse than Korea. As Kenneth Waltz tells us, states are ‘self-regarding units.’ They want domestic and foreign policy autonomy – for whatever purpose: cultural promotion, economic growth, individual liberty, ideological reconstruction, etc. But it is easy to get bullied. A few examples are helpful here. In the late 18th C Poland was partitioned three times – in 1772, 1793, and 1795 – by Russia, Austria, and Prussia. After the 1795 partition, it ceased to exist until 1918. But it was partitioned yet again in 1939 between the Nazis and the Soviets.

Paraguay and Mongolia suffered similar, if less well known, fates. From 1864 to 1870, Paraguay fought its much larger neighbors Brazil and Argentina, as well as Uruguay, in the War of the Triple Alliance. Inevitably the Paraguayans lost and were stripped of 25% of their landmass. After centuries of being kicked back and forth between czarist Russia and imperial China, Mongolia finally threw in its lot with the Soviet Union in the 1920s. It was a less an ally than a protectorate and became a forward staging base for the Red Army during the Sino-Soviet split. Like East Germany, Mongolia might easily have been the center of superpower war with little actual control over its fate and that of its citizens. This did not happen to Korea.

This prompts the question why, or rather why not? Why hasn’t either Korea been absorbed or otherwise bullied into submission since WWII? It happened frequently in Korea’s history before 1945. It has not happened since, and today with rising China on its doorstep, it does not appear to be happening again.

I propose two hypotheses to answer this question. One for each Korea. NK has learned to successfully play its opponents off of each other. NK is the weaker of the two Koreas, and it is the most likely to be subverted – by the USSR in the past, and by China since the early 90s. But it has hung on tenaciously. SK by contrast has recruited an external patron – the United States. The Republic of Korea has leveraged US power to push back on local encroachments quite successfully.

In some ways, the North’s ability to prevent domination is more remarkable than the South’s because the North is so much weaker. Its GDP per capita is low $1700 per annum. Yet NK has never been a proper satellite of either the Soviet Union or China. During the Cold War, Kim Il Sung regularly played the two communist behemoths off against each other for gains. Most spectacularly of course, Kim maneuvered both Stalin and Mao into support for his unification war. Material from the Cold War International History Project shows how wary both Stalin and Mao were. Both feared a major American response, including the use of nuclear weapons. Stalin worried about a distraction when the heart of the conflict was in Europe, and Mao feared that his long-sought, newborn revolution would unravel. So unprepared was the People’s Republic that its some of its ‘volunteers’ were sent into Korea without rifles. They were commanded to pick them up from fallen comrades.

Since the Soviet implosion, Northeast Asian geopolitics would suggest that China overlord NK. It is the last serious ‘friend’ of the regime. Without Chinese trade and aid, NK poverty would be so much worse. If the PRC wanted, the People’s Liberation Army could easily eliminate the Kim Jong Il regime. But this has not happened. And China’s much-touted ‘leverage’ over NK has not prevented its various missile and nuclear weapons tests, nor resulted in meaningful sanctions on food, fuel, and luxury items.

The moral of the story is that the Kims have done a masterful job keeping the other five members of the 6 party talks divided and unsure. The Kims have constantly juggled and separated their opponents, and NK has lived in the geopolitical ‘spaces’ created by all this confusion.

The Southern strategy differs. Rather than zig-zag on its own, the South chose to bandwagon with an external party. SK has acquiesced to an asymmetric patron-client relationship with the United States. But the benefits to the South have clearly outweighed the benefits to the Americans. Indeed, the US is an ideal ally for the South, because it is strong enough to project power to NE Asia and so resist local encroachment on Southern sovereignty. But the US is also too far away to really control Southern internal affairs. To which must be add a deep cultural gap which raises the costs of any US domination of Korea, and US liberal-democratic values, skeptical of imperialist expansionism. In short, the US is big enough to help SK, but geographically and culturally distant enough, and democratic enough, not to dominate it.

