Resident Scholar  Claude E. Barfield

It is difficult, and even misleading, to separate the evolution of China's (also known as the People's Republic of China and hereinafter "the PRC") international trade policy from other elements of Chinese foreign policy, particularly with regard to Asia. Given the centralized, authoritarian nature of PRC governance, it is natural for China's top leaders to plan and execute trade policy as an instrument of larger political and security goals. This Article first will attempt to place PRC international economic policy within the evolution of broader foreign and security policy characteristics and goals. It will then analyze in more detail the history of Chinese trade policy over the past decade.

Throughout much of the postwar era, it has been said that China was "a regional power without a regional policy." Even though the bulk of its important relations were with Asian nations, Chinese leaders tended to view regional activities in terms of wider ideological and political aims such as support for revolutionary and insurgent movements, opposition to American imperialism, and leadership of the Third World against developed-country hegemony. Needless to say, policies to support Marxist revolutionaries and insurgents--as well as aggressive stances on a multitude of border disputes--at times provoked great hostility from some of its Asian neighbors and have left lasting historical memories, particularly in the cases of India, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Even after Chinese foreign and economic policy changed dramatically, events conspired to maintain and even heighten Asian concerns about the "China threat." First, of course, was the brutal suppression of students and civilians in the 1989 Tiananmen incident; the second came with the clumsy saber-rattling in 1995-1996 in the Taiwan Straits, combined with a forceful assertion of its rights over disputed territory in the South China Sea. . . .

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Claude Barfield is a resident scholar at AEI.