Andrew Scobell

Rethinking China's Strategy in Asia and Beyond: Can We All Get It Right?

A s Steven Levine astutely observed back in 1984, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was “a regional power without a regional policy.”1 Indeed, China was without an Asia strategy until the end of the Cold War. While a number of books have examined the rise of China in the Asian context or looked at Beijing’s relations with its neighbors, until now there has not been a study focused on how China thinks about Asia. Gilbert Rozman’s book Chinese Strategic Thought toward Asia is, therefore, an important book. Strategy is probably the most overused and least defined word in the lexicon of the U.S. national security community. The closest Rozman comes to clarifying what he means by the term “strategic thought” appears well into the volume when he says he is referring to “ideas...[about the] means to realize ends” (p. 68). What Rozman seems to mean by the term is what is widely known as “grand strategy” (pp. 2, 3). In essence, the book is a thoughtful and comprehensive overview of big-picture thinking about Asia in post-Mao China. There is probably no scholar better equipped to tackle this topic. Rozman has written extensively on Chinese analyses of the countries on China’s periphery and those states’ analyses of China. The result is a tour de force treatment organized chronologically and geographically with a stand-alone overview introductory chapter. The first part consists of four chapters that divide Chinese thinking into four periods. Chapter 2 examines the decade of the 1980s, chapters 3 and 4 survey the 1990s, and chapter 5 explores the 2000s. The latter part of the book examines Chinese thinking toward Asian countries or subregions. There are separate chapters on Japan and Korea, Russia shares