Introduction

In the mid 1990s, the United States crafted a policy of engagement that sought to enmesh a rising China in webs of international organizations or regimes built upon liberal norms or rules.

Debate has since centred upon whether US efforts at engagement can steer China onto a peaceful path. If not, why? (Bernstein and Munro 1997; Friedberg 2000; Mearsheimer 2001, p. 402). If so, can engagement work absent material rewards offered for Chinese cooperation or economic sanctions levelled against Chinese obstructionism? If so, how? In other words, through what mechanisms might engagement exert normative influence on Beijing?

In the study of US policy towards China, a group of ‘optimistic constructivists’, as Friedberg terms them, believes that US engagement initiatives can manage Beijing by socializing it into accepting liberal expectations about appropriate behaviour (Friedberg 2005). Unlike neoliberal institutionalists and interdependence theorists, both of whom see engagement in terms of its potential to alter the material benefits and costs of Chinese compliance or non-compliance (eg Nye 1995; Ikenberry 2008a; Ikenberry 2008b; Deudney and Ikenberry 2009), optimistic constructivists maintain that engagement operates as a communicative device that softens ‘Chinese strategic culture’ (on Chinese strategic culture see Johnston 1995). ‘Communicative engagement’, as Lynch terms it, refers to ‘a dialogical process of exchanging reasons … which does not rest upon coercion or manipulation’ (Lynch 2002, p. 204, emphasis added). In the eyes of optimistic constructivists, Washington persuades Beijing of the legitimacy of internationally held norms, and Beijing in response enters into openminded deliberation by distinguishing good arguments from poor ones in order to find truth claims. Eventually, Washington will likely shape Chinese interests in line with the liberal world order. As Economy and Oksenberg (1999, p. 18) put it, ‘when intensive, high-level, strategic dialogue with China's leaders was conducted … progress was made in shaping Chinese thinking’. Over time, engagement will likely transform China into a ‘social state’, as Johnston (2008) suggests.

This chapter speaks to such a liberal-constructivist analysis of engagement. I argue that the normative mechanism through which engagement influences Beijing is not socialization, communication or persuasion (which I use interchangeably).