A significant document on China-US relations was released by the John L. Thorton China Center at Brookings to coincide with the visit to the United States of China’s likely next leader Xi Jinping last month.  The document, “Addressing US-China Strategic Distrust” was authored by two well-known academics – on the US side Kenneth Lieberthal and on the Chinese side Wang Jisi. A key feature of this document was the wise decision to allow each to express the perspective from their respective countries – without any effort to revise or emend the views expressed by the other over the concerns each leadership has.  Only after this singular analysis do the two authors join together to write a follow-on analysis with joint recommendations.

Writing the American view, as pointed out above, is Kenneth Lieberthal a well known American China-hand, a former professor at the University of Michgan and a special assistant to the President – Clinton in this case – for National Security Affairs.  Today Lieberthal holds the Director’s chair at the John L Thorton China Center at Brookings.

Wang Jisi is a key academic and advisor to the Party in China.  These latter appointments are often ignored in the West.  He is currently the Dean of the School of International Studies at Peiking University as well as the Director of the Institute of International and Strategic Studies at the Party School of the Central Committee. He was previously the Head of the Institute of American Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and a key advisor to the Party.  Wang Jisi is central figure in the current US-China dialogue because he is able to cross the academic/party divide and his a voice is heard both in Zhongnanhai and in the West.  So he is an important transmitter of thinking to the US and Chinese political communities alike.

Both perspectives are more than interesting.  The two experts align on the key perspective – “strategic distrust”.  Both authors focus  on  the issue of mutual distrust of long-term intentions termed in this article as “strategic distrust”— and declare that strategic distrust has become a central concern in US-China relations.  As they define it:

“Strategic distrust” therefore means a perception that the other side will seek to achieve its key long term goals at concerted cost to your own side’s core prospects and interests.

And while both agree that they focus here is not on military capabilities and intentions the definition certainly resonates with the idea of the strategic dilemma – that the more secure one country purports to achieve, the more insecure others perceive their position.

Lieberthal’s US analysis is compelling including his opening line that for US leaders:

Strategic distrust of China is not the current dominant view of national decision makers in the U.S. government, who believe it is feasible and desirable to develop a basically constructive long-term relationship with a rising China. But U.S. decision makers also see China’s future as very undetermined …

While this perspective makes sense, this a classic US view that enables more conservative perspectives in Washington circles to urge a “hedging strategy” that encourages US leadership to adopt exactly the view that the hedging strategy is designed to guard against.

But I’ll stop here for the moment and turn to the Chinese leadership perspective as described by Wang Jisi.

One thing is clear in reading his views of the Chinese leadership there is in Wang’s narrative and analysis more than a hint of pessimism.  It may well be that this tone reflects an effort by Wang Jisi to fully describe what he believes is the current leadership’s distrust of US policies.  My sensitivity to this pessimism is in part a reaction to a relatively recent piece Wang Jisi wrote in Foreign Affairs (April/May 2011) – “China’s Search for a Grand Strategy”. While there is certainly some tough thinking in this piece, the grand strategy is not dramatically aggressive.  In particular his effort to conceptualize China’s core interests in non-territorial terms – with the exception of Taiwan – but to see instead China’s core interests as – sovereignty, security and development – lead Wang Jisi to declare:

If an organizing principle must be established to guide China’s grand strategy, it should be an improvement of the Chinese people’s living standards, welfare, and happiness through social justice.

Such a grand strategy, were it to be adopted, would cause China’s leadership to focus heavily on global stability and contributing to a “peaceful international environment”.

This more benign perspective is largely missing in this recent piece.  Wang Jisi in fact pulls no punches.  As he suggests:

Meanwhile, in Beijing’s view, it is U.S. policies, attitude, and misperceptions that cause the lack of mutual trust between the two countries.

Yet it is also clear that the Chinese leadership has altered its view of global circumstances arising out of the 2008 global financial crisis.  This global economic crisis and its aftermath has led China’s leaders to conclude that China has ascend to the status of a “first-class global power,” and that the US is “heading for decline.”  Moreover the leadership apparently believes that the BRICS are “increasingly challenging Western dominance” and that China’s “development model” offers an alternative to Western democracy.  Finally, and more ominously, Chinese leadership believes that the US will seek to maintain its global hegemony  and as a result “America will seek to constrain or upset China’s rise.”