So Republic of Korea (ROK) received extensive assistance throughout the 50s, although US officials were unable to dissuade President Rhee from either his import-substitution industrialization plans or his constitutional shenanigans. Under General Park, the US had no role in emerging Korean miracle – the US would hardly have supported the oligopolistic cartelization of the Korean economy that created the chaebol. Nor was the US able to redirect Park’s constitutional misbehavior. In the 1980s, the US leaned on President Chun, but again, it hardly structured the emerging democratic politics of the Republic. It is highly unlikely, for example, that the US would have ‘approved’ the semi-presidential system Korea choose. Even the Kwangju suppression – frequently touted as proof of US domination by scholars like Bruce Cumings – occurred mostly by Korean special forces under local control. And certainly since the 1990s, no one would meaningfully suggest that the US Forces in Korea (USFK) dominate or secretly control the South Korean state. Finally, never in the alliance history did the US pursue anything remotely similar to the cultural genocide committed by Soviets in the Baltics, China in Tibet, or Japan in Korea. If Korea is Americanized, that process is driven by Korean consumer demand and interest in things like rock-and-roll or Hollywood films, not by enforced US cultural imperialism.

These two hypotheses from the Korean case suggest explanations for how a middle power with tough geopolitics can retain its autonomy. Other examples such as Benelux, Switzerland, or Canada would be usefully investigated as comparative cases.”

“Forging Autonomy in a Tough Neighborhood: Korea’s Foreign Policy Struggle” (1)

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Part two is here; part three is here.

Last Friday I spoke at the Korean Association for International Studies’ conference on “Sino-US Relations and the Korean Peninsula.” I spoke on a panel entitled “The Future of Sino-US Relations and Korea’s Security Strategy.” I was requested to write about Korean foreign policy and the Sino-US relationship. This was a challenging mission, as I am not a Korean. It required a mental displacement, and one of my arguments – that a united Korea will probably ‘finlandize’ – created a stir. My paper’s title is the name of this post. Below is the first part of my short oral presentation. Here is part 2 and part 3; if you want the whole thing, email me at rekelly@pusan.ac.kr.)

“As I sat to write a paper about Korea’s foreign policy toward with the United States and China, it struck me that the central trouble Korea faces in dealing with these two very large states is the asymmetry of national power. And indeed, this asymmetry applies to Korea’s whole neighborhood. Korea, as I argue in the paper, has possibly the worst political geography on the planet. It is surrounded by three much larger powers – three great powers no less – with little chance to catch-up to those powers, economically or militarily. As such, much of Korean foreign policy must focus on retaining freedom of movement against the encroachment of larger, nearby powers, or as I entitled my paper, Korea must carve autonomy out of a very tough neighborhood.

This will be a struggle, and it is a struggle Korea frequently lost in the past. Today, the greatest threat to Korean autonomy is China, and its greatest guarantor is the United States. With Japan and Russia both stagnating at the moment, China and the US will dominate Korean foreign policy choices for the foreseeable future.

So I want to begin my paper with 2 basic IR theory insights. First the Republic of Korea is a middle power. Second, small and middle powers are frequently pulled into the orbit of larger powers.

First, Korea as a middle power. I provide some basic statistics in the paper on Korea’s neighborhood that bear repeating. These numbers are all drawn from the CIA World Factbook, which is updated every 2 weeks. SK’s population is 49.6 M. By contrast, Japan’s population is 127 M, Russia’s is 140M, and China’s is a staggering 1.3 B. That means Japan is 2.5 times Korea’s size; Russia almost 3, and China 26 times Korea’s population. If we include the 23 M N Koreans, Japan and Russia are still twice Korea’s size, and China is still 18 times bigger. Economically, Korea’s GDP (not PPP-adjusted) is $900B; Russia’s is $1.8T, China’s is $4.3T,and Japan’s is $4.9T. So Russia is twice Korea’s size; China is almost 5 times, and Japan almost 6. NK’s GDP is a crushing $26B, so its addition would not change these proportions much.

This is not to denigrate the miracle on the Han. Korea’s GDP per capita exceeds both China’s and Russia’s, and the rapidity with which Korea raced from African levels of poverty in the 40s to the OECD in the 90s is remarkable. Nevertheless, my point is that Korea is comparatively small, and downright tiny compared to China. As Kim Il Sung said, Korea is a shrimp among whales, and this is the central challenge to Korean foreign policy.

