But why Indo-Pacific? Basically, the United States wants to use India and Japan’s contradiction with China to put more pressures on China42 and to consolidate its strategic superiority in both regions. Some Chinese analysts argued that the most important factor in this strategy is India. Indo-Pacific strategy actually is “India–Asia-Pacific strategy”. This is the real way to surpass Obama’s Asia Rebalance stra tegy. But one reason why India was picked up as the main instrument for this strategy is that India was alarmed by China’s BRI considering it a strategy of geopolitical expansion to harm India’s interest in the region. Therefore, the most effective way to balance out this strategy is to stabilize China’s relations with India and encourage India to adhere to its strategic autonomy. India has not publically backed the Indo-Pacific strategy. It still could make a different strategic choice. To pull India over, China would be better not to incorporate its cooperative projects with India under the scheme of BRI. Another possible way to pull this strategy apart is to improve relations with Japan to include Japan in the BRI.43 Either way, the focus of China’s response to the Indo-Pacific strategy should be on improving relations with its key peripheral countries.
While attributing the deterioration of China’s peripheral environment to the United States is still the mainstream thinking in Chinese perception, increasingly Chinese analysts began to find causes for China’s periphery change in China itself. For some analysts, “China factor” is the main driving force to cause the environmental transformation in Asia-Pacific. The substantial increase in China’s comprehensive national power has changed the regional geopolitics. Almost all countries in the region, no matter what their relationship with China is, have reacted to China’s rise. In particular, the unexpected rapid improvement of China’s military might has changed the geopolitical power structure in the region.44 According to one scholar, in terms of purchasing power, China’s military spending is very close to that of the United States. Given the fact that the United State has global military commitments and China does not, one can argue that China could spend much more than the U.S. military in the region.45 That of course could make China’s neighboring countries unsettled and concerned.
Other scholars agree that the complex periphery environment China is facing now was mainly caused by China’s rise, so-called “China-driven”. This is inevitable during the process of rise. Because of China’s rise, its periphery environment has entered a period of transition. The dominant power, major power, and middle and small powers are bound to react to China’s rise in a more or less negative way. China has to find a way to cross this threshold before China can truly rise peacefully. How long will this kind of situation last? Not until China has completed its rise. In other words, the current problems were largely caused by the fact that China is getting stronger, but not strong enough. This could be called the “dilemma of rise”46 or “China syndrome”.
As a result of this dilemma, different from the past when the regional flashing points usually did not directly involve China, now China often is at the center of the conflict.47 On the other hand, while the challenges facing China are bigger and more rigorous, China’s capacity of handling the challenge is also becoming bigger. Consequently, China’s rapid rise has directly led to the emergence of “dual centers” structure of China and United States in the region.48
That is exactly why some Chinese observers are more optimistic about the continuation of China’s period of strategic opportunities. They point out that one significant change of the content and condition in the concept of the period of strategic opportunities (PSO) is that the validity of the strategic opportunity is more and more dependent on China itself rather than on other forces. As long as China can sustain its strong economic growth, the period of strategic opportunities can also continue as China’s development per se is the fundamental foundation for the PSOs.49 Consequently, China could no longer wait for others to spare a PSO for China as it was the case in the post-9/11 period. China needs to do more to shape its periphery environment and create PSOs.
Some analysts pay more attention to the function of mutual action and reaction between China and key players in the region in bringing about changes in China’s periphery. On the one hand, with its rise, China is seeking more and broader interests. On the other hand, China’s expansion of its interest caused strong reaction from the concerned countries in the region. The typical example is the rise of tension on the South China Sea issue. In other words, the concerned countries in and outside of the region formed a “quasi-consensus” and “quasi-coalition” to deal with a “strong China”.50 Others saw the interaction between the U.S. Asia Rebalance and China’s response. The U.S. Asia Rebalance strategy stimulated some of China’s neighboring countries to be more willing to take risks to challenge and provoke China causing tensions in the region. China’s rightful and legitimate response to these provocations, however, was often perceived and described as “assertive”, “aggressive” and “overreacting”, with the purpose of kicking U.S. out of the region.51 The mutual interaction is also related to China’s domestic development which often influences the configuration of its periphery. While China needs a stable and prosperous periphery, the periphery also needs a stable and prosperous China. Historically, a stable and prosperous China often led to a stable and prosperous periphery thus constituting a community of common destiny.52
How to Deal with Change: Reactively or Proactively?
Then how to deal with an ever-changing periphery? In terms of priority, theoretically Chinese foreign policy has long followed the formula articulated by Hu Jintao: “Big powers are the key, neighbors are paramount, developing countries are the foundation, and multilateralism is an important stage.”53 Although periphery is defined as “paramount”, in reality periphery did not necessarily enjoy the priority position in China’s overall diplomacy. Starting from the Jiang Zemin period, the priority of China’s diplomacy was often put on major power relations, particularly the relations with the United States, which was considered the most important among priorities (zhong zhong zhi zhong). The thinking behind this is that as long as China can handle Sino-American relations well, other relationships would fall into place.
This emphasis began to change during Xi Jinping era. He has attached unprecedented importance to peripheral diplomacy. As an expert in a government think tank put it: “Since the 18th Party Congress, the strategic significance of periphery to China has been further demonstrated and the party central committee has increasingly paid more attention to the periphery.”54 In October 2013, for the first time ever, a high-level symposium exclusively dedicated to China’s periphery diplomacy was held in Beijing. The meeting was attended by all the standing committee members of the CCP’s politburo and almost the entire foreign policy establishment in the Chinese government. Xi Jinping personally chaired the meeting and delivered a keynote speech. This is indeed unprecedented in China’s foreign policy history. Normally, the Chinese government only holds working conferences to discuss foreign policy in general, not specific area or specific region of foreign policy. This highlights the critical importance and urgency that the Chinese leadership attaches to peripheral diplomacy. As Xi put it, periphery has an extremely important strategic significance for China in terms of its geographical position, natural environment and mutual relations.55
In practice, top Chinese leaders visited China’s periphery with unprecedented intensity covering the entire “grand periphery”.56 For example, both Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang’s maiden foreign visits after they became top leaders at the 18th Party Congress were to China’s neighboring countries. The first country Xi Jinping visited is Russia while Li Keqiang made his first trip to India. This tendency continued after the 19th Party Congress in 2017. Immediately after the party congress, Chinese leaders including Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang swarmed out to visit China’s neighboring countries and attend regional multilateral economic forums. Most of China’s major diplomatic initiatives such as AIIB and BRI were all aimed at peripheral countries at least initially. For instance, BRI initially included Central Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia.57
In the Chinese discourse of foreign policy, peripheral diplomacy began to be considered to be at least as important as, if not more than, the major