Defense Diplomacy, Chinese Style
China's leadership has shifted its international stance dramatically in the space of a very few years.
As David Finkelstein, a longtime student of Chinese security affairs, wrote in 1999, China's leaders had established a series of benchmarks that declared China would not participate in formal alliances with foreign governments. It would then not have to concern itself with alliance issues like interoperability of equipment, training and doctrine. Therefore, China rejected all efforts to participate in combined training exercises like those now common in Europe even when those exercises were confidence-building measures. Second, the benchmarks would prevent China from stationing forces abroad, making sure thereby that China's defense would occur at or within the country's borders. However, even as Finkelstein was writing, the ground was changing beneath China's feet, and recent developments even indicate an acceleration of the fundamental change in Beijing's policies.
. . .By 2000-01, facing continuing tensions with Washington and the growing threat of terrorism and insurgency within Central Asia and Xinjiang, Beijing was ready to move forward. During this time, it converted the Shanghai Cooperative Organization (SCO) from an organization whose main purpose was confidence-building, border demarcation and the expansion of trade, into a vehicle for cooperative security and, more important, a model for subsequent attempts to deal with other states on China's periphery.
Posted by Donald Douglas at November 10, 2003 11:12 AM | TrackBack