著者

張 雲

出版者

一般財団法人 日本国際政治学会

雑誌

国際政治 (ISSN:04542215)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.2022, no.205, pp.205_77-205_93, 2022-02-04 (Released:2022-03-31)

参考文献数

116

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As the second biggest economy in the world and the leading emerging economy, how does China use its huge economic power to realize strategic goals to make influence attempts toward other nations? What implications would be for the international order? China’s economic statecraft has attracted increasing global attention in both academic and policy circles. However, the existing scholarship on China’s economic statecraft has been mainly on economic inducements particularly China’s overseas investment and finance such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The research on China’s coercive economic statecraft remains understudied and most empirical studies have derived from the cases of import restrictions on agricultural products. China’s rare earth resource diplomacy, particularly the imposition of temporary rare earth embargo on Japan, provides us a valuable case to investigate China’s coercive economic statecraft. The existing literature on China’s rare earth resource economic statecraft could be divided into three major categories. First, there is a bulk of research from the perspectives of economics and law, but the studies from international politics remain to be developed. Second, the research from international political lens mainly considers China’s behavior a diplomatic failure as Japan successfully diversified its rare earth sources in a short period. China’s international reputation is also considered to be damaged as the WTO ruled against China and the Japanese public opinion toward China has deteriorated. Third, China’s rare earth economic statecraft has been largely used as a solid supportive evidence for China’s revisionist vision against the current liberal international order. The aforementioned research has provided significant insights to understand China’s coercive economic statecraft. However, they are mainly based on the outsider’s perspective and do not address the diversified internal debate and complex internal-external dynamic linkage. This paper has two major aims. First, it aims to identify the effectiveness and mechanism of China’s rare earth temporary embargo incident toward Japan in 2010. Second, this paper aims to clarify the full logic of China’s coercive economic statecraft by focusing China’s internal debate on rare earth from the global economic crisis in 2008 to now with an internal-external nexus perspective. With this combination of zoom-in and zoom-out approach, this paper is expected to clarify the conditions, effectiveness and legitimacy of China’s coercive economic statecraft and its implications on international order.

著者

張 雲

出版者

一般財団法人 日本国際政治学会

雑誌

国際政治 (ISSN:04542215)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.2016, no.184, pp.184_1-184_15, 2016

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<p>No one doubts that mutual mistrust is responsible for the unprecedented dangerous deadlock between China and Japan. There is a wealth of research on Sino–Japanese mutual mistrust. However, the conventional wisdom typically focuses on unique Sino–Japanese relations in shaping mutual mistrust. Over-emphasizing the uniqueness of Sino–Japanese relations has produced an "unproductive intellectual confrontation". In reality, both China and Japan have demonstrated their intentions and efforts for building mutual trust, but the mutual mistrust has deepened. Why has this seemingly abnormal situation happened? The representative case is the failure of the 3.11 disaster diplomacy between China and Japan. Why was such an unprecedented opportunity lost despite the initial relatively high expectations from the both sides? Furthermore, why did disaster diplomacy not contribute much in improving bilateral trust, but rather seems to have enhanced the mistrust between China and Japan? The existing literature seems to be largely insufficient to provide convincing explanations. It is necessary to reconstruct and re-theorize the research on Sino-Japanese mistrust.</p><p>To these ends, this paper introduces, first, the theories of misperception and mistrust in international relations. Then it uses the failure of Sino–Japanese disaster diplomacy around the 3.11 Great East Japan Earthquake as a case study, showing that even the initial gestures of goodwill could be distorted by entrenched biases to produce even more mistrust. Due to the negative mutual perceptions that began to solidify in 2010, even incoming goodwill messages from the other side have been unconsciously filtered or processed to fit with solidifying misperceptions. The fundamental problem originates in the different over-expectations of China and Japan from disaster diplomacy. The lack of timely and efficient communication enhanced the misinterpretation of the other side's intentions, which was followed by frustration and suspicion. When the public and the media have raised frustration and suspicion, political elites have generally lost domestic space to counter mistrust or tensions between states.</p><p>The paper shows that misperception and mistrust can be replicated unconsciously and unnecessarily in many scenarios. There is both theoretical and policy relevance in this project. The project tries to integrate Sino–Japanese relations research with more general international relations studies. In so doing, it would be helpful to provide an alternative intellectual explanation of Sino–Japanese relations with a more universally acceptable understanding. In terms of policy implications, the project will provide insights as to how the process of the formation of misperception and the replication of mistrust between China and Japan have evolved. Lessons can be drawn from this research in order to avoid or minimize unnecessary misperception in the future.</p>