This paper attempts to clarify why the political term, “the 3 million square kilometers of Chinese marine territory,” formed in Chinese political discourse by close examination of Chinese domestic politics from 1980 to 1996, which the literature has not yet fully addressed. It also discusses how Chinese experts calculated the legal coherence between the term and the United Nations of Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). One finding is that then-director of the State Oceanic Agency, Ruo Yuru, who believed that China lagged behind neighboring countries in ensuring maritime rights in the multiple maritime zones China could claim under UNCLOS, proposed the term “300 million square meters of Chinese marine territory” in 1984 to obtain domestic support for maritime development policy. The term, which conflates territorial water, contiguous zone, exclusive economic zone, and continental shelf into “un-unified space” under Chinese jurisdiction, was designed to appeal broadly to Chinese domestic actors who were unfamiliar with UNCLOS and who had focused on land development rather than the sea. Although Ruo’s conception of the “300 million square meters of Chinese marine territory” maintained compliance with the legal difference between sovereignty and sovereign rights defined by UNCLOS, the term may shape the views of Chinese actors in these maritime zones who perceive it as the “sovereign territory” of China because the different maritime zones defined by UNCLOS is understood through a common emphasis on China’s jurisdiction. The other finding is the Chinese government’s careful handling of the term, including replacing the term “marine territory” with “jurisdictional water” in more authoritative sources. This suggests that the government of China and Chinese experts apparently understand that the term contradicts the legal conception laid out by UNCLOS, which differentiates between sovereignty and sovereign rights, and potentially poses diplomatic problems with neighboring maritime countries. Even after UNCLOS came into force in China in 1996, some Chinese experts criticized the nationalistic view of “marine territory” as sovereign territory. However, despite careful handling of the term by the Chinese government, due to strong domestic consensus on using international law as a tool for ensuring China’s maritime rights, a nationalistic understanding of “marine territory” as “sovereign territory” has been accepted as fait accompli in China as its maritime policy develops.

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This article argues that China’s South China Sea policy is subject to the most important security goal of China, which has changed over time, rather than serving as an independent political objective of maritime advancement, as believed in the literature in Japan.

During the period in which China perceived the Soviet Union as its greatest threat, China selected Vietnam—an allied country of the Soviet Union—as the sole target in the South China Sea from the 1970s until the Mischief Reef Incident in 1995. China promised the Philippines that it would peacefully solve South China Sea disputes. However, China has not physically responded to the development of administrative control over the features of the Spratly Islands of the South China Sea since the 1970s.

As relations with the Soviet Union improved in the middle of the 1980s, Chinese maritime experts and military officers began insisting on protecting maritime interests under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). However, China continued to select Vietnam as its sole target in the South China Sea and engaged in battle with Vietnam in 1988 in the Spratly Islands. Deng Xiaoping avoided challenging the Philippines—an allied country of the U.S.—in the South China Sea because he prioritized maintaining a sound relationship with the West, which enabled China to focus on economic development. The 1995 Chinese seizure of the Mischief Reef claimed by the Philippines signaled a China’s shift in South China Sea policy. However, China’s top leaders largely prioritized the preservation of a stable international environment; thus, China continued to apply low-profile policies in the South China Sea, as shown by its signing of the Code of Conduct with the ASEAN. The Xi Jinping administration clearly ended this low-profile policy by seizing the Philippines-claimed Scarborough Shoal and subsequently defining the goal of building a strong maritime nations in 2012.

However, in recent years, the Xi Jinping administration began following its predecessors more closely by shaping the South China Sea policy subject to suit the Taiwan issue. China’s harassment of the resupply missions for the Philippines grounded on the Second Thomas Shoal and its simultaneous fueling of the fear of the Philippine public being entangled in the Taiwan contingency represent China’s calculated punishment of the Philippines due to the U.S.–Philippines security cooperation relationship, through which the U.S. has gained access to four additional basing sites in the Philippines under the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA).

