Why the rising China needs alliances
| Author | Muhammad Ali Baig |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/2057891120965712 |
| Published date | 01 December 2022 |
| Date | 01 December 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Mostly East Asian Politics (including Southeast and Central) |
Why the rising China
needs alliances
Muhammad Ali Baig
National Defence University, Pakistan
Abstract
Alliances remain at the heart of history, since they serve states in achieving geopolitical needs and
securing grand strategic necessities. Apart from strategic considerations, the article aspires to
highlight the psychological motivation for conceiving and forming alliances. It argues alliances to be
the basic instrument in ensuring survival and elaborates the psychological efficacy and utility in
employing the same device in gaining and sustaining the status of a functional great power. This
article addresses the most significant development in modern times, i.e. rising China and its pursuit
to become a pro-active great power, whilst greatly drawing from its strategic history in such
endeavours. It explores the ‘China Threat’, and argues that China is likely to enter into alliances
based on its geopolitical necessities by engaging its armed forces regionally, most likely in its near
abroad. The article interprets China’s Belt and Road Initiative as a soft alliance and predicts the
precursors of a military alliance.
Keywords
alliances, China Threat, geopolitics, rising China, strategic history
Introduction
For structural realists, a bipolar wo rld order is the most stable one, as the two poles be have
rationally, predominantly employing deterrence and containment in ensuring survival and pursuing
their strategic objectives.
1
However, in contemporary times, we are likely to witness a multipolar
international structure. The United States is striving to maintain its rule, China is rising to claiming
its share of the world power (Allison, 2015, 2017; Dobbins, 2012; Etzioni, 2013; Foot, 2009) and
Russia is reviving and resurging on the international horizon (Gao, 2018; Parafianowicz, 2017;
Tsvetkova et al., 2016). Being multipolar does not refer to irrational poles, but the unbalanced
balance likely will be balanced by bilateral or multilateral alliances, pacts, agreements, etc. In other
words, we may learn to live in a world where no power equates the other. However, at the same
Corresponding author:
Muhammad Ali Baig, National Defence University, Sector E-9 Islamabad, 44000 Pakistan.
Email: mmab11@gmail.com
Asian Journal of Comparative Politics
ªThe Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/2057891120965712
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2022, Vol. 7(4) 1095–1114
Mostly East Asian Politics (including Southeast and Central)
time, no power will be powerful enough to overpower the other. In current times, China is not a
power that could effectively project power well beyond its shores, overpower others, dictate its
terms or coerce and compel others to do its will. In ensuring its survival and becoming such a great
power, while sustaining its self-proclaimed peaceful rise, China needs alliances.
The world witnessed the catastrophic outcome of secret alliances before the initiation of the
First World War and the perils of hidden protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939
(Stackelberg, 2007: 148–149; Vermeiren, 2016: 49–72). However, alignments, re-alignments and
the drawing of new lines is a recurrent aspect of international relations. Though such inter-state
business must follow diplomatic norms and the new alliances in the contemporary world must
avoid such treacherous practices, this likely will not happen since states tend to achieve policy
objectives by exploiting the latter part of the Von Clausewitzian axiom, i.e. “by other means.”
2
Yet, the apparent contours of Chinese foreign policy orientation reveal that it is not likely to enter
into military alliances, as it intends to rise peacefully.
3
Nonetheless, peace can only be ensured by
having a big stick in one’s hand. Vegetius put it quite rightly that si vis pacem, para bellum, which
can be roughly translated as if you want peace, prepare for war (Milner, 2001: 63). I aver that
sooner or later, alliances based on defence and military footings will become an imperative for
China to ensure its survival and ensure its self-proclaimed peaceful rise. Historically, for great
powers such as China, “peace” is a subjective term that stems from its strategic and psychological
history. In other words, perhaps, Chinese strategic psychology interprets Pax Sinica (Prifti, 2014:
158) as the most peaceful peace, and to accomplish that it will likely go to great lengths.
There exists a good old axiom that ‘united we stand, divided we fall’. The dictum has its roots in
the ancient history of civilization, when human beings used to live in marginal societies and tribes.
In such a nomadic culture, the relatively small sets of people sought their redemption in forming
groups, as together they felt secure. However, initially, wild animals affected the psychology of
humans and greatly moulded the latter’s threat perception in avoiding being mauled. At that time,
humans could not overpower the wild species and adapted as such. Later, humanity progressed by
innovation and achieved a certain level of security by erecting walls and establishing fortifications,
thus effectively restricting the threat. However, as society enlarged and formed cities, city-states,
states and empires, the threat transformed from wild animals to civilized humans.
Apart from this progression, the human psychology remained focused on forming groups, large
or small, to calm their inherent fear. The transformation of threat also transformed the threat
perception, and the smaller or weaker groups began to feel fear of being overrun by the relatively
powerful. However, the unit of analysis in assessing the vulnerability or capability of a given group
could only be measured by numbers. Thus, a power shift could be predicted in favour of the group
or combined groups with large numbers. It was the dawn of alliance formation and led historians
and strategists to interpret the massed number of troops as the First Generation of Warfare or 1GW
(Lind, 2004: 12).
Alliances erected for defence and military purposes have a long history in serving the foreign
policy interests of nations and states. However, an alliance is not always initiated by the weak; the
powerful state can also take the initiative with the aim of securing the weak against potential
aggressors, ostensibly in the name of morality – International Relations scholars call this balancing
(Mearsheimer, 2001: 156–157). For instance, the United States signed a Mutual Defence Assis-
tance Agreement with Pakistan in December 1950, and provided platforms including the Baghdad
Pact, later called the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), and the South East Asian Treaty
Organization (SEATO) (Cheema, 1990: 119, 136–144). The US also entered into Australia,
1096 Asian Journal of Comparative Politics 7(4)
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