My second IR insight – that small powers often gravitate toward bigger ones – is aggravated in the Korean case, because that gravitation is even more likely to happen if, 1. those larger powers are great powers, and 2. if those larger powers are direct neighbors. Both of these conditions apply to Korea, and perhaps uniquely, Korea abuts 3 great powers. Not even Mongolia or Poland faces such harsh geography. Imperial Germany used to refer to the ‘ring of steel’ around it before WWI. Korea is in similar but worse position. Germany, a great power itself, could contemplate a breakout, and one may read WWI and WWII as German attempts to crack its encirclement. Korea has no such opportunities. It is simply too weak to pursue military resistance.

The great threat then to Korea is its domination by its much larger neighbors. Frequently large states intimidate, encroach, or otherwise bully smaller neighbors. Indeed, they may even absorb them outright. Korea’s own history gives us many examples of this dynamic. In the Choson dynasty period, Korea was a reliable vassal in the Sinocentric order. In the late 19th C, as Chinese power receded, Korea fell increasingly under the sway of Russia and especially Japan. In 1910, it was absorbed completely, and the Japanese pursued thoroughgoing japanification, including the elimination of the intelligentsia, restrictions on language and culture, and even encouraged the taking of Japanese names. Although Japanese power was smashed by 1945, it was locally replaced by the expansion of Soviet, Cold War power. And unfortunately for Korea, Japan rebounded quickly too. By the 80s of course, China’s rise had begun, so even as the USSR imploded, Korea’s entrapment continued. Throughout its history, its 3 larger neighbors have risen and fallen, but never fallen simultaneously. Korea seems doomed to a rotating list of hegemonic local threats. Today, although Japan and Russia are struggling, Korea faces the looming threat of China.”

Does State Hostage-Taking Work ?

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An interesting quirk of authoritarian states’ foreign policies is a tendency to take western hostages when they wander onto their territory. Iran, China, and North Korea do this quite regularly. Burma too has gotten into the act lately.

Iran has repeatedly detained Iranian-Americans and journalists on all kinds of ridiculous charges like threatening the honor of Islam. Right now, it is holding three US hikers, who incredibly were hiking in Kurdistan and accidentally wandered into Iran. Call their destination choice a brain failure – a chronic disease among Americans traveling.

NK this year alone held two Americans for 3 months and a South Korean for 6. In the 1990s, after Tiananmen, China used to imprison Chinese-American human rights campaigners.

The first, most obvious question, is how these people wind up in these places. Usually, it is out of stupidity. It looks increasingly like Laura Ling and Euna Lee did in fact land, if only for a moment, on the NK side of the Yalu. And the American who swam to see Aung San Suu Kyi probably deserved some jail time or a fine. And the same goes for those hikers now held in Iran. Who goes back-packing for leisure along the Iran-Iraq border?! One can only imagine Bill Clinton or Jim Webb shaking their heads in disbelief when they are called upon to get these people out.

But there is a larger IR question here too. These accidental penetrations are usually mishaps or stupidity. So when they are convicted as ‘spies,’ it is almost always farcical, and the West knows it. This begs the question then, why do it? The process has become ritualized: arrest, followed by CNN & world news overexposure, then lots of backroom haggling, finally a trip by some dignitary to ‘win’ the release, concluding with a weird photo-op in-country, and then another overexposed media frenzy on the ‘prisoners’ return. (I heard Lara Ling is already looking for a book deal.) Here are a few thoughts why authoritarian states draw out this song-and-dance as much as possible:

1. The more closed your state is the more paranoid you become about any foreign intrusion, no matter how ridiculous, minor, or foolish. This is why the USSR was able to casually destroy KAL 007 in 1983, and Iran accused the BBC of sparking the recent post-election riots.

2. In the world of globalization and the Great Recession, no one really cares much for the bad behavior of NK or Burma. They are international headaches most of us like to forget about. So these sorts of incidents, with all their ritual, hysterical family outbursts, and Larry King interviews, are a great way for small, irrelevant states to garner rare global attention. Use whatever you’ve got to whip up a storm of attention. When China used to do this in the 1980s, China hands called it ‘gong-banging.’

3. Authoritarian states can simultaneously use these accidental intrusions for domestic prestige-taking. North Korea and other rabidly antiwestern regimes can periodically demonstrate to their own people the importance of the struggle against the US. This stuff helps justify the deprivation and international isolation.