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It is often pointed out that the status of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been declining in the entire party and government system in China in recent decades. As a result, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been unable to cope with many challenges China faces today. With the progress of the Reform and Opening-Up policy since the early 1980s, pluralization and decentralization are increasingly apparent in making and implementing its foreign policy. And recently, media and public opinion and private sector interests have begun to influence Chinese foreign policy. However, the phenomena of the gradual erosion of foreign ministries’ status as well as the expansion of low politics diplomacy in foreign relations have been observed among other advanced countries.

This paper studies how the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs has reshaped its organization and changed its role as one of the country’s many complex party-government apparatuses in the era of globalization. Traditionally, the scope and jurisdiction of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been rather narrow as compared with foreign ministries in other countries. The departments focusing on managing international economy, foreign aid, national security, cultural exchange, and intelligence and analysis, which are common in other countries, do not seem to exist. In recruiting young diplomats, there has been strong emphasis on foreign language ability rather than basic knowledge of social sciences such as international relations or economics. Consequently, the reality of traditional Chinese diplomatic practice has leaned too much on bilateral relations.

However, the spread of globalization has brought significant structural change to the organization of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. With the apparent shift from regional affairs to functional affairs, several new departments have been established to tackle new global challenges. The impact of globalization has brought the low politics diplomacy dealing with the economics and social affairs to the forefront. Today, multilateral diplomacy is actively practiced. The ministry has been recruiting human resources with more diversified professional backgrounds.

As a result, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the globalization era has evolved to become more similar to ministries of foreign affairs of other countries. However, given the rapid change of circumstances both in and outside China caused by globalization combined with the traditionally limited jurisdiction and function of China’s national diplomatic organizations, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has still been unable to fully meet the global challenges that today’s China faces.

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How did China put into practice its non-interference principle before and after the 2021 coup d’état in Myanmar, and how did Myanmar’s key actors perceive China’s practice? Non-interference has been one of the more important foreign policy principles in the Asia-Pacific regional order. However, China’s approaches to the non-interference principle have evolved in the twenty-first century. Moving beyond the government-to-government channel that China had upheld in its diplomacy earlier, China began taking a flexible approach to the principle to work with the government of Myanmar and its opponents, i.e., ethnic armed organizations. In the context of the Belt and Road Initiative, too, China’s non-interference policy has been questioned by many, particularly those concerned about China’s “neo-colonial policy” and its alleged “debt trap” diplomacy.

However, the meaning of the principle remains ambiguous within academic and policy communities, as the principle is often evaluated politically and subjectively in reality. By addressing the ambiguity, this paper examines China’s actual political and economic practices of what seems to be interventionist behaviour—China’s conflict mediation in Myanmar and the Belt and Road Initiative—and the Myanmarese actors’ perceptions of the practices.

This paper employs as its conceptual framework a spectrum of interference consisting of coercion on the one hand and influence on the other. Primarily based on the author’s interviews with key actors in Myanmar in 2018, this paper uses the spectrum to examine China’s practices and the Myanmarese actors’ perceptions of those practices, to determine the extent to which they amount to coercion or influence.

This paper finds that China’s political and economic practices in Myanmar and the Myan­marese actors’ perceptions address opposite ends of the spectrum. China’s practices amount to the exertion of influence on both the government of Myanmar and on the ethnic armed organizations, without resorting to coercing either actor to engage in particular behaviour. In contrast, the Myanmarese actors perceive China’s practices as nothing less than coercion and the violation of Myanmarese sovereignty. Those perceptions are linked to anti-China sentiment, wide-spread demonstrations and physical attacks against Chinese infrastructures in Myanmar, which limit the scope of China’s attempt to expand its economic influence in that country. If one takes the view that the establishment of a new regional order has to be endorsed by regional countries, the above finding implies that China’s approach to its non-interference principle suggests that China still has a long way to go to reformulate the regional order.

