EAI Fellows Program Working Paper Series No.47

 

Author

Ji-Young Lee is an Assistant Professor of School of International Service, American University. Dr. Lee’s research focuses on East Asian international relations, security, and diplomatic history. Her first book examines Chinese hegemony in early modern East Asia and is currently under review. Her second project investigates how China’s rise impacts the American-led international order, specifically through the lens of the U.S.-ROK alliance and China. At SIS, she teaches courses on Asian international politics, Korean politics and foreign policy, and North Korea and international security. Prior to AU, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Politics and East Asian Studies at Oberlin College, where she also taught as a visiting assistant professor. She was a POSCO visiting fellow at the East-West Center and a non-resident James Kelly Korean Studies Fellow with the Pacific Forum Center for Strategic and International Studies. Currently, she is a Korea Foundation-Mansfield Foundation scholar of the U.S.-Korea Scholar-Policymaker Nexus program.

 

 

---

 

 

With the growth of China’s relative power vis-à-vis the United States, many wonder whether China will replace the United States as the leading power in Asia. As one way to think about this debate, we can historicize the rise of China in the broader view of Asian international relations. Prior to the nineteenth century, the rise of a new Chinese state was always one of the most important sources of international change in the East Asian states system. It is arguable that China’s East Asian neighbors Japan and Korea had dealt with the “rising China question” several times prior to the twenty-first century. Is it possible then that we can identify recurring historical patterns in Asian international relations that may help elucidate today’s questions? China was the sole great power for centuries in East Asia. How does this affect the process of China’s rise now in the American-led hegemonic order? What policy-relevant lessons can we draw from the overall pattern of the way the Chinese hegemonic order worked during the early modern period that many scholars consider a period of “Asia’s long peace”?

 

In this paper, I approach the question of China’s rise today historically, and explore its implications for international order, especially in the areas of the U.S. alliance system in East Asia. The goal is neither to suggest that history will repeat itself, nor to predict that a particular future scenario will hold. Rather, the paper surveys how the past history of the Sino-centric tribute system is contributing to the shaping of the rise of China today. It then challenges two popular notions that inform the current debate about a rising China. One is the idea that China’s growing power will reestablish regional hegemony on the model of a Sino-centric tribute system, and the other is that Japan and South Korea should make natural security partners against a rising China.

 

More specifically, I make the following two claims. First, the tribute system is not a notion that is comparable with the concept of sovereignty upon which the existing international system is built. As such, any invocation of this notion tends to be associated with China’s revisionist intentions against the sovereignty norms in today’s international politics. Beijing’s own invocation of its imperial past in the context of its territorial claims over the South China Sea and the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands have, for example, contributed to the speculation that China is seeking to change the status quo and challenging the liberal principles that the current international order rests on. Second, historicizing China’s rise highlights the logic of geopolitics found in Asian history as a mechanism for continuity. By the logic of geopolitics, I mean the politics arising from the geostrategic location of the Korean peninsula as the “bridge” between China and Japan. I argue that an in-depth study on the recurring dynamics in Japan and Korea’s responses to imperial China suggests that China’s growing power and influence may affect America’s alliance system, not by openly challenging the U.S. and its allies, but by creating a structural condition for further highlighting the differences in Japanese and Korean responses to a rising China. Further, the overall pattern of international conflicts in China-Japan-Korea relations indicates that the Sino-Japanese strategic rivalry and the contingency situation over North Korea will be troubling hotspots for Asian security, possibly entrapping the United States and China in an unwanted military confrontation.

 

A mention of the scope conditions of this study is in order. I primarily look at the early modern period in Asian history and the major international events associated with the Chinese hegemonic order between the fourteenth and the end of the eighteenth centuries (the Ming and High Qing periods in China; the Koryo and Choson periods in Korea; the Muromachi, Senkoku, Tokugawa periods in Japan). Rather than presenting details of the historical study, the paper will focus on drawing its key insights. The remainder of the paper proceeds as follows. In the first section, I will discuss how the images of the past Sino-centric tribute system are affecting China’s rise today, while using three recent events as a window into what I call the “politics of the tribute system” in contemporary Asian politics. In the second section, I present my argument about what the tribute system was, challenging some of the existing images that have shaped the debate on a rising China. The third section discusses the lessons drawn from research on China-Japan-Korea relational patterns in early modern East Asia for a policy-relevant analysis that speaks to the contemporary debate on the future of U.S. alliance system and a rising China in East Asia.

