Abstract
A central focus of China’s grand strategy has been to reassure other states that its rise is non-threatening. Yet, a large theoretical literature indicates that rising states’ reassurance signals should not be credible. Rising powers with hostile intentions have a strong incentive to misrepresent by behaving cooperatively, in order to avoid a balancing response from other states.This chapter identifies two ways in which the United States, by posing a threat to Russia, has facilitated China’s credible reassurance of Russia since the end of the Cold War. First, the presence of the US has reduced China’s incentive to misrepresent any hostile intentions toward Russia it might hypothetically hold, making China’s cooperative actions toward Russia more credible signals of its long-term intentions. Second, the US places enduring constraints over China’s behavior, which incentivizes China’s continued cooperation with Russia. These novel theoretical mechanisms help account for both Russia’s increasingly optimistic beliefs about China’s intentions and increasing China-Russia cooperation in the post-Cold War era, which realist balance of power and threat mechanisms cannot.
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Notes
- 1.
Intentions refer to the actions an actor plans to take in the future under a given set of external incentives and constraints. They contrast with goals, which are a state’s ultimate ends; that is, goals are primitive preferences that inhere to the actor and are exogenous to the incentives and constraints of its external environment (Glaser 2010: 32). Two states’ goals are compatible to the extent that the realization of one’s goals advances (or at least does not impede) the other’s. Similarly, an action is cooperative to the extent that it advances the receiver’s goals, whereas non-cooperative actions impede the receiver’s goals. Benign intentions therefore imply that the sender will behave cooperatively under an anticipated set of future conditions, whereas hostile intentions imply non-cooperative future behavior.
- 2.
On this claim, see Ross (2020).
- 3.
This theoretical argument is adapted from Yoder (2020).
- 4.
For a formalization of these mechanisms, see Yoder (2020).
- 5.
See the distinction between intentions and goals in note 1.
- 6.
Importantly, this definition of intentions is taken from the realist literature that claims that intentions are fundamentally unknowable, and therefore engages balance-of-power realists on their own terms. See Rosato (2015: 52–53).
- 7.
For an expanded version of this case study, see Yoder (2020).
- 8.
This is also borne out in Russia’s more recent support of China’s “Belt-and-Road Initiative” for regional infrastructure investment that includes Central Asia (Charap et al. 2017).
- 9.
In addition, the Trump administration escalated US confrontation with China over cybersecurity issues, the South China Sea, China’s treatment of the Uyghur population of Xinjiang province, and the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic (Busby and Monten 2021).
- 10.
Since 2016, China and Russia have also negotiated linkages between China’s BRI and Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union and reached numerous agreements on trade, finance, and energy (Foot and King 2021: 216).
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Yoder, B.K. (2022). The US Factor in China’s Successful Reassurance of Russia. In: Yoder, B.K. (eds) The United States and Contemporary China-Russia Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93982-3_8
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