4. Your can always garner a few nice concessions by trading these people back. If you are dirt-poor North Korea, you can trade SK or other hostages for all sorts of goodies – whiskey, dollars, cigarettes. If you are Iran, ask for spare parts for you collapsing industrial plant.

Tiananmen +20: Tank Man will be a National Hero One day

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The Tiananmen Square Massacre was 20 years ago this week. It hardly needs repeating but this is one of the great moments in the long battle for human freedom against tyranny. One can only hope that the Tank Man below wasn’t (as probably happened) tortured or beaten to death.

Tank Man

What can we learn from the survival of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) ?

1. I think just about everyone is surprised the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and PRC are still around. Given how rapidly other communist tyrannies were collapsing, just about everybody thought China should be next to go. Why it didn’t happen:

a. Learning: The CCP watched the USSR and decided not risk the same opening. This is theoretically important, because it suggests how directed human action can up-end foggy notions of the ‘zeitgeist.’ Everybody thought the times were against the CCP,  it was ripe to fall, the historical pressures were enormous, the democratic dominoes were falling. And that was all correct. But the party still held out anyway. This is a salutary warning against seeing history as Hegelian History, with large tectonic philosophical shifts pushing states and leaders this way or that. The contrast here is striking. The CCP set its face against the wind, held tough, and now is considered a model for a new, globalization-savvy autocracy.

b. Culture: For all the sound and fury of communism since Mao, the real ‘ideology’ of the Chinese masses is traditional confucian agrarian conservatism. And it is not democratic. It deeply stresses social harmony and one-ness (recall the 2008 Olympics), unlike democracy and pluralism, which admit and try to manage conflict. It is the subculture of Asian, social harmony-demanding confucianism that is the real block on democratization out here. It is arguably the single biggest problem for democracy in Korea. In the North, the Kim monarchy regularly manipulates deeply rooted Korean symbols, where the Southern democracy has struggled with a foreign philosophical implant lacking local historical and cultural resonance. This argument holds for most of the confucian Asian space, including China. In 1989, the CCP monopolized political discourse, positioning itself as a defender, not of the shallow communist artifice just a few decades old, but long traditionalist confucian Chinese culture. By contrast, the students were promoting alien foreign concepts in a country where xenophobia has been a regime ideology for centuries.

A great irony of communist systems is how traditionalist-nationalist rather than communist they actually are. Without the communist ideology, most of them might have been considered semi-fascist, like the clerical fascism of Latin America. NK is arguably as much a fascist as stalinist state, with its hereditary kingship, focus on blood and soil (Korean uniqueness and unification), its plumbing of Korean history (rather than Marxist ideology) to justify the party’s rule. In China, communism is highly xenophobic, with foreign powers playing a critical, regime-justifying role (Japan, the US, the USSR). And nationalism has exploded since the ‘patriotic education campaign’ began in 1991. In the USSR, when Stalin was in real trouble in WWII, he mobilized Russian nationalism for the ‘Great Patriotic War.’ In Vietnam, the communists were as nationalist as they were socialist. In other words, communist ideology frequently overlays the real values rooted in the society – generally traditionalist and nationalist. These values at the bottom cannot be rooted out quickly, and indeed frequently popular nationalism replaced elitist abstract communism as the real ideology of communist regimes.

This is important in China, because the Confucian peasant subculture was as much a block on the turn toward democracy as the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Eastern Europeans knew what democracy and the West was. They had had some exposure in the centuries before 1989, and they knew they wanted to rejoin European modernity. They wanted Starbucks and McDonald’s as much as democracy. In China, that was not the case. The student elites certainly wanted democracy and liberalization, but there was little popular sympathy and interest across the wide agrarian peasantry. Who knew want democracy or liberalism meant in the thousands of villages which most Chinese peasants have never left? This is why the CCP brought in rural PLA units to crush the protestors.

In the short, most of the Chinese population had and are living a traditional Confucian peasant lifestyle, the rhythms of which only change slowly. The CCP might try wild, extreme social experimentation on this hapless population, but unless such pressure is directed for long, long years, it was bound to fail. For all the awfulness of the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution, the basic cultural tropes – confucian, agrarian, traditional – changed little. Such radical shifts in attitudes take far longer, no matter how murderous the Marxist regime; Cambodia survived even the Khmer Rouge. This was and is the subculture, the real culture, below the artifices of ideology. And this subculture provided no democratic resources to the students – no myths, no past experiments, no heroes, etc. Instead, the popular culture favored/had accepted for centuries a confucian, traditionalist-nationalist blend of closed rule. And that is pretty much what the CCP is today.

