The nation called G2, China, the most influential nation in the world today 2012, has soared their power and national prestige to the top of the world. Accordingly, the international role of China has been even with the United State in dealing with in...
The nation called G2, China, the most influential nation in the world today 2012, has soared their power and national prestige to the top of the world. Accordingly, the international role of China has been even with the United State in dealing with international affairs. These facts attract the wide varieties of Scholars’ interest and make it worth for them to study china’s future and announce analytical research papers of China. Overproduced and inconsistent opinions of the research papers on China’s future path even make us confused enough. Therefore, more scientific research and objective description on China are demanded.
The purpose of this research paper is, by assessing the leading factors that has formed the China’s military and nuclear strategy and by applying the common international politics theories, to discuss that the direction of China’s military policy and nuclear strategy is globally-centered nation oriented beyond regional-centered nation.
Regarding the research method of this paper, I, the author, chose offensive realism as this topic deals national security which includes the politics and military related subjects. The offensive realism mainly states the phenomenon that at the situation of anarchy in world political system, maximizing the nation’s viability is universal character. Consequently, the nation, especially that has superiority over other nations, will attempt to dominate force among the nations all over the world.
China had been one of the strongest nations until it was founded in 1949; however, it became a semi-colonial state for a century long. Its desperation to overcome this national disgrace history of China, it certainly makes constant effort to recapture its national position again. As the part of the efforts, the hypothesis is to strengthen the economy and military power of the nation. Thus, the author tries to address the offensive realism as the basic theory in order to describe the China’s forward steps on becoming hegemonic nation and the backgrounds of establishing military policy and nuclear strategy.
To successfully address these issues, the author has comprehensively studied the universal theories of the policy decision making process to explain the nature of China’s military policy by creating ‘military policy decision frame work.’ Furthermore, as the set of the study, the internationally, domestically, and individually separated analytical levels facilitated to find the factors affecting China’s military policies.
As the result of the research, the found factors are the threats of national security from the outer world, the internal environment of politics and dynamic relationships among power elites, and leaders’ individual point of view towards national security and military thought. China’s periodic characteristics of military policies and nuclear strategies based on these factors are following;
In the days of Mao Zedong, China faced the military threats from the United States in 1950s and 1960s, Soviet Union in 1960s and 1970s. Additionally, the unstable political environment was incurred by the unrealistic grandiloquent campaigns such as ‘the Great Leap Forward’ and ‘the Cultural Revolution’. Mao Zedong’s option was to rule over the nation with ‘the wartime military system policy’ which was based on ‘the inevitable war theory’ came out from Marxism and Leninism, and to select ‘the minimum deterrence strategy’ with limited nuclear weaponry production technologies.
Thanks to the US-Soviet Union d?tente, China enjoyed the relatively stable periods, developing national economy rather than focusing on strengthening the defense power in the time of Deng Xiaoping. He also changed military posture as ‘the peace time military policy’ insisting a total war is avoidable. However, he attempted to recover the inferior conventional weapons from continuing the development of the nuclear technology, setting the ‘limited deterrence strategy’ which allows limited counter attack.
In the days of Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin, China under international situation of the Post Cold war faced the threats of traditional and non-traditional national security which makes China, with accumulated economy, pursue military policy that allows it to respond both traditional and non-traditional military threats since Gulf War of 1991. Especially, from this point, China’s characteristics of military policy had changed from defense-oriented to greater power oriented policy which is to secure and enhance their national interests. Moreover, a developed nuclear technology with an elaborate targeting method and an increase in the number of nuclear warheads finally consented to ‘new limited deterrence strategy.’
As described above, backtracking and synthesis study on the process of transforming the characteristics of nuclear and military policies in each period concludes that China has been consistently employed the internationally centered nation oriented policy which brought from offensive realism which justifies an superpower country over the world. These efforts are to be continued and as a result, China has been becoming a top level nation in the world transcending a centered Asian country as we see in 2012.
Historically, China has long and rich cultural background as well as a vast land space and populations. These factors lead Chinese to believe in Sino-centrism which make them feel race chauvinistic mind and formed their view of the world. These days, China itself conducts study on its future position and how to set and control the world order. To achieve this, China is on seeking wisdoms from their great ancestors as well as other nation’s history which ever ruled the world. The recent program ‘大國?起’ broadcasted by CCTV is an example of this effort.
International society includes South Korea must scrupulously observe China’s proceeding courses and devise a proper steps and creative ideas to induce positive and desirable directions of China's policies from its offensive realism which takes a view of pessimistic future.
Especially in the case of South Korea, spent thousands of history and boarders with China, it ought to analyze and observe China’s polices more accurately ever in order to generate desirable world order with China for its national security and interests.