ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is deceptively simple. We are interested in knowing how China’s involvement in international and regional security institutions has affected its foreign policy behavior. The issue lies at the heart of the public policy debate in the United States over China policy. Advocates of engagement believe that bringing China into international institutions, sometimes more grandly termed “the international community,” will moderate China’s behavior and encourage more cooperative actions. But they have not articulated with much precision why they support engagement, what engagement means, and what it is supposed to do. Some, mostly in the military, see it as an opportunity to acquire more information and intelligence through closer sustained contacts with military institutions. Others see it as a way of tying China down with multiple commitments and issue linkages. Still others see it in more transformative terms as a policy aimed at changing Chinese interests or preferences. The second argument tends to be the dominant one, however. Conversely, advocates of neocontainment or some other more coercive balancing strategy believe that China’s involvement in international institutions has done little to modify, restrain, or constrain China’s behavior. Neither side is working from much solid empirical evidence.2
