The Logics and Contradictions of Peaceful Rise/Development as China

s Grand Strategy1
Barry Buzan
I am going to start by looking at the main questions of Chinas Grand Strategy and the
meanings of this strategy. The main focus will be looking at the ends of Chinas
Security and Foreign policies.
There is a widespread view that China has no coherent Grand Strategy and needs to
correct this. The only people who seem to think that China has a Grand Strategy are
American realists, like Goldstein, Swaine and Tellis. But, necessarily, as they are
realists, their view of Chinas Grand Strategy is that it is simply transitional, and they
think that the Peaceful Rise is a tactical approach to cover a period of weakness.
I want to argue that the strategy of a Peaceful Rise does not have to be limited in that
way and that it could easily become a proper strategy, and I also want to argue that there
are several advantages in adopting this strategy.
So, the argument is that China does have a Grand Strategy. I am going to call it
Peaceful Rise Development (PRD) because rise and development are closely
interdependent ideas, which is to say that rise and development are inextricably
intertwined. The main argument is that PRD is not necessarily transitional, that it does
not only serve to cover a period of weakness but that it can also serve to achieve
purposes of the state. If it does so, it contains the potentiality to be something more
endurable and, I would add, practical and significant.
The logic for China behind Peaceful Rise Development has been in place since the late
1970s and it remains without change. First of all, China has an urgent need to develop.
To understand the strategy of PRD we need to understand that China could only develop
if it engaged globally, that is to say, if China became part of the global capitalist game.
The difficulty that they faced in doing this was that Chinas neighbors and other great
powers might become disturbed or feel insecure or threatened by a rising power that
was so big. So, if China did succeed in developing quickly, this would have impacts on
its neighbors and the others great powers of the system. This posed a danger to China
that if others responded in a thread-feeling way, this could have repercussions that
would undermine Chinas engagement with the global economy and, therefore,
undermine this strategy of development. If you look at the map, you can see that China,
like Germany, has a geopolitical location that its challenging.
So, I think China does have a Grand Strategy, which I call Peaceful Rise
Development. Therefore, there are three questions that need to be answered. First of
all, are the logic of this Grand Strategy and the contradictions within it, fully understood
by Chinas leaders? I would argue that the answer is mainly no. Second, does China
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have sufficient depth and coherence in its policy-making processes to implement such
strategy? And I would argue that, so far, the answer to this question is also no. Third, is
this Grand Strategy a Sun Tze style of Art of War strategic deception or a long term
policy? Is the Peaceful Rise simply an attempt to cover Chinas period of weakness?
To answer these questions, first we need to look at what it is a Grand Strategy. We are
going to take Brooks, Ikenberry and Wolhforths definition of a Grand Strategy as a
set of ideas for deploying the nations resources to achieve its interest over the long run.
It is not just about the military, it is about the whole deployment of the resources of the
state.
Grand Strategies have a number of functions; I will focus on three of them. First, they
serve to provide stable overarching frameworks that make policy choices add up to
something coherent. So, they enable a state to present its ideas and its way of
proceeding in the world in an overall coherent fashion. Second, they serve also to
legitimize and embed foreign and security policies politically, by explaining it to the
citizenry in broad terms. Thirdly, grand strategies project an image of the country to the
world. The strategy of Chinas Peaceful Rise and Development projects an image of a
country that you can trust, even if it is rising. So, this is exactly the opposite to which
other countries did when they raised, like Japan, Germany, Britain, which was beating
up another great powers.
A Grand Strategy poses particularly difficult choices; I am going to focus on one that it
is central to this talk. The main issue about a Grand Strategy is how to make the ends
that the nation pursue (which are a set of core aims that define the national interest in
terms of both domestic goals and how are the state and society going to relate to the
wider world) meet with the means (which are the absolute and relative capabilities of
the state and society in relation to the rest of the world). So, a Grand Strategy is about
finding some balance between ends and means.
Now, we are going to examine which are the ends that China pursues. After a close
reading to the literature and policy statements, it is possible to identify seven stable aims
that define the core of Chinas Grand Strategy. But they also generate a set of
contradictions and puzzles.
The first one is to maintain the exclusive rule of the Communist Party. The second one,
and closely link to the first, is to maintain high economic growth, because the
legitimacy of the Communist Party depends on that. The third objective is maintaining
the stability of the Chinese society. The fourth is defending the countrys territorial
integrity. In the case of China, this rather normal aim includes processes yet unfinished
of national reunification and territorial disputes. The fifth aim is to increase Chinas
national power, particularly relative to the United States, but also to everybody else.
This is accompanied by the fact that China would like to see a multipolar world, a world
order that its less dominated by the US. So we find the rhetoric of multipolarity and
anti-hegemony in Chinese foreign policy statement. The sixth aim is maintaining
favorable regional and global conditions for Chinas development, although it is very