2. The late 80s was a heady time of ‘democracy domino effect.’ This is ironic, insofar as the domino effect of the Cold War was to be a communist one. The idea of a democratic domino effect has not been researched much, although democratic expansion around the globe does seem to come in waves.

3. The endurance and success of the CCP continues to fire the argument that democracy and development are trade-offs. So long as Indian growth lags behind China’s, the ‘late developer’ argument that developing states cannot afford democracy will live on: democracy, with all its transaction costs, logrolling, side payments, distracting social and partisan conflicts, etc., is too expensive when growth is the real priority. Basically this is Berthold Brecht’s argument that bread is more important than freedom. I used to reject the idea that democracy is an opportunity cost of development, because it feels so illiberal. But of course, if it accurately reflects development patterns, i.e., if it is empirically accurate, then my moral discomfort is irrelevant. My suspicion is growing that the CCP and others like Lee Kwan Yoo or Park Chun-hee who make the same argument are (sadly) correct.

I am quite surprised (and disappointed) at how stable China seems to be. Like most Liberals, I like to hope that all good things go together. So for years after Tiananmen, I agreed with all those liberal progressive prognosticators (T Friedman, B Clinton, the Economist), that eventually China would open up, that all this market exposure would spur liberalization and then democracy. That just does not seem to be the case, at least in the medium term. How sad…

4. Prediction: For all the pessimism of this post, I will guess that China will still encounter a democratic transition in the long-term (before 2050). I still think democracies’ have major economic advantages over autocracies (more transparency, better rule of law, free journalism that will point out failure, less corruption). If the implicit deal between the CCP and the Chinese is high growth in exchange for political quiescence, then if growth slows, the CCP is in trouble. And autocracy’s economic inefficiencies do place a ceiling on growth. Like Indonesia and SK, I still suspect the Chinese economy will hit a plateau beyond which it cannot rise without political reform. And I do metaphysically agree with George W Bush that people want to be free, make their own choices, and have a say in their government. One day, the Tank Man will be a national hero.

“Obama’s Foreign Policy and Its Influence on East Asia”

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The following is my response to a paper by this title at the Northeast Asian security and cooperation conference discussed in my previous post.

“Before my theoretical comments, let me say as a citizen that I am both alarmed and embarrassed by the content of the paper. Alarmed because if the author is correct, then the US and China will be at war soon. Embarrassed, because if this is how Chinese or Asians or non-Americans generally see the US, than the Bush administration was even more disastrous than I thought. I am ashamed that serious people would believe the US seeks “world domination,” wants to invade NK, or unleash a militarized Japan on an unsuspecting East Asia. I certainly don’t want that, nor do I believe that most Americans see their foreign policy this way. Chicago Council on Global Affairs’ public opinion surveys of US popular foreign policy attitudes hardly substantiate these claims either. Chalk this up as more fallout from the disastrous Bush administration.

My comments will focus on IR theory, but the paper’s real focus is normative public policy, not political science.

1. This paper presents the US in a mix of offensive realism and power transition theory. The US is expansionist and a declining, angry hegemon using a neo-imperial grand strategy in Asia to prop up declining prestige and influence. Specifically, the United States is pursuing “world domination,” and the language used is pretty strong. The US is “arrogant,” “selfish,” engaged in a “conspiracy,” “infiltrating East Asia," and “besieging China.” The US is not just a unipole but a revisionist hegemon deploying tools of overt dominance. The US is remilitarizing Japan and purposefully preventing a Korean settlement as an “excuse” to stay in the region.

I doubt most Americans would accept this image or support such an aggressive line. I also challenge anyone to find policy statements (not just policy papers from think-tanks or something), leaks, or State Department foreign relations papers that support this. Also, someone needs to write a dissertation on the idea of a revisionist hegemon; this is new in IR theory, but a good insight based on Bush administration behavior.

