I was searching vain today for a blog post I’d supposedly done on Yan Xuetong’s analysis of the US-China relationship.  While I had reviewed the piece: “The Instability of Superficial Friendship”‘ in The Chinese Journal of International Politics, Vol.3 (2010), pp. 263-292, I had not written a blog post on it.

Yan Xuetong, for those of you who don’t know him, is a very well known and prolific IR relations specialist in China.  Yan Xuetong is currently the Director of the Institute of International Studies at Tsinghua University and the chief editor of the above journal.  He is part of a generation of Chinese scholars that have undertaken some of their research abroad.  In Yan Xuetong’s case, he did his PhD at UC Berkeley receiving it in 1992.  Yan Xuetong is very clearly on the nationalist side and has expressed strong views on China’s core interests.

In my review of Yan Xuetong’s article I cast him as supporting the characterization of the US-China relationship as  – fei di fei you (非敌 非友) neither friend nor foe.  Now Yan Xuetong is in good company here and this characterization includes both US and other China experts.   Here I know I have blogged on this well known characterization – several times in fact – starting as early as “Jumping to Conclusions” and subsequently.  Now my own view is that a more appropriate characterization of  the US-China relationship is  – yi di, yi you’ (亦敌 亦友)－ both friend and foe.

But I digress.  So Yan Xuetong focused on a relationship that he described as unstable and a result of superficial friendship between these two great powers – one the declining hegemon and the other a – or “the” – rising power in the contemporary global system.  As I said at the time:

But Yan Xuetong extended the analysis [of neither friend nor foe] by concluding that there are four kinds of interests in this critical bilateral relationship: common interests, complementary ones, confrontational interests and conflicting ones.  For Yan Xuetong the difficulty in the current relationship between these two critical powers arises because policy makers insist on characterizing the US-China relationship as being more cooperative that in fact is the case. China and the US fail in their efforts to build a more collaborative and stable relationship because they fail to see that in fact they have more mutually unfavorable interests than mutually favorable ones.  Officials in both countries find it difficult to create stable relations because of the unrealistic expectations of mutual support each presumes of the other.  In fact, according to this scholar, this instability is of sort greater than one might find in a conflictual relationship.  For Yan Xuetong ‘superficial enmity’ is more stable and it “… also provides more chances for improvements in bilateral because the nations have more mutually favorable interests than they realize.” (Yan, 284).

So in this analysis, “enmity” is better than “friendship” – at least for now – a rather strange conclusion but perhaps a logical outcome of a difficult relationship and differing national interests.  Yan Xuetong urges both to lower expectations and to reduce unexpected conflict by accepting that the two great powers regard the other as a political competitor.  Further he suggests that that the two should enlarge their mutually favorable interests before they even consider developing durable cooperation.

There is no doubt that there are many experts who are willing – even eager – to accept the competitive perhaps rivalrous nature of the relationship.

The conclusion that superficial “enmity” is better and more stable than “friendship” – according to Yan Xuetong – has drawn the attention and raised serious questions by  another well known China IR scholar.  As a result, in the most recent volume of The Chinese Journal of International Politics,” Alastair Iain Johnston from Harvard has written, “Stability and Instability in Sino-US Relations a Response to Yan Xuetong’s Superficial Friendship Theory.” Vol 4 (2011), pp. 5-29  Johnston both takes Yan Xuetong’s analysis very seriously and – in my opinion – does an effective job in raising questions over the approach and the conclusions identified in Yan Xuetong’s article.

In the next blog I will turn to the Johnston analysis  and see where we are now in understanding this key great power relationship.