So it would appear that the Chinese leadership has  – to some degree – bought the revivified “declinist thesis”.  It is hard to grasp fully what the Chinese leadership understand to be a fist-class  global power.  If they mean in other words – and I doubt it – a superpower in some manner on par with the United States, it makes little sense but then I am at a loss as to the Chinese leadership’s  perspective on the architecture of the global powers and what the consequences of that status might be for the US and China.  It might of course explain the period of “assertiveness” that appeared in 2010 and centered on Chinese push back in East Asia and the South China Seas.  As for the economic place of the US, while the political dysfunction are all too apparent, one would be foolhardy to ignore US economic resilience.  But it leaves one rather unsettled.  And maybe that’s the point.

As for ameliorative steps the experts call for enhanced dialogue and economic integration.  While simply illustrative the experts call for greater Chinese foreign direct investment in the US and the improvement Chinese transparency with respect to political decision-making.  The experts call for improved trilateral dialogues where China and the US engage with both Japan and India and work to prepare standards and rules for cyber operations for each government.  Finally, and probably most importantly, the experts call for “deep dialogue to discuss” how each should operate in the key Asia-Pacific  region.  This dialogue of necessity should involve the militaries of both sides.  Of course this crucial dialogue has been on the US agenda for some time but it has always been sacrificed to the tactical needs of China to signal its opposition especially to Taiwan and the US continuation of arms provision to the Taiwanese military.  Still in the context of enhanced dialogue there can be no greater effort by both sides.

But the two experts also worry “that at a time of far reaching change, each side is increasingly uncertain about the other side’s real perceptions and long-term intentions in this relationship.”  It is a troubling narrative to those who look to long term collaboration between the US and China. But it is hard to discount and the two experts have provided a bilateral future that we’d do well to take heed of  if only to avoid.

Image Credit:  John L. Thorton China Center at Brookings

Well I was on my way to examine “offshore balancing” when I encountered this fascinating piece by Robert D Kaplan – subject my colleague John Mearsheimer at political science at the University of Chicago. The article on John is contained in the latest Atlantic Monthly entitled, “Why John J. Mearsheimer is Right (About Some Things)” and with several great pictures of John – one especially at the end of the article identifiably at the University of Chicago.  This piece does raise offshore balancing but that is not reason enough to target it.  Nor is the fact that Dan Drezner also took the opportunity to blog on John, see his piece at his foreignpolicy.com following the Kaplan piece – though clearly he beat me to the punch – drat!

The idea for detouring to the subject of this piece really is two-fold.  One is to use the article to examine again US perceptions on China and the China-US relationship.  The second, to mull over – if just briefly – the interrelationship of Kaplan to Mearsheimer.  For in the end the piece on Mearsheimer is, in my view, about Kaplan and his framing of international relations and US grand strategy – and far less, in a number of respects, about Mearsheimer.  And indeed Mearsheimer poses a conundrum for Kaplan – hence the contingently phrased title. While Mearsheimer’s “offensive realism” is ‘right up Kaplan’s alley’ the controversy that Mearsheimer has raised in his attack on America’s Israel lobby – is not.  For Kaplan the article is an exercise of not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.  As Kaplan writes in the piece:

The real tragedy – [no pun intended I assume for The Tragedy of Great Power Politics – John’s most powerful IR book] of such controversies, as lamentable as they are, is that they threaten to obscure the urgent and enduring message of Mearsheimer’s life work, which topples conventional foreign policy shibboleths and provides an unblinking guide to the course the United States should follow in the coming decades.  Indeed, with the most critical part of the world, East Asia, in the midst of an unprecedented arms race fed by acquisitions of missiles and submarines (especially in the South China Sea region, where states are motivated by old-fashioned nationalism rather than universal values), and with the Middle East undergoing less a democratic revolution than a crisis in central authority, we ignore Mearsheimer’s larger message at our peril.

So read the above as Kaplan urging us to: “come on folks let’s forget about all those nasty Israeli-Jewish-Palestinian debates – with more than a whiff of some nastiness, and let’s focus on the rise of China, US grand strategy, Realism Offensive Realism and Samuel Huntington.”  But even Kaplan must admit:

The Israeli Lobby has delegitimized Mearsheimer.  Inside the service academy where I taught for two years, in the think-tank world where i work, and in various government circles with which I am acquainted, Mearsheimer is quietly held in higher regard because of the familiarity with his other books, but the controversy (and its echoes last fall) has surely hurt him (emphasis added).