2. The author misuses the notion of the security dilemma by asserting that the US is primarily responsible for tension in East Asia. A security dilemma is a common problem in regions and does not require outside intervention to ignite. The SD explains the unhappy logic of states arming and counter-arming, all while claiming this only for defense. The regional security literature shows how much this process accelerates among proximate states, and lateral pressure explains why it can lead to genuinely explosive arms races. A far simpler, less conspiratorial approach would see that North East Asia is a tightly packed geographic region and consequently has a built-in likelihood of a tough SD. Local grievances over history, territory, and ideology all worsen it, as does the lateral pressure of so much regional growth occurring so rapidly. In short, closely proximate, wealthy, and growing states with lots of disagreements will certainly have a nasty SD.

History suggests this too. Long before US power seriously arrived in East Asia in the 1940s, East Asian societies were warring with one another. Indeed, most Korean, Japanese, and American IR tags the US as a stabilizer or offshore balancer over the horizon, not an instigator. And it seems far more likely that a US abandonment of Korea and Japan would spur much more serious arms racing spirals. Without US extended deterrence, it is likely Japan and SK would feel strong pressure even to go nuclear. Finally the USFK and USFJ are here with popular assent. If these states voted the US military out, the US would leave. It left France in the 60s and the Philippines in the 80s. Like NATO, American ‘empire’ in East Asia is one of invitation, not imposition.  The problems between East Asian states exist despite the US presence and would persist should it leave. The US has little impact on the historical conflict over Japanese imperialism and textbooks, the border disputes over Dokdo, Taiwan, or the South China Sea, or the ideological splits between communism and democracy.

3. The author seems to argue for a security community in East Asia, but ultimately suggests that a concert, dominated by the US and PRC, is necessary. The problem is the US presence. Yet the security community literature is quite skeptical about its possibility here. The grievances listed above are deep.  Without agreed norms and borders, it is hard to see NE Asia building a multilateral system. It took Europe centuries of war to agree on borders and that war is an illegitimate tool of diplomacy. Asia is simply not there yet. The level of trust and ‘we-ness’ necessary is lacking, and the US is not the cause of this, unless one argues that the US presence freezes grievances that could otherwise be worked out in a confrontation. Again, the disputes over memory, territory, and ideology are massive impediments hardly related to the US. The existing evidence on successful and failed security communities indentifies no major role for a US presence. In Western Europe and Latin America, successful security communities were established with and without a US presence. In NE Asia and South Asia, security communities have failed with and without a US presence.

4. Regarding US ‘neocontainment’ of China, the author slides to fantasy quite honestly.  The author asserts that the US is aligning with India to create a great power check on China; is aligning with Australia and SE Asia to contain China in the South China Sea; wants to either “invade NK” (!) or foment chaos there to suck in China and “drag China down;” and most fantastically, remilitarize Japan “to give it a free hand to create trouble in East Asia.” I do not know of evidence to support any of this. Certainly nothing in NSC National Security Strategies has ever spoken this way, and much of this can easily be explained away.

The US is engaging India, because, 1. Democracies naturally feel a comradery that the CW strangely damaged between India and the US. 2. The US is desperate to avoid a nuclear arms race in South Asia, as well as the possibility of proliferation. 3. The US desperately wants a reduction in Indo-Pakistani tension so that Pakistan can redeploy its best forces from its eastern border to the northwestern frontier to battle the Taliban-Pashtun insurgency. None of this has anything to do with China; indeed stability in Pakistan is clearly in China’s interest. No one wants a talibanized nuclear Pakistan.

The US is similarly engaged in SE Asia. It is all-driven by the GWoT. The US does not want Indonesia to slide toward radical Islam, and the US assistance program there has focused on police and counterinsurgency training, not naval strategy or large-scale warfighting. Nor is it even clear if the Indonesians want to be roped into a US-led neo-containment ring. In the Philippines, the US is doing the same. It wants to help Manila control its island fringe. I know of no US naval or large-scale assistance, nor of a return to the large bases of the past.

In NE Asia, it is just maoist fantasy that the US wants to invade NK. There is no evidence of that. Nor does the US want to bring China down. As Secretary Clinton herself said a few months ago, the US is grateful to the Chinese for buying its debt. I have seen nothing suggesting there is a US plot to reduce China. And remilitarizing Japan so it can bully East Asia? Where is the proof of such an outlandish claim? If anything, the US would like to see Japan normalize so that its history fights recede; this would lower the temperature in East Asia. As with Germany after WWII, the US would like Japan to be an integrated, well-behaved democracy tied to the West. A resurgent Japanese militarism would create huge headaches for the US and likely pull it into a war again if one occurred.