unclear what exactly does that mean. The seventh aim is to avoid having others perceive
China as threatening.
I am going to take these seven aims as very consistent and very stable in Chinas policy
over the last thirty five years. However, here are some questions that need to be
answered about theses seven aims. For example, how does Aim Four, which
incorporates a set of territorial disputes, square with Aim Seven, which is to avoid
others to see China as threatening? Likewise, in Aim Six, what does exactly mean a
favorable regional environment? There are two ways in which we could interpret that.
On the one hand, it could be that China has relaxed, friendly and cooperative relations
with its neighbors. On the other hand, it could simply mean that China has successfully
intimidated its neighbors into complying with its wishes. This is completely ambiguous
in this statement, and it is an argument that is very often repeated in Chinese foreign
policy statements. Finally, as I have already said, is Aim Seven merely transitional, as
implied by the debate of moving on from Dengs profile strategy, to get others see
China as non-threatening while China is relatively weak, or is it a long term strategy?
We can reformulate the last question by asking: is China revisionist or status quo?
If we turn to the means, pretty clearly China has been rapidly developing over the last
thirty five years in a very impressing way. So, we can take as a baseline fact that China
s material capabilities have been increasing rapidly are going to continue to do so. The
core question is: what is China going to do with these increasing capabilities? Are they
going to be channeled mainly into hard power, military power; or are they going to be
channeled into soft power? As we can see, China has not been conspicuous in its
military spending, so this question remains open.
The policy of Deng is that China should keep a low profile. Is this policy now
redundant? Have the increasing in Chinas means and capabilities already become so
great that China should now play a bigger role and take more leadership responsibility?
How has China coped with the Chinas threat problem, when everybody can see that
Chinas means are increasing quickly but everybody remains uncertain of what are the
Chinese going to do with these increasing capabilities? So, this takes us to the essence
of the Grand Strategy which is: how do you bring means and ends together?
Here, I want to remark a set of contradictions in Chinas foreign and security policies.
This set of contradictions underline the difficulty that China faces in producing a
coherent grand strategy out of these even aims.
First, how can you pursue territorial disputes and aspirations of regional primacy while
striving to maintain a peaceful and favorable environment and harmonious relations
with both neighbors and the United States? It is not clear how are these two aims going
to work out together.

Neither is clear how China can both integrate itself into a US-led global economic order
and promote a stable international environment, while, at the same time, treating the US
as a major strategic rival.
Then, how can China feature anti-hegemonism as a general goal while, at the same
time, also seems to want to achieve primacy in its own region?
Also, how can China pursue domestic stability by the use of internal crackdowns (as
done in 1989 and recently) while at the same time countering the China threat theory?
This is a very difficult task, China can wisely say that what they do inside their territory
is their business. Nonetheless, what China does inside its territory is visible and affects
the way other people see China, and therefore brings consequences, particularly
consequences in terms of its Grand Strategy, because what China does internally affects
the way that China is seen externally.
Another contradiction is how can China cultivate nationalism and a sense of historical
victimhood in order to bolster regime legitimacy domestically, without becoming
hostage to the nationalist opinion they are creating, regarding the military pursuit of
territorial disputes, and the casting of Japan and the United Sates as enemies, which
seems to be the consequences of this internal policy.
Coming to the end, another problem is how to achieve rapid development without
creating a market society ruled by a communist party, and thus threatening the goals of
social stability and harmony.
If one wants to worry about anything about China at the moment, it should be that there
is a growing contradiction between a leading party that defines itself as communist,
which has very successfully created, through heroic economic reforms, a capitalist
society. There is a contradiction in a communist party ruling a capitalist society, and it is
pretty clear that the party is increasingly feeling uncomfortable in its own society. So
the problem is how to how to reconcile the high priority to domestic security issues with
the unavoidable linkage of Chinas development to a Western-dominated global
economy.
Then, there is this rather interesting but quite subtle issue about China pursuing soft
power. Over the last two decades, the Chinese have been re-legitimizing themselves by
opening up the use of classical Chinese thought and culture. You dont have to be a
Confucian scholar to know that the logic of harmony in Confucianism is highly
dependent on the logic of hierarchy. But if you look at Chinas foreign policy
statements, you will see a lot of times the concept of harmony but you wont see any
mentions of its necessary condition, which is hierarchy. So, projecting only one part of
an image and leaving aside the other part, which is hierarchical, is problematic,
especially in relations with neighbors and the United States. It is also problematic that a
party that call itself communist could be opening itself up to the Confucional classics,
which some interpret as meaning that China should become more democratic.