And that is, I suspect what Kaplan believes is a tragedy of sorts – pun intended. My sense is that John cannot help himself.  Just recently I was with him and others at Harvard at a US-China policy workshop.  There, John played a significant role in discussion and debate.  But at various moments John would express himself, or ask a question, stated in the most incendiary fashion – only to pull back after serious reaction, pushback and debate.  There is a problem with judgment in my opinion that has not aided John and left him not so much as the enfant terrible, as expressed by Kaplan, but just, at times, terrible.

So let’s leave the personal and focus on the ideas.  Dan in his post, “Intellectual clean-up in the realist aisle, please!” focused in part on the Realists.  There he takes Kaplan – and the Realists – to task for always acting the victim and declaring that realism is alien to American foreign policy thinking.  As Dan urges:

Cut it out already.  There is a long intellectual lineage in the American academy – starting with Hans Morgenthau and continuing with Mearsheimer and his students – that evinces realist principles.

Dan having so clearly taken the Realists to task for victimhood, I’ll leave it at that.  But let me focus on John’s primary foreign policy view – the rise of China and what the US must/should do.  While I won’t debate the practical value of IR theory in foreign policy action – though I think the track record is pretty dismal, and not surprisingly given that much of IR theory, including realism, operates principally at the 30,000 foot level – John’s judgments, indeed predictions – are dead wrong when it comes to understanding the rise of China and US action in response.   John’s lens is offensive realism that sees great powers, driven by uncertainty, striving for dominance and hegemony – all of them all the time:

Mearsheimer, who is not modest, believes it is a reliance on theory that invigorates his thinking.  Returning to his principal passion, China, he tells me: “I have people all the time telling me that they’ve just returned from China and met with all these Chinese who want a peaceful relationship.  I tell them that these Chinese will not be in power in 20 or 30 years, when circumstances may be very different.  Because we cannot know the future, all we have to rely upon is theory.  If a theory can explain the past in many instances, as my theory of offensive realism can, it might be able to say something useful about the future.” … If China implodes from socioeconomic crisis, or evolves in some other way that eliminates the potential threat, Mearsheimer’s theory will be in serious trouble because of its dismissal of domestic politics.  But if China goes on to become a great military power, reshaping the balance of forces in Asia, then Mearsheimer’s Tragedy will live on as a classic.

But China will reshape Asia.  It is already doing so.  The question really is will this power transformation with the rise of China and the relative decline of the United States result in not just competition and rivalry but in conflict between the United States and China and others.  Historically, most other power transformations of this sort have led to conflict.  The question in Asia is – will China and the US come to blows?  And to understand that offensive realism is inutile.  Conflict or its absence depends on both US and Chinese leadership.  And it also depends on diplomatic strategy.  Elsewhere I have argued that the US – and China as well – need to exhibit more “Bismarckian diplomacy – and here I mean after 1871, and less Wilhelmine behavior.  The China Threat School and offensive realists behind offer a brand of US diplomacy that will heighten tensions and make the necessary adjustments between the two great powers more difficult not less.   It will raise the prospects of conflict and increase the possibility for misjudgment and mistakes by the two sides.

There is no inevitability of a certain ‘hard type’ of Chinese leadership.  Just as there is none in the United States.  What is needed is smart leadership employing strategic military/political/economic behavior – on both sides.  Within the structure of the international system is leadership behavior and decision-making.  These leaders need to get it right.  John’s views it seems to me tells us nothing about getting it right.

Image Credit: The University of Chicago: permission from John Mearsheimer

I was fortunate to join colleagues from Harvard, but as well from other US academic institutions  – and colleagues from China as well – in a fascinating discussion here at the Kennedy School over this past weekend.  The workshop was filled with great US China specialists of all stripes – Susan Shirk from UCSD, Tony Saich and Iain Johnston from Harvard as well as a number of IR theorists including Etel Solingen UC Irvine, John Mueller from Ohio State, John Mearsheimer from Chicago and Stephen Walt from Harvard.   The session was organized by my old mentor Dick Rosecrance – lately of Harvard and the Belfer Center there but also Graham Allison and Joesph Nye former Kennedy deans, Ezra Vogel a China-Japan scholar who has gained a recent note of fame for his just released book on Deng Xiaoping and a host of economists, ‘guns and rocket’ folks and IR types.

As my wife always argues these kinds of meetings, are as she says “just an excuse to schmooze with old friends.” “Yes, I say, and what’s wrong with that.”  But the weekend workshop had a more serious objective. The workshop was titled, “Chinese Strategy and the US Response: How Far is Adjustment Possible?” This is the first of several sessions possibly looking at how the US and China can survive the power transition – that is the rise of China and relatively speaking, the decline of the United States – likely exhibiting competition and rivalry, but avoiding  outright conflict.

