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The Chinese government has more control over more wealth than any other government in world history. With the Communist Party controlling the "commanding heights" of the world's second-largest economy, China appears ideally structured to pursue economic statecraft, using economic resources to advance its foreign policy goals. Yet as this book shows, domestic complications frequently constrain Chinese leaders. They have responded with a distinctive approach to economic statecraft: orchestration. Drawing upon extensive field research across Asia and Europe,
Orchestration traces the origins, operations, and effectiveness of China's economic statecraft.
List of contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1. Learning China's History Lessons
- 2. Orchestrating China's Economic Statecraft
- 3. Never Let a Crisis go to Waste: Beijing's Economic Statecraft across Western Europe
- 4. Creating a Region: China's Economic Statecraft in Central and Eastern Europe
- 5. Engaging North Korea
- 6. Crossing Lines: China's Economic Statecraft in Myanmar
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
James Reilly is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney. He has been a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Oxford. He also served as the East Asia Representative of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in China from 2001-2008. His articles have appeared in numerous edited volumes and academic journals, and he is the author of Strong Society, Smart State: The Rise of Public Opinion in China's Japan Policy, and the co-editor of Australia and China at 40.
Summary
The Chinese government has more control over more wealth than any other government in world history. With the Communist Party controlling the "commanding heights" of the world's second-largest economy, China appears ideally structured to pursue economic statecraft, using economic resources to advance its foreign policy goals. Yet as this book shows, domestic complications frequently constrain Chinese leaders. They have responded with a distinctive approach to economic statecraft: orchestration. Drawing upon extensive field research across Asia and Europe, Orchestration traces the origins, operations, and effectiveness of China's economic statecraft.
In this book, James Reilly examines the ideas and institutions at the heart of China's approach to economic statecraft, and assesses Beijing's orchestration in four cases: Myanmar, North Korea, Western Europe, and Central/Eastern Europe. China's unique experience as a planned economy, and then a developmental state, all under a single Leninist party, left Chinese leaders with unchallenged authority over their economy. However, despite successfully mobilizing companies, banks, and local officials to rapidly expand trade and investment abroad, Chinese leaders largely failed to influence key policy decisions overseas. For countries around the world, economic engagement with China thus yields more benefits with fewer costs than generally assumed.
Orchestration engages three central questions. First, why does China deploy economic statecraft in this particular fashion? Secondly, when is China's economic statecraft most effective? Finally, what can the China case tell us about economic statecraft more broadly? The findings show how China uses economic resources to exert influence abroad and identify when Beijing is most effective. By exploring the domestic drivers of China's economic statecraft, this book helps launch a new research field: the comparative study of economic statecraft.
Additional text
Reilly has written a theoretically tight and empirically rigorous analysis of China's foreign economic policies. His social science training and area knowledge lead him to complex findings: First, there is variation in the success of the Chinese Communist Party's foreign economic policies. Second, this variation depends in large measure on whether the Party can find, and then coordinate with, sub-state economic actors with independent but overlapping interests, in the face of variations in state practice in target states. Third, the reality of China's foreign economic practices is quite distant from the U.S. policy makers' unsophisticated stereotype of a monolithic Party-State dictating exploitative outcomes around the world.