Moving to the next base, we will talk about the Peaceful Rise Development (PRD) as a
Grand Strategy. We can rule out warlike rise as a rational option, which is based on a
false analogy to the 1930s. The conditions for a warlike rise no longer exist. How many
of you think you will see a Great Powers war? I have asked that question to dozens of
audiences and the answer is always the same: no one think they will see a Great Powers
war. So, warlike rise is not impossible but highly unlikely. As a result, Peaceful Rise is
the default strategy for a contemporary rising power.
Broadly speaking, Peaceful Rise looks like this: the growing power makes both absolute
and relative gains in its material and status positions in relation to the other great powers
in the international system. And it has to do this without precipitating major hostilities
to the other great powers. This has to work by processes of mutual adjustments between
the rising power and the other powers. There is a two-way process in which the rising
power accommodates itself to the rules and structures of the international society, while
at the same time other great powers accommodate some changes in those structures and
rules to adjust to the new disposition of power and status.
The Peaceful Rise can be divided into two stages: Cold and Warm Peaceful Rise.
On the one hand, Cold Peaceful Rise means no great powers war, but not much else.
So, we can think of it as the kind of relation that there is between Israel and Egypt or
between Russia and the West: no trust, no friendship, a lot of suspicion, but no war.
On the other hand, Warm Peaceful Rise would aim towards a kind of security
community outcome: a friendly environment with a considerable depth mutual trust,
and low sense of threat. Think of the relations between the countries of the European
Union, the United States and Canada, and also the states of South America.
Now, the problem is that during the last two decades, Chinas foreign policy and
rhetoric drift very awkwardly between these two models of Peaceful Rise. On the one
side, we have Warm PRD in the talks about harmony, co-development, about China
being a status quo power, in its practice of joining intergovernmental arrangements and
of contributing to peacekeeping operations. On the other hand, there is an equally strong
record of behavior that points to the Cold Peaceful Rise: its talk of nationalism and
victimhood, of the rights of the big over the small, and in its practice of assertive
military pursuit of territorial claims and gagging of its own civil society.
Both of these strategies are going on at the same time, which raises the question about
the coherence of Chinas foreign policy. One thing we can say for sure is that the
continuation of this will inherently produce a Cold Peaceful Rise outcome. If you are
facing someone whose behavior is very mixed, who comes across as partly threatening
and bullying, and partly harmonious, what are you going to do? What is your response
going to be? You are going to say I dont know what is going on here, so I think
prudence is called for, and Id better be prepared for the worse. This is because there is
no enough consistency to make you say this is my friend or this is my enemy.

As a result, this means that China will have to create a more coherent foreign and
security policy that is has done so far.
Lets see how do Cold and Warm Peaceful Rise strategies measure up against Chinas
seven foreign and security policy aims.
First, we are going to see the Cold Peaceful Rise. There is no obvious contradiction
between the Cold Peaceful Rise and the first five aims: maintaining the exclusive rule of
the communist party, maintaining high economic growth, keeping the stability of the
Chinese society, defending the countrys territorial integrity, and increasing Chinas
national power. But there are quite big contradictions between Cold PRD and the
seventh aim, that is to say, the aim of avoiding others perceiving China as threatening;
and also there is a potential contradiction between Cold PRD and the sixth aim of
cultivating a favorable regional and global environment.
Cold Peaceful Rise is de facto Chinas current policy, just look at Chinas relation with
the United States, Japan and India. Also, look at its relations with Russia; they are not
warm but a fragile and instrumental strategic anti-Western partnership. The same goes
for its relations with its South Sea neighbors since 2008.
The principal beneficiary of this policy is the United States, because it means that China
is bullying and looking threatening, so its neighbors go running to the US for help.
Americans are not loved in Asia either, but Chinas foreign policy of Cold Peaceful Rise
is making life easier for the US.
On the other hand, Warm Peaceful Rise can be more demanding but much more
effective for Chinas aims. It would allow it to pursue the seven aims without much
contradiction. First, China could achieve its seventh goal of minimizing Chinas
threat. Then, it would allow China to define Aim Six (a favorable environment) in
reciprocal and consensual terms instead of the primacy and coerced terms that it has
been using up to now.
The Warm Peaceful Rise Strategy assumes that Dengs analysis of international
relations from 1978 remains valid; that is to say, that peace and development have
become the main characteristics of the international society, that China is no longer
existentially threatened by other great powers, and that Chinas own development
depends on it being engaged with the world economy. As we can see, these three
premises remain true.
A Warm Peaceful Rise requires a significant change, a move towards common security,
with the idea that common problems require collective action because they generate
shared fates. In other words, it requires a shift from the idea of security against to that
of security with. As I have suggested, China has a good record of doing this (take, for
example, its relations with ASEAN during 1990-2008).
So, the overall problem is not Chinas rise, most of the world accepts that China is
going to rise whether they like it or not, and many would love it because they dont like