Inevitably there was much circumlocution – arguing around the point, near the point but not quite on the point. But over the day and half the group did make progress in sketching out a scenario or framework for this relationship – though we are not so far along so to be able to elaborate the behaviors and structures that would guarantee a successful power transition between these most crucial great powers.

The discussions were very rich and stretched over a wide variety of issues from the territorial, to the economic and political, the strategic and the military.  Let me just draw out a few choice items.

My good friend Arthur Stein, and a long established presence at UCLA, probably had the best insight – this toward the end of the workshop – that of framing the relationship as a ‘couple’. Thus, there is an existent ongoing relationship but one that must be managed.  Dick Rosecrance picked up on this framing  at the end to suggest that the US-China relationship is like a ‘common law couple’ – not formally married but in a relationship nonetheless.  What is critical in describing the relationship this way is to establish that there is a preexisting relationship that must be worked on.  And in that reference frame there was a reminder that to be successful it was important to act to adapt yourself to your spouse rather than to try and change your spouse. The basic need for both – avoid stupidity, manage the relationship and avoid divorce.

Well I suspect these views reflect words of wisdom for marital relations.  But we will see if it holds for the US-China relationship and what structures and behaviors it suggests for IR as opposed to marital counseling.  But as a starting point – not bad.

But there was more.  Our friendly ‘guns and rocket’ types including Bob Ross from BC and the Fairbanks Center at Harvard, Taylor Fravel and and Barry Posen from MIT, gave us a perspective in the regional competition and the military modernization and build up that in the end – given geography and capability  – leads to both being able to box the other in  and giving advantage to the defense over the offense.  Now the likely advantage of the defensive suggests at first glance that these powers would be better off where they restrain spending and offensive deployment.

Joe Nye insightfully and quite pointedly argued that it would be quite wrong for the United States to frame the US reassertion of its regional East Asian presence  with a cold war containment in mind.  He urged that the US maintain its ‘engagement but hedging strategy’ – the hedging being the US reaffirmation of its bilateral Japan strategy.  Containment of China it was suggested could only be provided by China.  In other words, ‘China will contain China’.  And finally and in the circumstance that China fails to contain China over the coming years then ‘pinpoint balancing’ from various states – not a broad and threatening coalition – would suffice to do the trick in the circumstances.

The prime effort – by China but also the United States – as the years of the power transformation tick by – is to find the leadership capacity and will – the means and structures – to reconcile to the other.  Let’s hope this is not too tall an order.

[Ed. note – This piece first appeared at the Munk School of Global Affairs Portal.  It forms the second part of a three part examination by this humble blogger of the contemporary US-China relationship in the context of the South China Sea]

The predicted flashpoint for US-China relations has been for the last year and more the South China Sea (nan zhongguo hai 南中国海).  It is here that the US ‘China Threat School’ from the Washington beltway and the ‘China Can Say No’ (zhongguo keyi shuo bu 中国可以说不)from Beijing and the nationalists target US-China rivalry, competition and even conflict.  These experts and opinion makers see a growing inter-state rivalry. Each side urges their government to stand firm and defend the national interest.  What is it about the South China Sea that has marked it as such a central flashpoint?

In the recent past China has reasserted ‘historical’ claims over all the islets, including the Paracel and Spratly archipelagos and some 80 percent of the 3.5 million square kilometers along the nine-dotted U-shaped line (an old Guomindang assertion going back as far as 1947) Depending on interpretation this Chinese claim can be to all features, waters and resources or less aggressively a claim to all features and, for legal islands, a continental shelf and a 200 nautical mile Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) for each.  At least with respect to the former claim there appears to be no international legal ground or basis to assert such encompassing sovereignty. And even if both countries – that is China and the United States – rely only on the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and rights acquired by EEZ, the two countries disagree on what that means.   The US  – remember the US has failed to ratify UNCLOS – argues that the coastal state is allowed to retain only special commercial rights in a zone while the Chinese argue that the coastal state can control virtually any activity within the EEZ.

The current expenditures on the Chinese navy – the PLAN – have been directed until recently to weapons systems that are designed for “access denial”. This earlier PLAN strategy appeared to be:  (1) to secure approaches to Taiwan and deny the US access to it; (2) to deny the US and other near Asian neighbors access to the South China Sea; (3) to protect China’s sea lane lines of communication; and (4) hinder generally others sea lane lines of communication.

