I have just re-tooled my Chinese foreign policy syllabus for an undergraduate lecture course on the topic.
Like most academic tasks, revising this syllabus was much more time-consuming than I had anticipated. Moreover, there are never enough lectures to cover all the topics that need to be addressed. Nevertheless, this version seeks to cover both China’s foreign relations during the Cold War as well as its grand strategy since the end of the Cold War.
Check out the syllabus.
Adam Cathcart, a professor of history at Pacific Lutheran University in Washington, edits a terrific blog on China and North Korea, sinonk.com.
The site contains a great deal of Chinese and Korean language materials that are translated into English and analyzed.
One recent post stands out: a “dossier” of materials from the Chinese language press on how the leadership in Beijing responded to the death of Kim Jong Il. The .pdf file includes 23 documents, including several analytical pieces.
Check it out here: China-North Korea Dossier No. 1: “China and the North Korean Succession”
The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a body which Congress created in 2000, has started a new round of hearings.
Typically, each hearing examines a particular dimension of China’s international activity and any security implications for the United States.
The most recent hearing, held yesterday, explores China’s thirst for natural resources. In particular, the hearing focused on water, hydrocarbons and minerals, and fishing featured a number of prominent exports, including Elizabeth Economy from the Council on Foreign Relations, Mikkal Herberg from the National Bureau of Asian Research, and Lyle Goldstein from the Naval War College.
The written testimonies can be downloaded here.
Deborah Brautigam, author of the detailed and informative book The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa, has an equally terrific and informative blog.
Similarly entitled China in Africa: The Real Story, she covers China’s growing role in Africa — a great resource for those interested in these issues. As she writes, “This blog takes up where that book left off.”
Hat tip to Bill Bishop for letting me about this blog.
In this article in Contemporary Southeast Asia, I examine China’s behavior in the South China Sea disputes through the lens of its strategy for managing its claims. Since the mid-1990s, China has pursued a strategy of delaying the resolution of the dispute.
In the article, I make several arguments:
At the end of December, the Jiefangjun Bao, the official paper of the People’s Liberation, carried a brief article on page three of the print edition – with a small revelation about a key principle of China’s foreign policy. The article described a speech delivered by Gen. Ma Xiaotian, Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the PLA, to the China Institute for International Strategic Studies, a PLA-affiliated think tank in Beijing.
As reported, Ma’s remarks contained standard boilerplate for a year-end review: “China’s overall security environment was favorable,” but “will continue to undergo complicated and profound changes.” What came next, however, was unexpected. Ma used a revised version of the last eight characters of Deng Xiaoping’s famous “24 character” guideline for China’s foreign policy from the early 1990s: “keep a low profile and achieve something” (taoguang yanghui, yousuo zuowei). The reformulated version states that China should “uphold (jianchi) keeping a low profile and actively (jiji) achieve something.”
Ma’s use of Deng’s revised guideline in an official Chinese newspaper is important for several reasons.
First, it provides, in print, confirmation that Deng’s long-standing guidance has, in fact, been revised. President Hu Jintao made this revision to Deng’s guideline in the summer of 2009, but because it was the subject of significant debate, the revised text rarely appears in official media sources.
Second, despite media reports of the growing influence of the military in Chinese politics, Ma’s use of the revised foreign policy guideline reveals the consensus between party and military leaders on questions of basic policy principles, including foreign policy.
Third, it highlights the problem of using only English-language media from China. Although the use of the revised phrase is quite apparent in the Chinese version of the report, it’s translated in the English version as “keeping a low profile and making a difference” – suggesting that the guideline hadn’t been revised.
For an excellent scholarly study of Deng’s guideline, see “Lying Low No More? China’s New Thinking on the Tao Guang Yang Hui Strategy,” by Chen Dingdigng and Wang Jianwei from the University of Macao in the Fall 2011 issue of China: An International Journal.
[This was originally published in The Diplomat.]
Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic reports on a new study from the Journal of Medical Internet Research about the relationship between tweets of a journal article and scholarly citations.
The conclusion:
articles that many people tweeted about were 11 times more likely to be highly cited than those who few people tweeted about.
Apparently, the number of tweets an article receives within the first three days can predict its scholarly impact. This new measure of impact is the “twimpact factor.”
For more, see “Highly Tweeted Articles Were 11 Times More Likely to Be Highly Cited” – Alexis Madrigal – Technology – The Atlantic.
In this chapter, I explore the recent competition over maritime rights in the South China Sea. This competition over maritime rights is related to but distinct from other components of maritime security in the region, including competing claims to territorial sovereignty over island groups, freedom of navigation and naval modernization.
