The yin-yang, or Taiji, symbol is one of the most well-known visual facets of Chinese philosophy. It plays a particularly central role in Taoist iconography. In addition, the motif is frequently found within traditional Chinese art, perhaps most prominently in the depiction of a pair of koi circling each other in a round body of water. Liselotte Odgaard's China and Coexistence makes appropriate use of this elegant image on its dust cover. Such imagery is all the more apt in the context of this review; it neatly captures the complementarity that exists between Odgaard's largely inductive analysis of China's place in the world and the deductive perspective on the same issue that is forwarded in Edward N. Luttwak's The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy.
While the proverbial wisdom that it is best not to judge a book by its cover normally holds true, it does not apply to China and Coexistence. Odgaard's choice of the iconic Chinese koi painting for her publication's exterior deeply resonates with the book's central contention that Chinese grand strategy encompasses a neat, if not always stable, pairing between the promotion of cooperation on the broader world stage and the protection of more immediate national interests closer to home. Such a contention goes a long way toward making sense of the apparent tensions between various strands of Chinese foreign policy and national security, presenting them less as contradictions and more as parts of a holistic approach to the solidification of China's place within the international system. While far from Pollyannaish about what such a stance portends for China's relations with its neighbors (and the United States), Odgaard generally envisions a period of relative stability within such dynamics in the coming years.
The book's main point of innovation, outlined in its opening pages, is to take seriously a concept, “peaceful coexistence,” that has long been featured in Chinese statements on foreign policy but generally denigrated by most outside analysts as being little more than empty rhetoric. Instead of following the dominant conventional wisdom in the extant literature that it is best to dismiss the term out of hand, Odgaard seeks to lend it analytical substance by identifying the key operational components of “coexistence” (“a strategy that promotes the establishment of a system for comanaging global security issues between great powers that subscribe to different programs of international order”; p. 2). In Chapters 2 and 3, she then contrasts such an approach to world politics with a series of other grand strategic visions extrapolated from the existing work on great powers and the historical experiences of such states.
The remainder of the book, its empirical core, measures subsequent Chinese behavior against such benchmarks. Chapter 4 outlines patterns within Beijing's cautious pursuit of policies that are designed to diminish the likelihood of conflict along China's contested territorial periphery, albeit without sacrificing its core national interests within such disputes. Chapter 5 moves farther afield through a consideration of the pragmatic stance that China has carved out on international order (specifically, multilateral intervention and sanctions toward Iran, Sudan, and Myanmar) via its position as a permanent member of the United Nation's Security Council. Chapter 6 returns to Asia and describes the thorny problems faced by Beijing in regard to legitimacy challenges emanating from Taiwan, Xinjiang, and Japan.
Each of these chapters contains fine-grained analyses of the issue arenas they cover. More impressively, in composite they do an excellent job of demonstrating the diverse sets of policies that Beijing has employed in its interactions with the rest of the international system since the end of the Cold War. However, the persuasiveness of such observations is limited by two broad shortcomings. First, the absence of Chinese language sources throughout the book is rather disappointing, especially as foreign policy elites within China have written extensively about the topic at hand. Second, and more importantly, Odgaard fails to fully explore the interactions between coexistence and nationalism that, she contends, stand at the core of China's relationship with the outside world.
She only partially overcomes such a defect in Chapter 6, where she notes that “[p]eaceful coexistence implies the right to be left alone to concentrate on the pursuit of national interests and to exercise political authority without outside interference” (p. 178), and again in the book's conclusion, which speculates upon the likelihood that such a line will endure as China becomes more powerful.
Luttwak's publication stands as an intellectual counterpoint to Odgaard's. The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Security is grounded by a singular set of propositions about the enduring and constraining structure of great power politics and the strategic logic it produces. In a word, within such dictates the prospects for a peaceful emergence of a new power on the world stage are remote. As a result of such enduring laws, Luttwak has a rather dim view of China's ability to navigate its own rise tranquilly. He is particularly pessimistic about the country's concurrent promotion of economic growth and military strengthening as it cannot help but elicit a strong backlash from other states. Such a development is unlikely to play out well for any of the involved parties. Moreover, the author chides, “If Chinese leaders ignore the warning signs and forge ahead, the paradoxical logic will ensure that instead of accumulating more power, they will remain with less as resistance mounts” (p. 6).
The rest of the book is intended to lend substance to this somber pronouncement. Its first half contains a series of brief excursions into the historical and theoretical roots of China's emerging predicament, while also sketching out what Luttwak views as its main features. More specifically, Chapters 2 through 12 make the case that China is particularly prone to falling into the trap, posed by the logic of strategy, into which so many other rising powers have sunk. The second part of the book then describes the manner in which various international actors have already started to react against China's meteoric rise. Chapters 13 through 19 cycle through Asia and report that indications of counterbalancing are proliferating across the continent. After a detour into Europe in Chapter 20 (which somewhat strangely hones in on Norway's recent contentious relationship with China), Chapter 21 finds evidence of strains within U.S.–China relations.
This book appears intended to provoke debate more than to forward a comprehensive argument about China's rise. As such, it is unrealistic to hold the work up to particularly rigorous methodological and empirical standards. Yet even when viewed more as a conversation starter than as a definitive statement, it is a flawed publication. First, as with Odgaard's, it contains no Chinese language sources, and, unlike her book, makes only scant use of interview data. Second, Luttwak makes little effort to place his observations within the context of the expanding literature by other students of great power politics, such as Aaron Friedberg and John Mearsheimer, and to argue how his contentions relate to their arguments about China. Third, the book is peppered with rather odd usage of concepts borrowed from developmental psychology and applied to great power relations (“great-state autism”; p. 13) and, more specifically, China (“acquired strategic deficiency syndrome”; p. 105), terms that are at best strained and at worst grossly stretched beyond their original meaning. Finally, and most importantly, the evidence that Luttwak makes use of throughout the book is highly stylized and selective, leaving the impression that he was simply seeking out events that confirmed his deeply held first principles.
In sum, both books are stimulating, but neither is entirely convincing, in no small part because both authors fail to attain the elegant balance found between the interlocking yin and yang forces of the Taiji symbol. In the field of Chinese foreign policy and national security studies, such an equilibrium stems from considering how the theoretical arguments that are derived from the broader international relations and security studies literature can facilitate more accurate descriptions and explanations of Chinese behavior, and from contemplating how such actions may require a modification of these general theories. Over the last two decades, this coupling approach has emerged as a state-of-the-art feature in the study of Chinese foreign relations. Despite its limited failings, Odgaard's book comes much closer to reaching such a standard than Luttwak's, and thus merits more attention. However, to be fair, both publications are quite thought provoking: Luttwak's for forwarding a rather succinct warning about dark clouds on China's horizon, and Odgaard's for revealing just how Beijing has been relatively successful, so far, at holding off the storm that it normally produces.
