E pluribus unum? Constructing the United States of China

VICTORIA UNIVERSITY OF WELLINGTON

CHINA AND THE WORLD

INTP 444 / 2007

CHRIS LIPSCOMBE

STUDENT ID 300102972

Research Essay:

E pluribus unum? Constructing the United States of China.

Abstract:

At the same time as political commentators in the West are

examining closely the words and actions of Chinese leaders

to clarify whether the People’s Republic of China is friend

or foe, ‘responsible’ or ‘revisionist’, the whole issue of

what is a state, and the related issues of nation,

territory, sovereignty, authority and legitimacy, seems to

be blurring the picture. An examination of Chinese policy

decisions relating to Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan points

towards a federal future for the People’s Republic of

China, with the pressures felt by Chinese leaders

paralleling the experiences faced by the founders of the

American union of states (the Philadelphian system). By

understanding the nature of Chinese sovereignty, and

playing back the development of the Philadelphian system

through a Chinese lens, we find ourselves watching the

construction of the United States of China.

Submission Date:

Friday 19 October 2007 (extended from Monday 15 October

2007)

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INTP 444 / 2007 RESEARCH ESSAY

The problem

The rise of China on the world stage has coincided with a

growing number of academic debates on the role of the state

in world affairs. At the same time as political commentators

in the West are examining closely the words and actions of

Chinese leaders to clarify whether the People’s Republic of

China is friend or foe, ‘responsible’ or ‘revisionist’1, the

whole issue of what is a state, and the related issues of

nation, territory, sovereignty, authority and legitimacy,

seems to be blurring the picture.

The problem that I have set myself to answer in this essay

is to discover what kind of polity the People’s Republic of

China is, and what kind of polity it might become. I will

consider current debates around the nature of the state, and

in particular the contributions of Allen Carlson from a

constructivist and Chih-yu Shih from a post-modernist

perspective to the understanding of sovereignty as a central

theme in China’s ongoing state formation. Through a review

of Chinese policy decisions over the past two decades

relating to Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan, I will attempt to

show that the search for legitimacy and security by Chinese

leaders is pointing towards a federal future for the

People’s Republic of China. In closing, I will consider the

example of the United States, and suggest that the pressures

1 For example, see Alastair Iain Johnston’s article (Johnston, 2003) for

the ‘responsible’ side of the debate, and Wu Guogang’s article (Wu,

2006) for the ‘revisionist’ side.Chris Lipscombe Student ID 300102972

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for legitimacy and security felt by political leaders of the

People’s Republic of China parallel the experiences of those

responsible for the founding of that other great experiment

in federalism, the United States of America.2

My goal in this essay is to demonstrate that the People’s

Republic of China is still finding its feet as an

international actor, that this development has in fact been

played out before in history, most notably by the United

States of America, and that the future role of China will be

largely determined by how well it constructs the present out

of its disparate parts. Ultimately, I hope to show that it

is not sovereignty that is undergoing construction, but the

United States of China.

2 Note that federalism as a form of government and federation as the formation and implementation of a union of states are both distinct from

democracy and democratising trends. Although their adoption may signal a

growing pluralism, which in turn may support democratic reform,

democracy is not a necessary pre-condition. The ‘democratisation’ of

China (or otherwise) is therefore outside the scope of this essay.Chris Lipscombe Student ID 300102972

of 39


The debates

Current debates around the nature of the state in

International Relations theory coalesce around the theory of

interstate structures, the phenomenon of global economic

growth, and the transformation or ‘softening’ of the state

under globalisation.

Structural realists like Kenneth Waltz deny domestic or

normative influences on inter-state relations, and point to

the irreducible logic of war as competition between states

in an anarchic world (Waltz, 1990). This view is countered

by post-modernists like Richard Ashley, who portrays Waltz’s

work as a ‘self-enclosed, self-affirming joining of statist,

utilitarian, positivist, and structuralist commitments… a

totalitarian project of global proportions: the

rationalization of global politics’ (Ashley, 1984: 228).

This debate sites the state as a contested space between

rationalism and the politics of identity and culture.

Neoliberalists and liberal democrats extol the

liberalisation of trade and the growing economic

interdependence of states in world affairs. Robert Keohane

argues that international economic activity has led to

‘extensive relationships of interdependence’, and as such

promotes peace and cooperation rather than conflict and

dislocation (Keohane, 2005 [1984]). In this he echoes

Kant’s argument for perpetual peace (Kant, 1891 [1795]) and

some of the more recent American administration’s arguments

Chris Lipscombe Student ID 300102972 of 39


for democratic peace (Clinton, 1994: 11). Francis

Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ thesis (Fukuyama, 1989, 2006)

celebrates the disappearance of Soviet Russian socialism as

the final triumph of liberal democracy. This prognosis

already seems optimistic, and has aroused opposition ranging

from Derrida’s ‘spectres of Marx’ haunting the world stage

and refusing to die (Derrida, 1994) to Samuel Huntington’s

‘clash of civilisations’ threatening to create a new world

order based on irreconcilable differences in values and

institutions between the West and the rest (Huntington,

1996). In this debate, the state becomes a contested space

between economic and political concepts of freedom.3

Constructivists led by Alexander Wendt have taken on

realists and liberal internationalists in arguing for the

role of norms, beliefs and ideas in shaping world affairs,

and that the anarchy trumpeted by realists as the ground of

inter-state relations “is what states make of it” (Wendt,

1992). Traditional realists like Holsti make the case for

growing complexity of states, rather than transformation

3 The debate here is actually about liberalism itself, as understood in

both its economic and political guises, and incorporating both ikts

negative (e.g. freedom from want) and positive (e.g. freedom to act)

