Following the June 1989 Tiananmen Square violence, Deng Xiaoping famously enjoined his colleagues to adopt a low-profile foreign policy and, only on the basis of greater achievements, eventually “do something.” Protecting China's Interests Overseas chronicles and explains how and why China has become a nation increasingly “doing something” – protecting its growing interest frontiers abroad, often with more than diplomatic démarches.
Andrea Ghiselli has written an important book casting a bright light on two important, related questions: first, how and why has the People's Republic of China (PRC) evolved from being a nation primarily concerned with protecting its territorial integrity, preserving internal order, and asserting control over Taiwan, to become a nation increasingly motivated to safeguard expanding interest frontiers externally?; second, how and why has a nation that from the mid-1950s to today proclaimed “non-interference in the internal affairs of others” to be at the heart of its foreign policy, become a growing force in UN international peacekeeping operations, deployed armed military personnel in humanitarian and citizen-evacuation missions, dispatched naval forces on anti-piracy and anti-terrorism missions, inserted its own hot-pursuit commandos into neighbouring states (2011), and utilized both government and private security forces operating abroad to protect Chinese citizens and property?
The answer to these questions is more mundane and more complex than simply the narrative of an assertive Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, consolidating his authority by searching for foreign enemies for his dragon to slay. To condense Ghiselli's intricate argument, drivers of China's interest protection activities are: the tendency of military and security instruments to follow economic activity; the explosion in the number of Chinese nationals living and working abroad; unpredicted and episodic crises such as the need to suddenly evacuate about 36,000 imperilled nationals from civil war-torn Libya in March 2011; and, the interplay of domestic bureaucratic interests, not least the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of National Defense and associated agencies, the Ministry of Commerce, and myriad central coordinating bodies and local administrations. It is unsurprising, for instance, that the People's Liberation Army Navy thinks of wide-ranging global missions more often than the land army.
Some of China's interest protection activity has been encouraged by other powers, not least the United States, which (at least in the opening decade-plus of the new millennium) urged Beijing to play a more globally minded “responsible stakeholder” role, such as anti-piracy cooperation in the Gulf of Aden.
In many respects the PRC's evolution toward more forward-leaning interest protection policies was foreseeable, if not foreseen. During the long period of constructive engagement, Washington generally sought to harness China's growing power to reinforce the international order that the US had done so much to construct and promote throughout the post-Second World War era – the “rules-based international order.” Eight consecutive US administrations from Richard Nixon through to Barack Obama had progressively sought China's collaboration on global pandemics, climate change, international economic management, counter-terrorism and counter-narcotics operations, rolling back North Korea's nuclear weapons programmes, and much else. As events unfolded, China rapidly built its comprehensive national power and became more active, but all this did not produce a sufficient volume of converging and parallel interests to avert growing friction. This is the current era's central big power contradiction.
The expansion of China's interest frontiers notably accelerated in 2001–02 with Beijing's entry into the World Trade Organization and Jiang Zemin's “Go Global” strategy, the early 2000s’ effort to encourage Chinese enterprises to reach beyond PRC borders to develop new markets and growth opportunities. The outward thrust gained an added boost with the ascension to power of Xi Jinping and his 2013 launch of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Just as we have seen with so many Beijing efforts to mobilize the populace for various objectives, so with this outward thrust Chinese enterprises and individuals grabbed opportunities with alacrity, often exhibiting lack of discipline in the process. Considering the Middle East and North Africa, which is Ghiselli's principal geographic focus, literally hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers and thousands of firms established footholds abroad, often in unstable locations such as Sudan, Libya and Pakistan. The PRC's mounting energy needs, its ability to build infrastructure, and the need to diversify critical resource and commercial logistical corridors became important drivers of the thrust.
As this activity rapidly grew, however, new vulnerabilities were underappreciated by PRC risk analysts. The Chinese intelligence and area studies communities actually knew precious little about countries and cultures beyond their own periphery and a few other big powers. Consequently, Beijing repeatedly has been surprised by events, not least the Arab Spring. The precipitous 2011 implosion of the Gaddafi regime in Libya required the evacuation of 36,000 PRC nationals. I remember one Chinese military officer telling me of being ashamed that in at least one case China had been forced to charter foreign aircraft to extract its own citizens from a perilous situation – hence the push to acquire lift capacity, “bases” abroad to support such activities, and the intelligence resources to avoid such unwelcome surprises in the future. Beijing's interest protection activities have followed the renminbi and Chinese people abroad. I recall a Chinese foreign policy analyst half-jokingly lamenting that the preceding Western colonialists and international multinational corporations had already occupied the comparatively easy-to-manage locations around the world, leaving the PRC with more problematic options.
The other key contribution of Ghiselli's volume is a thorough discussion of the development of both legal and regulatory mechanisms to shape and execute China's external interest protection activities. The players in this process are: key civilian (Party) leadership; military, paramilitary and intelligence bureaucracies; other functional ministries; sometimes local territorial administrations; experts; enterprises; and public opinion. Indeed, Ghiselli likens the policy process to the Cohen, March and Olsen “garbage can model of organizational choice” and quotes Robert Jervis in the observation that other states often appear more organized and strategically coherent than they are. Nonetheless, when all is said and done, Ghiselli emphasizes that Beijing's first principle of crisis prevention and response is: whoever sends someone out of the country is responsible.