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Official Chinese Communist Party history simply indicates that Deng Xiaoping launched the open-door policy in 1978, largely discounting international factors, such as China’s joining the United Nations and China-U.S. reconciliation. With regards to the pre-1978 era, most studies focused on inter-Politburo politics, because during the Cultural Revolution power struggles often occurred among the leadership. According to the literature, the political situation after the death of Lin Biao is described as the struggle between Zhou Enlai, who aimed at economic reconstruction, and the radicals such as the “Gang of Four,” but they were under the almost complete dominance of Mao Zedong. Previous studies describe how Zhou’s economic policy was at the mercy of politics, and do not analyze his intention and policy. This article reconsiders the conception and limitation of the open-door policy which was launched as a part of Zhou’s policy, considering the importance of the changing international circumstances through analyzing a project designed to import large industrial plants from Western countries. This project was called the “4-3” development strategy, because its total projected cost was US$4.3 billion.
Closer examination reveals that the industrial development strategy underlying the open-door policy was formed gradually in the early 1970s, in association with the change in the leadership’s perception towards new international circumstances. Until then, the Chinese leadership had pursued the construction of “the third front” as a preparation for war, which was a massive construction of defense and heavy industries in inland China. However, the change in the international situation in the early 1970s reduced the necessity of preparing for a war. Zhou Enlai and the bureaucrats therefore proceeded with the “4-3” development strategy as a part of a new national strategy, which included the reorganization of the bureaucracy to support the open-door policy and the shift of investment from military industry to agriculture and light industry and from inland to coastal areas. They implemented these policies through modifications of the 4th Five Year Plan.
However, there was a conflict between the open-door policy and Mao’s revolutionary diplomatic strategies, despite Mao’s support for the former. The conflict came to the surface as the U.S.-Soviet détente emerged, and the pursuit of the opening was hampered. However, the open-door policy was gradually transformed into a comprehensive industrial policy. As a result, Hua Guofeng and Deng Xiaoping were able to launch a systematic open-door policy soon after Mao’s death.

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This article explores how and why the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) decided to abandon its New Democracy policy and implement the Socialist Transformation in 1953. It argues that abandoning New Democracy, which had been part of a grand strategy change that included planned industrialization, was an action taken in response to changes in the international environment. First, the start of the Socialist Transformation was deeply linked to a change in the industrialization strategy. Second, these changes were a reaction to a perceived US threat that intensified after the outbreak of the Korean War. This study analyzes domestic and foreign policy linkages in the early period of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), an area still little covered in existing research.
In the early days of the PRC, the CCP reasoned that the Socialist Transformation could not be initiated in haste. The period before the transformation was to be executed came to be known as the New Democracy period, a stage in which the CCP planned to first cooperate with the domestic bourgeoisie and individual farmers who would later have to be eliminated to pave the way for the future Socialist Transformation. According to this plan, China’s path to industrialization was to be a gradual one in which agriculture and light industry would come first. These plans were based on the assumption that hostilities with the United States would not escalate to direct confrontation. In 1953, however, New Democracy was called off and the Socialist Transformation was initiated.
The abandonment of New Democracy was a gradual process. Starting in 1951, it was led by Mao and comprised a step-by-step turnaround in China’s industrialization strategy. By the autumn of 1951, the CCP had decided that its economic strategy should be to focus on heavy and defense industries. This was in stark contrast with the New Democracy strategy, which prioritized light industry and agriculture. At the same time, positions on when to bring about Socialization were also changing as Mao thought Socialization would give impetus to industrialization. After outstanding conditions were met, in 1953 the CCP declared the start of Socialization (the General Line for the Transition Period) and launched the First Five Year Plan.
An important factor behind these strategic changes was the perceived threat from the US policy of containment after the outbreak of the Korean War. Before the war, although American imperialism was seen as the main adversary of the Chinese Revolution, it remained unclear to the CCP to what extent the United States constituted a threat to mainland China. The fact that CCP leaders did not expect America to engage with the PRC directly was a fundamental assumption that supported New Democracy, but American intervention in the Korean War and the neutralization of the Taiwan Strait in 1950 dissolved this premise. CCP leaders thought the United States would encircle the PRC from three directions: the Korean Peninsula, the Taiwan Strait and Indochina. This perceived threat spurred demands to develop heavy and defense industries, while the moderate strategy of New Democracy was no longer considered suitable to the PRC’s needs.

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