5. The author’s disappointing conclusion is that Obama will not change his obviously Bush-inspired vision of US foreign policy. Both are exponents of American exceptionalism and therefore will pursue adventurism. This is probably inaccurate.

a . This suggests to me a lack of understanding of elections in democracies. Obama has in fact changed US foreign policy. His charm offensive of the last few months has explicitly focused on undoing the Bush legacy of the US as revisionist hegemon. He is reaching out to Russia, Iran, and Venezuela. Bush would never have done this.

b. It underrates the importance of US pubic opinion and its powerful rejection of the Bush administration. Bush left office with the lowest approval rating since President Truman. US elections are usually focused on domestic politics, but Bush made such a foreign policy mess, that Obama was able to build an issue out of it. Further, only a huge rejection of Bushism made it possible for a Democrat as liberal as Obama to achieve the White House. The last 3 Democratic presidents were all moderate southerners. Obama is a genuine liberal, and there is no way he would have been viable without a major rejection of Bush’s legacy, which includes his belligerent foreign policy.

6. Finally, a few large comments on US foreign policy are required. It is true that the US has an exceptionalist vision of itself – the last best hope for mankind (Lincoln), the end of history (Fukuyama), God has a special mission for the United States (Bush 2). But it is important to see that this exceptionalism leads to isolationism, not imperialism. In US foreign policy mythology, Eurasia is the old world of nobility, land and class conflict, world-breaking fanaticisms, dynastic wars, etc. By contrast the US is the new world – where all men are equal, with no history of radicalism and ideology. The US is starting history anew. And so US foreign policy should avoid the corruption of the old world. The US should be a beacon as a “city on the hill” to the world. Hence President Washington counseled the US to avoid “entangling alliances.” John Quincy Adams said the US should “not go forth in search of monsters to destroy.” In short, yes, the US is arrogant about itself, but that arrogance leads to overseas avoidance out of contempt, not to imperialism based on a civilizing mission. I know foreigners loathe it when Americans celebrate themselves this way, but what’s important here is that American exceptionalism does NOT counsel “world domination,” but isolationism.

And in fact, US foreign policy followed this generally, and even after major wars, the first US inclination has been to leave, not stay and dominate, much less colonize. So the US joined WWI very late, fought a few battles in the spring of 1918, and then went home. If anything, the conventional wisdom today is that the US was not ‘imperialist’ enough in the interwar period. By not joining the League of Nations and world affairs more generally, the US made no contribution to slowing fascism in the 20s and 30s.

Again in WWII the US joined relatively late, only after it was forced in by Pearl Harbor. Even after Pearl Harbor, FDR did not believe he could get a war declaration against Germany. Hitler declared war first. When the war ended, the US population called ‘to bring the boys back home’ – a constant postwar rallying cry hardly consonant with imperialism. Indeed the US was pulling out of both Europe and Asia, until the Europeans invited US presence in NATO, and NK invaded SK, convincing the US it had to stay.

And after the Cold War, isolationism again returned. The Republican party retreated to tradition realpolitik on issues like Haiti and Bosnia. After Iraq 1, the US pulled out most of ‘the boys.’ NATO was questioned. US forces in Asia and Europe shrank. Only another surprise attack, 9/11, convinced the US to once more ramp up in Eurasia. And even this was short-lived. US public opinion support for Iraq 2 slid below 50% in 2004 and never returned. The US has been looking for a way to leave Iraq and Afghanistan ever since.

Maybe the US is an imperialist. Certainly Chalmers Johnson and Noam Chomsky think so, but there is a lot of counter-evidence that questions the “world domination” argument. This is not not considered in this paper.”

“Global Economic Crisis and Cooperation in East Asia: Search for Regional Cooperation, Leadership Formation and Common Identity”

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Part two is here.

