China: strategic goals and international relations culture
China has learned much from its history, and the rest of the world
should too. Despite the pressures placed on China in the nineteenth
century, the PRC remains the last great empire, in that it rules over
subject non-Chinese peoples with ancient cultures of their own. In
some areas these subject peoples still constitute a majority (in Tibet
and Xinjiang); in others they are now a minority (Inner Mongolia and
Yunnan). As in the past, it is state policy to increase Han Chinese set-
tlement in all these nominally autonomous areas to ensure they remain
forever Chinese. China’s policy in the present-day context should be
seen for what it is: a continuation of the means traditionally used to
extend Chinese imperial rule through migration and administrative
controls. In this sense Chinese policy carries with it expansionist
implications.
The corollary to China’s historical expansionism is that China
has been remarkably reluctant to surrender any territory gained. Suc-
cessive Chinese dynasties tried to reconquer Vietnam, the only
formerly directly administered territory in Southeast Asia ‘lost’ to the
Chinese empire. Chinese of all political persuasions are quite unsym-
pathetic to Tibetan aspirations for independence, while the more
recent ‘loss’ of (Outer) Mongolia and the Russian Far East still rankles.
These two areas are probably now irretrievable, but two others are not:
Taiwan and the islands of the South China Sea.
This brings us to a second historical lesson that Chinese strategic
thinkers have taken very much to heart: the Chinese empire has been
strongest (and thus most strategically invulnerable) when it has been
united. A divided China, whether into competing empires (usually
north and south), or when riven by internal disunity (as during the
great rebellions of the mid-nineteenth century), was a weak China
that invited humiliation and dismemberment. The importance of
A Short History of China and Southeast Asia