But that doctrine and spending seems to be changing.  Recently the Chinese have been planning a form of power projection. The Chinese are contemplating trials for its first carrier, an ex-Ukrainian carrier called the Varyag that has been renamed the Shi Lang.   The Chinese Navy has been planning this launch apparently to be followed by the construction of its own carriers with a new doctrine of “far sea defense” – a far more assertive policy.  This doctrine, among other things, would see Chinese warships escorting commercial vessels that are crucial to the Chinese economy through as far as the Persian Gulf to the Strait of Malacca and on to China.

The rise in tensions – and the apparent rising assertiveness – of China in the region was initiated in part by what appeared to be China’s growing stake in the South China Sea.  Though it is somewhat complicated to tease out, it appears that rising tensions between the US and China over the South China Sea can be traced back to March 2010.  Then, two visiting US officials to China, Jeff Bader, at the time, senior director of Asian affairs at the National Security Council, and James Steinberg, Deputy Secretary of Defense held meetings with senior Chinese officials. They were were told by these Chinese officials (apparently State Councilor, Dai Bingguo, Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi and Vice Foreign Minister Cui Tiankai) that China would not tolerate any interference in the South China Sea and that the South China Sea was now part of China’s “core interest,” or at least so it was told to US and western media by US officials.  Such a statement it appeared elevated the South China Sea to equal status then with Taiwan and Tibet.  This South China Sea status was noted widely by western media particularly in the context of a Chinese Navy that had announced a new doctrine of “far sea defense” – a far more assertive policy, as noted earlier.

Though the western media has in the “on again- off again” tensions in the South China Sea repeated this declaration of “core interest” it may in fact not represent official Chinese views.  Chinese experts point to the statement by State Councilor Dai Bingguo.  Dai Bingguo is a senior Chinese official who has become one of the foremost and highest-ranking figures on Chinese foreign policy in recent years.  It was Dai Bingguo who remained at the G8 L’Aquila Summit after President Hu Jintao returned to China following riots in Xinjiang.  He has attended as a senior leader at the important US-China dialogues – The China-US Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED).  At the second round in May 2010 – not long after the reported statement to US officials of “core interest”  – in which Dai Bingguo was in attendance – this is what Dai Bingguo said at his press conference on May 25, 2010:

Both sides recognized that China-US relations are of great significance to our two countries and the world and that cultivating and deepening mutual strategic trust between us is extremely important for the sound and steady development of China-US relations in the new era. The Chinese emphasized that while it may not be possible for China and the United States to agree on every issue, it is important that both sides observe the spirit and the principles of the three Sino-US joint communiqués and the China-US Joint Statement, respect and accommodate each other’s core interests and major concerns, and properly handle our differences and sensitive issues, especially concerning China’s core interests such as Taiwan and Tibet-related issues, (emphasis added) so as to consolidate the foundation of mutual trust.  If we keep to this right direction, we can overcome interferences, difficulties and obstacles, and take forward our relationship.

No mention of the South China Sea as a “core interest”.  In fact there is some reason to believe – without an official transcript – that what was said to the American officials was either not precisely conveyed, or was misinterpreted by officials and then the media.  So, apparently what was stated was that the South China Sea was “related to a China core interest” (sheji guojia hexin liyi –涉及国家核心利益) for instance the stability  and peaceful resolution of South China Sea disputes as opposed to say Taiwan which would be:  (Taiwan shi zhongguo de hexin liyi – 台湾是中国的核心利益) – Taiwan is a core interest of China.

Well diplomacy is all about words and words and their interpretation are made more difficult by two languages.  Unfortunately too many observers have stated or repeated a China position on the South China Sea that appears not to be official and feeds interests on both sides that see the other as a growing threat.  The story continues but careful diplomacy is called for on both sides.

Image Credit:  Wikimedia Commons an image of the USS Peleliu

Recently the “China Threat” School has focused on the South China Sea as the point of US-China’s most evident flashpoint – and a likely challenge to US influence in Asia.  As noted by Columbia’s Andrew Nathan, there have been a spate of books that have emerged since the 1990s on the China threat.  And even those not necessarily attracted to China Threat or Realist perspectives – more on them in the following post-  have identified the region as a possible site of US-China rivalry.  So for this blogger it seemed timely to examine the challenges to US-China relations posed by the South China Sea.  Andrew Nathan has just mentioned has provided a recent “Review Essay,” entitled, “What China Wants”, in Foreign Affairs. The  review tackles China’s foreign policy objectives. Nathan has used the essay to focus on two US China watchers – Henry Kissinger, who needs no introduction, and Princeton’s Aaron Friedberg. Nathan has used these two experts to uncover widely antipodal views of China’s foreign policy views in the US community of China experts.

