John W. Garver

China's Push Through the South China Sea: The Interaction of Bureaucratic and National Interests

Over the past decade a highly significant development has attracted little scholarly attention: the steady expansion of Chinese power in the South China Sea. There were several excellent studies of this process through the very early 1980s, but these ended well before Chinas push from the Paracel Islands to the Spratly Islands in 1988. Indeed, they disagreed about whether China would actually do this. By the early 1990s China had pushed into the Spratlys and built up a relatively strong base there. It is thus time to look anew at Chinas activities in that region.

Development of China's Overland Transportation Links with Central, South-west and South Asia

The development of Chinas western regions was for a long time hampered by the difficult terrain of the area and its distance from the sea and hence maritime commerce. However China now has the fiscal wherewithal to invest in modern transportation technology and build railways and roads to link its west to the oceans. These networks will bring an acceleration of rates of development in the west to bring it more nearly in line with the east, and are a manifestation of Chinas economic rise. A second dimension is that the new lines of transportation will be bearers of Chinese influence to Central, South-west and South Asia. Trade flows and inter-dependencies will develop, and Chinas role in the regions to its west and south-west will increase.

China and South Asia

Sino-Soviet rapprochement and a reevaluation of Indias China policy by Rajiv Gandhi in 1987 have produced the most cordial Sino-Indian relations in over thirty years. Both Beijing and New Delhi desire still further improvements in bilateral relations but have been stymied by a paucity of parallel interests and by continuing fundamental conflicts over the territorial issue and Chinas role in South Asia. Zhou Enlais 1960 proposal that China accept Indian claims in the eastern Himalayas while India accept Chinas claims in the region southeast of the Karakoram Pass no longer stands. Beijing now calls for Indian concessions in the east in exchange for Chinese concessions in the west. China also views military relations between itself and South Asian countries as legitimate relations well within the purview of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. To New Delhi, they constitute unacceptable threats to Indian security. Because of these continuing fundamental tensions and rivalries, Chinas entente cordiale with Pakistan remains important to Beijing.

Is China Playing a Dual Game in Iran

One aspect of China’s Iran policy suggests a sincere effort to uphold the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) regime in cooperation with the United States. Another suggests that Beijing believes a nuclear-armed or nuclear-armed-capable Iran would serve China’s geopolitical interests in the Persian Gulf region. Is China playing a dual game toward Iran? This question cannot be answered with certainty, but given its importance, a tentative and necessarily somewhat speculative effort to think through the matter is in order. Over the past decade, Beijing has significantly cooperated with the United States in attempting to ensure that Iran does not acquire nuclear weapons in violation of its NPT obligations. In 1997, Beijing withdrew from nuclear cooperation with Iran under heavy U.S. pressure and as part of a deliberate effort to expand Beijing’s cooperation with Washington. Since 2006, China has voted first to have the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report the Iranian nuclear issue to the UN Security Council under Article 7 of the UN Charter dealing with threats to international peace. It then voted ‘‘yes’’ to a series of Security Council resolutions demanding that Iran cease uranium enrichment as well as plutonium reprocessing, and that Tehran cooperate fully with the IAEA’s efforts to verify that Iran’s nuclear programs are not geared to produce nuclear weapons. Each of those Security Council resolutions imposed increasingly broad sanctions (even if only marginally so) against Iran for refusing Security Council demands. This aspect of Beijing’s policy behavior suggests that China has been an emerging strategic partner of the United States.

The Restoration of Sino-Indian Comity following India's Nuclear Tests

Indian justification of its May 1998 nuclear tests in terms of Chinese threats to India prompted a multifacited Chinese campaign pressuring New Delhi to retract its offensive statements. One significant element of Chinese concerns with Indian statements was apprehension over an Indian drift toward alignment with the United States. Beijings efforts were successful and within two years New Delhi had given Beijing the requisite assurances and the normal state of Sino-Indian amity was restored. Sino-Indian interactions in the period after Indias May 1998 tests demonstrates the extreme sensitivity of both powers to the others alignment with the United States in the post-Cold War world.

Asymmetrical Indian and Chinese threat perceptions

India tends to be deeply apprehensive of threats from China, while China appears comparatively unconcerned about threats from India, and finds it difficult to understand why India might perceive China as a threat. Two explanations of this asymmetry are (1) a deliberate and systematic understatement of Chinese concerns about India, resulting from the mobilization function of Chinas public media, and (2) the greater effectiveness of Chinas application of power over the past 50 years.

China's Anti-encirclement Struggle

Abstract Confronted during the first decade of the twenty-first century with the rapidly burgeoning US-Indian security partnership and then by the emergence of the India-Japan security relationship, Beijing struggled to respond. After initially attempting to court India away from a too-close partnership with the United States in the first half of the decade, Beijing shifted to a more coercive approach around the end of 2005. One key mechanism used to pressure India was psychological war waged via the Internet raising the possibility of another Sino-Indian war. As China shifted from a soft to a hard-line approach toward India, policy toward Japan was moving in the opposite direction. After keeping relations with Japan in the freezer during the early part of the decade, around 2006, Beijing shifted gear and adopted a much more conciliatory approach. The authors hypothesize that these simultaneous shifts in Sino-Indian and Sino-Japanese relations were not coincidence but predicated instead on an understanding that simultaneous efforts to pressure Japan and India could drive those countries further together.

The Sino-Soviet Territorial Dispute in the Pamir Mountains Region

The single largest territorial issue explicitly in dispute between China and the Soviet Union is in the region of the Pamir Mountains-just north of Afghanistans narrow Wakhan corridor. The nature of this dispute is important because it impinges on the ease with which major sources of tension between the two countries may be eliminated. Moreover, the potential resolutions of this issue have important geo-political implications for the neighbouring countries of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Chinese Communist Party and the Collapse of Soviet Communism

The collapse first of Communist rule of the USSR and then of the USSR itself was without question one of the pivotal events of the era. Since Chinas 20th-century history has been so deeply influenced by Soviet developments, it is important to examine the impact of these events on China. This article asks, first, whether the top leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), had a deliberate policy towards the decline of Soviet Communism, and if so, what was the nature of that policy? Did the CCP attempt to assist their comrades in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) as the latter battled for survival during 1990 and 1991?

India, China, The United States, Tibet, and The Origins of the 1962 War

The 1962 war between India and China had a profound and wideranging impact. It finally destroyed Nehru’s vision of pan-Asian unity to create a new, post-colonial order. It gravely weakened the Nehruvian– Gandhian vision of India prevailing in the world by virtue of its moral example, and instructed Indian opinion in the harsh realities of international politics. In so doing, the 1962 war pushed India onto the road of military power which it still travels today. The 1962 war thrust China into alignment with Pakistan, thereby creating one of the most durable elements of Asian international politics. It set India and China on a twenty-five year long confrontation, which the leaders of both sides are still struggling to undo. It forged an abiding Indian apprehension of China that still deeply colors India’s response to China’s