ABSTRACT
Just as ‘democracy promotion’ has guided the USA’s international relations since Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, ‘non-interference’ (不干涉) has taken a central position in China’s contemporary foreign policy discourse. However, whereas the contradictions of the first have been frequently scrutinised (see, for example, Chomsky 1992), the latter has not yet been carefully unpacked and
*Ruben Gonzalez-Vicente is Assistant Professor at City University of Hong Kong, China. <ruben. gonzalez@cityu.edu.hk>
Vol. 69, No. 2, 205-223, https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10357718.2014.978740
analysed in the context of changing global geopolitical architectures. The debate has instead focused on whether the non-interference principle has any merit, and whether China’s actions actually conform to its own legal sovereignty-based definition of non-interference. Most existing scholarship approaches the question of Chinese non-interventionism within wider debates on ‘humanitarian intervention’ and the ‘responsibility to protect’. Recent studies thus observe that while the People’s Republic of China (PRC) began implementing its noninterventionist standards after officially joining the international community in the 1970s, it increasingly seeks to balance this doctrine with pressing international expectations to act as a responsible great power (Carlson 2004; Li and Zheng 2009; Liu 2012; Pan 2012; Pang 2009; Suzuki 2011). Some analyses have also tangentially explored the issue of Chinese non-interventionism within discussions about the potential empowerment of African and Latin American states in an increasingly Asia-centred era (Condon 2012; Gonzalez-Vicente 2011). However, fewer efforts have been put into understanding what kind of interventions lay behind China’s narrowly defined version of non-interventionism, or into carefully examining the links between non-interference and shifting economic governance architectures. The limitations of China’s non-interventionist stance have not gone unno-
ticed. Recent research on Chinese international development cooperation alerts against taking China’s non-interventionist stance at face value (Mawdsley 2012a; Tan-Mullins, Mohan, and Power 2010, 876). Besides some inconsistencies in the principle’s application, these analyses recognise that any economic or development-based encounter is, at a minimum, a political intervention in support of the prevailing institutions, norms and political elites. As Mawdsley (2012a, 267) puts it: ‘when China talks about “respect for sovereignty”, there is no acknowledgement that sovereign power may be contested from below, and that it by no means necessarily translates into an empowering relationship between a nation-state and its citizens’. The issue is not only the reliability of China’s non-interference discourse, but also the narrow ideology and practices that underlie non-interference. Surprisingly, while there is an abundance of analyses of hegemonic geopolitical constructs emerging from the West (Agnew and Corbridge 1995; Said 2003), the linkages between contemporary Chinese geopolitical discourse and behaviours remain under-researched (a few notable exceptions are Agnew 2010; Callahan 2004, 2009; Fairbank 1968; Yeh 2009). This article aims to contribute to this literature. It explains that China’s
prevailing interpretation of its international role rests on a very limited idea of ‘non-interference’. Drawing on Polanyi’s (2001) concept of ‘embeddedness’, it is argued that markets, society and politics occur simultaneously, and can only act as discrete realms in epistemological abstractions. The Chinese concept of non-interference is limited to the legal-diplomatic realm, and rests on an unproblematic acceptance of the Westphalian state order and the capitalist model of development as the naturalised modes of political economic organisation and human interaction. Non-interference thus consists of a series of rules of
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conduct and active interventions that act to sustain state-based regionalism architectures. In this manner, Chinese non-interference is not the absence of political action. It is a very particular norm of political and economic engagement, which is at odds with some other forms of supranational or regulatory regionalism that diffuse national state power or rescale it upwards or downwards away from the state. Instead, Chinese non-interference enhances bilateralism and state-based decision-making. The article considers three main questions: How is non-interference con-
ceptualised? What are its conceptual flaws? And how does the Chinese institution of non-interference contribute to the rescaling of regional governance? The article explores the discourse and practices of Chinese noninterference, and does not aim to analyse the whole range of impacts that Chinese foreign policies and commercial relations have on regional economic governance. However, Chinese non-interference is, in its own right, one of the most salient characteristics of China’s international engagement, with apparent consequences for economic governance, and thus one requiring careful scrutiny. The following section opens with a brief historical background to China’s
non-interference approach. It situates non-interference in the wider context of Chinese international relations and foreign policy, and discusses its genealogy. Drawing on scholarship on ‘embeddedness’ and critical studies of Westphalian sovereignty, it then discusses flaws in the Chinese conceptualisation of noninterference and limits in its implementation. The next section contends that Chinese non-interference is an active rule of economic and political intervention. As such, it regulates Chinese economic exchanges with the world. This illustrates how non-interference contributes to the rescaling of economic governances by enhancing the leverage of national governments, bringing back the national state as a key regulator of economic activity.