 

The Politics of the Sino-centric Tribute System and a Rising China Today

 

In recent years, in both popular dialogue and academic discourse, a Sino-centric tribute system and China’s imperial past are increasingly perceived as associated with China’s future intentions. It is argued that a growing Chinese power will establish regional hegemony modeled on the tribute system. International relations scholar Charles Kupchan notes, “China might attempt to exercise a brand of regional hegemony modeled on the tribute system.” In popular dialogue, too, China’s invocation of its imperial past in territorial disputes has led many to suspect that China intends to resurrect “a new face to China’s ancient tributary system where China is the central power and Beijing is the global political pole.”

 

These speculations may come as little surprise as people wonder how China will use its power in the future. China’s own invocations of the Sino-centric tribute system took place in the process of China’s engagement with the world, with the prime example being the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony. China chose the glamor of the Tang empire (618-907) and the Ming empire (1368-1644) as key themes in the ceremony in order to convey the message to the world that a ‘real China’ is powerful, confident, prosperous and cosmopolitan. The tributary missions by Zheng He during the Ming period were to highlight the harmony that Confucian values lend to the world, and that China’s rise is not a threat.

 

At a deeper level, the discourse on the tribute system is being animated in part because China is in the process of defining a new great power identity with its newly acquired power and wealth in the twenty-first century. It is seeking inspiration from an idealized version of its imperial past, including the influence and respect it enjoyed from its neighbors during earlier centuries. President Xi Jinping defines China’s foreign policy as serving “the ‘Two Centuries’ objective to realize the great rejuvenation of Chinese nation.” The “Chinese Dream” seeks to promote China’s cultural soft power and modern Chinese values, while he emphasizes that “China should be portrayed as a civilized country featuring rich history, ethnic unity, cultural diversity, and as an oriental power with good government, developed economy, cultural prosperity, national unity and beautiful mountains and rivers.” China’s dream is presented as a common dream of all of Asia. Further, the official China Daily writes, “The realization of the Chinese Dream is conducive to facilitating the rejuvenation of Asia.”

 

How about other East Asian neighboring powers’ views on China’s imperial past and the Sino-centric tribute system? How do these notions affect their perceptions of China’s rise? Despite China’s intended message of a peaceful rise, it appears that the discourse on the tribute system is interpreted as China’s intention of changing the status quo, while sometimes contributing to shifts in neighboring powers’ views on the rise of China. There are three events that can provide us with a potential window into this dynamics: the Koguryo dispute between China and the two Koreas, the territorial disputes over the South China Sea, and the dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands between China and Japan. What emerges from the developments of these events is as follows.

 

First, the notion of the Sino-centric system is not simply a question of China’s great power identity, but is also associated with the identity politics of its neighboring countries. The Koguryo dispute shows that differing interpretations over the history related to the tribute system can sensitize what Mitzen called “ontological security.” Ontological security refers to the need of a state to “experience oneself as a whole, continuous person in time… in order to realize a sense of agency.” In other words, given that Koreans have long regarded Koguryo (which existed from 37 BC to AD 668) as the fiercely independent Korean state, the claim that Koguryo was a provincial vassal kingdom of China threatened a Korean sense of ontological security. This flare-up between South Korea and China had substantial effects on the South Korean perception of the rise of China as a potential threat to their national security, a shift from its earlier excitement about China’s rise in Asia. An April 2004 Korea Herald poll found that 63 percent of South Korea’s ruling party members viewed China as its most important diplomatic partner. In August, however, a similar poll showed that that less than 6 percent of South Korea’s National Assembly members regarded China as their country’s most valuable diplomatic partner.

 

Second, the Sino-centric tribute system is juxtaposed with the rules and norms of the existing international law as exemplified by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) in the case of the disputes over the South China Sea. In the process of parties to the disputes presenting their own claims, China’s invocation of the territorial rights “since ancient times” was considered as challenging international law and the liberal principles that the existing international order rests on. The disputes resulted in “a rapid dissipation of China’s ‘soft power’” that existed leading up to the Beijing Olympics. Today, China’s neighbors think about the link between China’s imperial past and its current ambitions, where “the main distinguishing feature of Zheng He’s voyages was the size of the vessels and numbers of soldiers they carried, enabling China to impose its will on some lesser territories.” Arguably, the heightened threat perceptions felt by Southeast Asian countries toward a rising China have led to the tightening of their security ties with the United States as part of “rebalancing to Asia” strategy. Third, another example of the linkage between the tribute system and a rising China occurred in June 2013, when China disputed Japan’s sovereignty of Okinawa on the grounds that the Ryukyu kingdom paid tribute to imperial China. Although the Chinese government involvement with this assertion is a question, cases such as these matter, because of its potential to escalate the tension between China and Japan over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands dispute into a crisis mode...(Continued)