Book Review: China’s Asymmetric Statecraft: Alignments, Competitors, and Regional Diplomacy

Situated amidst a complex international neighborhood, China’s regional relationships are asymmetric, notwithstanding the country’s relations with the Soviet Union and with Japan before 1945. International Relations theories, with their concentration on the statecraft of Western great powers, historically have paid little attention to such dynamics. However, based on exhaustive research in various national archives, Yuxing Huang analyzes and explains China’s regional statecraft in three important arenas of the Cold War era. Huang argues that China’s regional statecraft depends on the nature and number of its global competitors. Facing one competitor, China’s regional politics are more uniform, while with multiple competitors, China is more diverse and selective in its relationships. Uniformity has the advantage of consistency when facing a single opponent, while using selective policies can target the interstices of multiple rivals. His cases—East Asia (1955–1965), South Asia (1955–1963), and Indochina (1962– 1975)—include examples of China’s diplomacy toward both aligned and non-aligned neighbors, comprising both uniform and selective policies of accommodation, coercion, and status quo maintenance. Huang demonstrates a broad command of Western and Chinese IR theory and scholarship, and an even more impressive depth of research into Chinese and Western diplomatic archives. Huang’s analysis of China’s East Asian diplomacy concentrates on Taiwan and Japan. He argues that from 1955 to 1958, China pursued a uniform strategy of accommodation. For example, in May 1956, Zhou Enlai proposed that Chiang Kai-shek could keep his armed forces if he agreed to unification. However, with the