I argue that despite the recent escalation of tensions between 2009 and 2011, armed conflict in the South China Sea is far from inevitable:
The disputes over maritime rights and territorial sovereignty in the South China Sea pose distinct challenges that the United States must navigate:
The chapter is part of a volume on the South China Sea, Cooperation from Strength: The United States, China and the South China Sea, published by the Center for New American Security, a research organization in Washington, DC.
At the end of 2011, a study by the at Georgetown University on China’s nuclear forces attracted a great deal of attention, including a in The Washington Post. The project documented the construction of networks of tunnels by the Second Artillery, the PLA’s strategic rocket forces, and suggested that China might have as many as 3,000 nuclear warheads – a figure roughly ten times higher than the current estimates of the U.S. government and independent research organizations such as the .
Experts and analysts quickly challenged many of the study’s most provocative claims about and . Questions were also raised about that formed the basis of the study’s conclusions. A key source for the study’s claim about the number of warheads was . To track down the original source for this claim, Greg Kulacki from the Union of Concerned Scientists, traveled to several libraries, including one in Hong Kong. He learned that was an article by a junior American naval officer published in 1986 whose data was reprinted in a 1995 Chinese-language magazine published in Hong Kong, and subsequently recycled through online discussion forums for the next decade or so.
The Georgetown team trumpeted their use of open or unclassified Chinese-language sources of information as a new resource for the study of China’s military. As other scholars and I , a veritable explosion of open-source information from China about military affairs has occurred, much of it online. These sources include the PLA’s official publications such as newspapers, journals, and books, as well as unofficial sources, including popular magazines, online discussion forums, and unofficial websites.
Still, as Kulacki’s leg-work demonstrates, the proliferation of such open sources is a mixed blessing for scholars and analysts of the PLA. On the one hand, more information is now accessible, which should improve the quality of research. On the other hand, more information than any one individual can digest is now available – and mostly only in Chinese.
The volume of Chinese-language information now available places a premium on verifying the accuracy and authoritativeness of data from unofficial sources, especially blogs and online discussion forums. Otherwise, the Internet becomes a convenient tool, unwittingly or not, for “information laundering” defined as concealing or masking the origins of a piece of data.
The seriousness of information laundering is evident throughout the Georgetown study. Glancing through the slides of the presentation, one claim caught my eye: that the Second Artillery had 12 launch brigades facing India, including eight in the Tibetan Autonomous Region. This was curious for two reasons. First, the Second Artillery has only about thirty brigades, the majority of which are located in either China’s hinterland or coastal provinces, not near India. Second, there are no confirmed reports of Second Artillery brigades inside Tibet.
The sources for this claim in the Georgetown study demonstrates how easily information can be laundered online. The first source was a segment from a military news show from the Hong Kong-based Phoenix TV network. The second source was a post from a now defunct blog, (that only appeared to be online for the month of November 2010 according to this ). The blog post was redundant, as it only contained a crude machine translation of the transcript of the television segment.
The , however, was based not on information from China, but instead from India. The segment was entitled “The Indian media states that the PLA has deployed 12 missile brigades on the border aimed at India” (??????????12????????). The source for the segment was reportedly an essay in the Times of India by a former Chief of the Army Staff of the Indian Army. Yet a search of the Times of India’s website as well as the news database Lexis-Nexis couldn’t locate this essay. As a result, the claim in the Georgetown study about Chinese missile brigades in Tibet was thoroughly laundered. The original source for the claim can’t even be identified, much less verified.
Open-source information holds great promise for the study of China’s rapidly changing military. But they must be used with great care, especially if the data comes from unofficial outlets such as blog posts and online forums. Just because a piece of information about the PLA is available on the Internet in Chinese doesn’t endow it with authoritativeness in the absence of verification and corroboration.
UPDATE (10 January 2012): Through excellent sleuthing on the web, Time magazine’s Beijing correspondent has found what appears to be the Indian source of the Phoenix television segment. It comes from , who served as Chief of the Army Staff in the late 1990s. The op-ed, however, appeared in the Asian Age, not the Times of Indiaas Phoenix television reported. It provides no source for the claim that the Second Artillery has launch brigades in Tibet.
[This post originally appeared on as “”]
[This post was reprinted on as “”]
A chapter of mine (co-authored with Alexander Liebman) on the influence of China’s navy has just been published in an edited volume of papers from an annual conference on the People’s Liberation Army.