I thank Ketian Zhang for her comprehensive summary and thoughtful review of China’s Rising Foreign Ministry. She raised a few intriguing questions in her review, and I would like to engage with those points in my response.
Zhang rightly pointed out that assertive diplomacy is not “internalized by every Chinese diplomat” while noting that there are substantial variations in how this assertiveness is practiced despite the political centrality of the Chinese political system. Too often, the literature on contemporary Chinese politics tends towards the “Chinese system” as monolithically directed by the Party General-Secretary. While this is not untrue, it is partial. This interpretation erases the manifold agencies and capacities that sub-national actors can bring to bear—even under Xi. To be sure, that is not to say that other actors, including the Chinese foreign ministry, is an autonomous alternative nor can it resist the wishes of its leaders. As Zhang shows in her own book, Chinese coercion decisions are still, broadly, made by the Party center.
Zhang further reminds me that the appendix where I detailed instances of cooperative and assertive behavior from 2009–2020 could figure more prominently and systematically in the book. I concur with her that there is certainly space to expand upon the empirics here and weave these into the book. Nevertheless, it was a methodological judgment call on my part to focus more on the interview data and have the appendix serve as a complementary and supplementary resource—providing additional context and evidence to support the arguments and as a foil for my interview questions.
Next, she asks about the definition of assertiveness present in the book. In China’s Rising Foreign Ministry, I operationalized assertiveness as “the tendency to leverage one’s resources to impose costs on others to extract compliance and/or police behavior”. I agree that this may not necessarily capture “positive” aspects of Chinese diplomacy. While my book’s aim was to examine the negative aspects of assertiveness; per Zhang, there is scope for more engagement regarding “positive” diplomacy which I hope to take on in future work.
Finally, Zhang asked about the dynamics of different actors evaluating Chinese diplomatic practices differently. She points out that there are international and domestic impacts when Chinese diplomacy is driven by the need to show political allegiance. Indeed, Chinese “wolf warrior” diplomacy is well received at home but encroaches on western diplomatic sensibilities abroad, leading to mismatches of perceptions for both “competence” and “assertiveness”. How PRC diplomats selectively respond to claims of assertiveness—explaining, defending. and even embracing it—is intriguing but one that I did not consider here.
China’s diplomacy is a fast-moving and evolving phenomenon, there is certainly more work to be done to better understand the various aspects of China’s foreign ministry and its diplomats. Like Zhang’s fascinating work in China’s Gambit, this book hopes to advance the literature on Chinese foreign policy, with a fresh take on its diplomats and diplomacy.
