Increasing power is not the best explanation for China’s recent actions.
“Chinese assertiveness” has become an infamous phrase – it is regularly used by media, pundits, and politicians, yet there is little scholarly work that would clarify the meaning of the concept. A similar situation exists when it comes to China’s power. Although it is generally assumed that “China is rising,” there are surprisingly few systematic studies of China’s power being done comprehensively and rigorously.
As such, we have ended up with the proposition that China is “assertive” and that the ongoing “power shift” is the reason why. In reality, we do not know which Chinese actions, precisely, fall within the “assertive” label or what this label actually means. Similarly, we do not know how much power China has acquired, and we are not even sure how to assess China’s power. Worse, there is not even much ongoing discussion about these questions.
To begin with, an “assertive” action is one when China (in this case) actively pursues its interests and acts boldly toward achieving its goals, even if they contradict the interests of other actors. An assertive action by China must be significantly different from both the actions of other countries and previous norms. Hence, when talking about Chinese assertiveness, we talk about new and unique Chinese behavior, which is qualitatively and/or quantitatively different from the behavior of other countries.
Looking for the policy cases which fulfil these criteria in the area of the South China Sea, we first notice that the events from the years 2009-2010 – when the “assertive” discourse started developing – do not meet them. Only since 2011 can we find cases when China acted assertively. Altogether, the book identifies five such examples: cable cutting incidents, the Scarborough Shoal stand-off, the Second Thomas Shoal stand-off, the oil rig incident, and land reclamation and militarization of Chinese outposts.
These five cases should serve as the basis for the study of how and why China acted “assertively” in the South China Sea.
There have been various explanations dealing with the topic of why China has acted assertively; however, no rigorous testing has been done so far. The explanation that growing power of China made it act assertively has been the most influential theory, and therefore it is also at the center of the book. The book first builds a comprehensive and multidimensional model of power, which includes three levels (international, state, domestic) and eights sources of power: military, economy, national performance, international institutional setting, geopolitics, position in the international economy, domestic legitimacy, and soft power.