The Institute of Chinese Studies at Pusan National University held this two-day conference with Chinese and Japanese scholars also invited. I was a discussant on a panel entitled “China’s Changing Role in NE Asia.” I provided feedback on a Chinese paper on Obama’s foreign policy. My remarks are my next post. It was a new opportunity for me to sit to meet with Chinese and Japanese scholars at a conference.

1. The Chinese were very policy-oriented, while the Japanese were more like American IR, and the Koreans split the difference (just like their geopolitics). I found it difficult to respond to my paper, because it was mostly a normative interpretation of US foreign policy, talking about what the US should or should not do. None of the Chinese papers used much IR theory; most of them cited news magazines, Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy in order to make policy points. By contrast, the Japanese work looked more like what I read in ISQ or IO. In a side discussion, a Japanese scholar said to me that this was quite common from Chinese scholars at conventions, and that it used to be more so. S/he felt uncomfortable, because these things frequently degenerated into foreign policy contests. This reminded me of my earlier observation that Korean IR is also slanted toward public policy, although not as much.

2. The Chinese attitudes towards Japan, Korea, and the US were fairly hostile (or paternalistic toward Korea) in the formal discussion, but in the private conversation it was all smiles and congeniality. For example, my paper was all about the  US pursuit of “world domination.” (*Sigh* Thank the Bush administration for that attitude.) Another paper argued that China is becoming the dominant power in Korea, and will and should markedly structure the outcome of unification. China’s “3 No’s” are: a unifying Korea could not create chaos in Manchuria, not be a bulwark of US containment of China, and not indulge Pan-Korean expansionism. China would only ‘permit’ a neutral unified Korea. Yikes! This reminded me of Russia’s recent claims to a sphere of influence in the near abroad. I asked a few Koreans about these remarks, and they generally agreed that they were pretty sinister. This sort of talk will clearly push Korea toward the US more as an over-the-horizon guarantor of its sovereignty against a rising China. Empirically, the argument struck me as a correct reading of China’s attitude toward Korea, but normatively, I would be pretty nervous if I was a Korean. Japan too came in for lots of fire about history, its nationalist right, hidden expansionist impulses, toadying to the US. The Japanese scholars seemed to take this pretty well, but it was awkward. In the end, I got the clear impression that the Chinese would like the US out of Asia and think that the Japanese are closest militarists.

3. The body language of the conference became noticeable over time. The Japanese and Korean scholars tended to speak in low tones and short bursts. The Chinese spoke quite loudly, tended to wave their fingers and point, went on quite longer than others. I don’t know if this is culturally-encoded or belligerence or what though.

4. The Chinese scholars also seemed to speak for the government or nation. They comfortably and frequently used the first person plural –’we China will do this or that’,’ or ‘we will permit/not permit this or that.’ I and the Japanese scholars spoke in the third person generally. This made me wonder if their work is in some way cleared or approved by a government agency.

The IR scholar in me, of course, immediately perceived a sociology of power in all this. The Chinese clearly spoke with a self-confidence and assertion about their government’s “interests” in Asia that the rest of us did not. You could easily feel the ‘China rising’ vibe in their presentations and comments. They weren’t openly belligerent, but I did feel a little ‘bullied.’

Further, their presentations were quite normative and policy-focused, so they subtly polarized the panels. Other participants felt cast into national roles as ‘defenders’ of ‘their’ governments; certainly I felt that way. It easily could have become a foreign policy showdown between nationals rather than an academic forum. I remember when my turn came to speak – after an openly maoist, anti-American policy paper (covered in my next post) – that I did feel this ‘patriotic’ urge creeping up on me to play the ‘American’ in the room and say posturing, RISK-boardgame stuff like, ‘my government can hardly be expected to tolerate this…,’ or defend the US allies in room – the Japanese and Korean scholars. It was tempting to play the macho superpower and throw that back at the Chinese by, e.g., saying that the US will defend Korea’s sovereign right to reunify as it sees fit without Chinese guidance/permission. This was a genuinely uncomfortable, bizarre, and new feeling. I think I restrained myself reasonably well – I certainly don’t think of myself as a nationalist – but some of the comments (like the US wants to invade NK) were so outlandish I felt compelled to dismiss them as “fantasy.”

All in all, it was a great experience. The papers were a mixed bag academically, but as examples of attitudes and cleavages in NE Asia, they were superb, and the sociology of the conference was a huge learning experience – better than the papers themselves.