I have reviewed earlier – in a posting at the Feature of the Week at The Munk School of Global Affairs’s Portal,  Kissinger’s views in “On China” Kissinger’s recent summation of his perspectives on China from his many years of involvement in China and his many exchanges with China’s leaders as a public and private figure.

Aaron Friedberg has a China Threat perspective but a reasonable one according to Nathan.  On Friedberg Nathan writes :

Friedberg also exaggerates Chinese power, although in pursuit of a different argument.  His is the most thoughtful and informative of a stream of China-threat books that have come out since the mid-1990s.  Within that genre, its contribution is to focus on China’s strategic intentions.  Although Friedberg agrees with the classical realist logic that a change in power relations inevitably generates rivalry, he also believes it is important to figure out what, as he puts it, China wants. … China [according to those Chinese experts Friedberg follows] should seek to “displace the United States as the dominant player in East Asia, and perhaps to extrude it from the region altogether.

David Shambaugh, an extremely well known international relations scholar and first rate China hand at George Washington University used his recent sabbatical very well and he paints in, “Coping with a Conflicted China” (The Washington Quarterly, Winter 2011) a highly differentiated view – as opposed to the China Threat School or Kissinger for that matter – of the various approaches that influence China’s foreign policy thought and behavior.

Shambaugh describes seven – yes seven – distinct tendencies in China’s international relations schools of thought.  As a result of competing identities, there are, according to Shambaugh, in China’s foreign policy several elements simultaneously in its thought and action.  While these schools of thought, or as Shambaugh prefers “tendencies of analysis,” then are distinct intellectually, they nevertheless generate competing international relations identities and China remains, “a deeply conflicted rising power with a series of competing international identities.”

Obviously if there are these competing identities it is likely to complicate dramatically how China may or may not act in a particular situation or over a particular issue or issues. But the complexity set out by Shambaugh is likely a reasonable antidote to the overly simplistic but dominant, “China Threat” and realist schools in Washington  .  So a quick review of Shambaugh’s tendencies of thought is warranted:

• Nativism (hyper-nationalistic and strongly anti-American) – “China should not be internationally active. … The group bears a strong traditional Marxist orientation” e.g., “China Can Say No” (Zhongguo Keyi Shuo Bu group);
• Realism (dominant group – found throughout the military and in some universities and think tanks) – “a very hard-headed definition (relying on power) and defense of China’s narrow national interests” e.g., Yan Xuetong – Tsinghua daxue, Zhang Ruizhang, Renmin daxue;
• Major Powers (China’s American Studies community) – focused on the major powers and major power blocs; “top priority maintaining harmonious ties with Washington”, e.g. Wang Jisi, Beida & Cui Liru, CICIR;
• Asia First – China’s focus should be on “its immediate periphery  and Asian neighborhood” – a focus on regional trends and the growing regional architecture – a multilateral regionalism balancing purely national strategies as well as bilateral relations.  Analysts urge the building of a stable neighborhood; e.g., Zhang Yunling, CASS, Qin Yaqing, China Foreign Affairs University
• Global South – main Chinese identity should be with the developing world and China should continue to see itself as a developing country and support common international positions with these countries notwithstanding China’s rising power status.  These analysts are strong supporters for the BRICS and G20 to the extent it enlarges the leadership pool and assists in the redistribution of power.  So joining the G20 leaders summit, according to this tendency of analysis, does not turn China into a status quo power;
• Selective Multilateralism – supports expanding China’s global involvement but only on issues where China has national security interests. These analysts have found global governance to be highly contentious – Is China obliged to become a “responsible international stakeholder” or does it even have the ability to take on global leadership? Those favoring this tendency of analysis, urge that “China avoid increasing China’s global involvements, but realize that China must be seen to be contributing to global governance.”  Thus these experts are not the equivalent of Liberal Internationalists “but instead are a more internationalist version of realists.”
• Globalism – these experts urge China “to shoulder the responsibility for addressing a range of global governance issues commensurate with its size, power, and influence.”  These group are close to the West’s, Liberal Institutionalism perspective.  These experts trust multilateral institutions more than the previous Selective Multilateralism.

The waters of the South China Sea have become the scene of increased tension with conflict over competing claims for islands and seabed mineral rights between China and its neighbors.  Now how does our understanding of the US China Threat School and realists and China’s seven tendencies in foreign policy thinking and behavior help us understand the China-US relations in this presumptive flashpoint?