Americans hegemony and they would like a more distributed pattern of power and
development in the system. The problem is not that China is rising, it is how China
rises, this is to say, what kind of China rises: a cold, negative and threatening; or a
warm, positive and attractive.
To think about this, and to think about how China might pursue a Warm Peaceful Rise, I
am going to make a few suggestions in terms of three levels of policy: domestic,
regional and global.
In terms of domestic policy, what China does at home is it own business, but it cant do
what it likes without affecting the way it is perceived abroad. Therefore, there are three
things to notice. First, the Communist Party needs to keep pace with the social market
society; it needs to move from market communism to pluralistic communism. It
doesnt need to be democratic but it needs to be a more open and participatory society.
Otherwise, it will look threatening to others and it will be unstable internally.
Secondly, it would be useful as well if China would be less engaged in internal fights. A
lot of countries have internal problems like the ones that China experiences in Tibet and
Xinjiang, and there are a lot of lessons that China could learn from looking at the ways
other countries have handled their internal problems. But the repression policies that
China adopts only serve to undermine its image and its rhetoric of a Warm Peaceful
Rise.
Thirdly, it needs a more centralized government control over foreign and security
policies, because the present policy is incoherent. Until very recently, Chinas foreign
policy was being made by, at least, a dozen of different institutions, like official
agencies, provincial governments, and stated-owned industries; all of which have
different interests. The curious thing in here is that, for outsiders, the normal thing to
expect from a communist country is central control. So people read Chinas behavior as
if it was central controlled, but it is not. Moreover, Chinas Foreign Ministry is
relatively weak, compared to other countries. As a result, we have a practical problem
that also creates a perception problem.
In terms of its regional policy, China has a difficult geopolitical position. It cant
insulate its region the way the United States, it needs therefore to be systematically nice
to its neighbors. Hard work needs to be done in order to address the history problem
(particularly among China and Japan) and de-link it form nationalism. There is a very
sustained propaganda, especially regarding how awful the Japanese are. So, China
needs to come over this historical antagonism that poisons politics in the region, and
move forward.
Also, China needs to acknowledge territorial disputes and submit it all to binding
arbitration.
Another thing China needs to do is support Indias and Japans claims for a permanent
seat at the United Nations Security Council, as this will be coherent with Chinas

multipolarity world vision. If you want a multipolar world, then the other poles of
power have to be given their seat at the top.
Moving to the global level, the huge strategic game for China would be to improve
relations with its region, so it could weaken American position in East Asia at no risk to
itself. How could Americans complain about China being nice to its neighbors? They
couldnt, there is no risk in this strategy at all.
Also, China needs to take the multipolar rhetoric more seriously; there is a lot of
political support out there for that. Moreover, doing this would weaken the China
threat lobby in the United States.
Curiously, there is a lack of confidence in Chinas government in the fact that as China
goes strong its influence is going to grow naturally as a result of that strength. In fact,
this has already happened, but China needs to have more confidence in itself and in the
consequences of its rise.
So, the big question is: what kind of great power does China want to be? And its choices
seem to be the following: it could be a great power that claims its place in the
international society by power political means, mainly looking backwards, seeking
vengeance for the century of humiliation and to restore a kind of Sino-centric system in
East Asia. Or it could use its rising power to look forward, pursuing consensual means,
and create a more pluralist and decentered international society in the post-Western age.
To sum up, Warm Peaceful Rise is achievable but it is not easy. It means that China will
have to make quite a lot of hard changes in some of its domestic and foreign policies,
but it will also have a lot of gains, in terms of its strategic aims, if it does so.
The present mix of soft and hard foreign policy rhetoric and behavior is not going to
work for a Warm Peaceful Rise. As a consequence, China needs to make up its mind
about whether it is living in a realist, Hobbesian world, in which case Cold Peaceful
Rise makes sense; or accept as durable and valid Dengs view that the nature of the
international system has changed towards a low risk great power war, and open
opportunities for Warm Peaceful Rise and Development.
It seems to me that China is not going to have a coherent Grand Strategy until its leaders
commit to one or the other of these views. And the history is going to judge harshly a
leadership that raises this idea of a Warm Peaceful Rise, peace and harmony, and make
promises of a warm peaceful rise; but whose performance delivers a Cold Peaceful Rise.
In conclusion, Peaceful Rise Development is a unique idea for Chinas Grand Strategy.
If its leadership could deliver this as a Warm Peaceful Rise, it could claim a truly
historical accomplishment that would mark the end of a Western dominated era of
warlike rise, and the move to a new model of international relations.