aspects (Berlin, 1969: xxxvii-lxiii, 121-34). This tension lies at the

heart of the liberal democratic project, and may ultimately be

irreconcilable, as the promotion of positive liberties may eventually

undo the social and political consensus required to guarantee negative

liberties. In any event, the subject is too large for this present

essay.Chris Lipscombe Student ID 300102972

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under these pressures (Holsti, 2004: 58–69). ‘Soft’

realists such as James Rosenau acknowledge differences of

opinion over the future of the state, and attempt to draw a

middle line between proponents and detractors in taking into

account both changes in ideas and material conditions

(Rosenau, 1999). Rosenau also opens the door to new forms of

diplomacy and social contracts appropriate for a ‘world

marked by weakened governments and a pluralism of authority’

(Rosenau, 1999: 10; Bauman, 1992: 160), embracing not only

territorially defined polities or ‘landscapes’ but also

‘mediascapes, financescapes, ethnoscapes, ideoscapes, and

technoscapes’ (Rosenau, 1999: 13).

Some definitions

Organisations with distinct identities, authority structures

and leadership are polities but, according to Holsti, states

are ‘the only contemporary political organisations that

enjoy a unique legal status – sovereignty – that have

created enduring public international institutions’ (Holsti,

2004: 28). Holsti readily conflates the concept of

sovereignty with the state. Yet in diplomatic terms a state

is merely a polity that is recognised by other states. Thus

the People’s Republic of China is recognised as a state by

the United Nations, and the Republic of China (Taiwan) is

not; although both would meet Holsti’s other defining

characteristics – a fixed position in space

(territoriality), politics of a public realm,

institutionalised political organisations, a multiplicity ofChris Lipscombe Student ID 300102972

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government tasks and activities, and legitimising authority

structures (Holsti, 2004: 29).

These bundled practices of sovereignty are characterised by

Stephen Krasner as ‘organised hypocrisy’ (Krasner, 1999).

For Krasner, international legal sovereignty as it refers to

the practice of mutual recognition of states is merely one

way of talking about sovereignty, along with the ability to

exclude external actors (Westphalian sovereignty), the

organisation of effective authority and control within the

state (domestic sovereignty) and the ability to control

trans-border movements (interdependence sovereignty)

(Krasner, 1999: 9). This dissection of sovereignty

emphasises its constructed nature but obscures the nature of

sovereign power exerted through an internalisation of

external control and authority.

The modern state exerts control or authority over its

citizens through a combination of historical, intellectual

and socio-cultural factors inextricably bound up in the

development of the western modernist project. In historical

terms, the two treaties negotiated at Osnabrück and Münster

that comprised the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia recognised

European states as exercising exclusive legal authority

within the realm, and legal authority between realms

(Holsti, 2004: 43). Sacral or natural authority previously

held to exist above or beyond the state was now vested in

the state, personified as the sovereign. For Hobbes (1985

[1651]), the right of the state-as-sovereign to govern and Chris Lipscombe Student ID 300102972

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the agreement of the people to be governed constituted the

fundamental agreement or contract that bound the ‘common-

weal’ together.4

In intellectual terms, from Hobbes and Descartes through

Locke and Montesquieu to Rousseau and Kant the concept of

sovereignty was developed first as the sovereignty of the

reasoning man, and then by extension the state that governs

through sovereign reason (Lund, 1971: 209–221).

Enlightenment thinkers ‘invoked the heroic figure of

reasoning man who knows that the order of the world is not

God-given, that man is the origin of all knowledge, that

responsibility for supplying meaning to history resides with

man himself, and that, through reason, man may achieve total

knowledge, total autonomy, and total power. Reasoning man –

man who is at one with the public discourse of “reasonable

humanity” – is the modern sovereign’ (Ashley, 1989: 264–5).

4 The historical development of the system of international states in

war-torn Europe of the seventeenth century provides the context for Max

Weber’s description of the state as the organisation claiming a monopoly

of violence in a given territory (Weber, 1946 [1919]). It is the

subsequent redefinition of politics as an exercise in sublimated war

that is the illuminating aspect of von Clausewitz’ famous dictum that

“War is politics continued by other means’ (von Clausewitz, quoted in

Foucault, 2007 [2004]: 301). Hannah Arendt also reminds us that warfare

remains ‘the final arbiter’ in international affairs, and quotes Hobbes

approvingly when he says: “Covenants, without the sword, are but words.”

(Arendt, 1970: 5).



The rationalisation of the state through the reflexive

application of the concept of sovereignty also authorises

individual citizenship, legitimises the actions of state

leaders acting on behalf of citizens, and continually

regenerates the state as the site where citizenship can be

legitimated. In socio-cultural terms, the modern citizen is

the ultimate creation of the modernist state, and without

whom the state cannot exist.5

Two further developments to the idea of the state need to be

addressed – one which attaches sovereignty residing in the

state and its citizens ever more firmly to a specific

territory, culture and language, and the other that sees

sovereignty residing in non-state and trans-state entities

and institutions.

The first of these extensions is the modern nation-state.

With the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, 5 Michel Foucault, following his investigations into the relations of

power as a ground for meaning, identifies relations of power as a

requirement or pre-condition of the internalisation of sovereignty.

‘Between every point of a social body, between a man and a woman,

between the members of a family, between a master and his pupil, between

everyone who knows and everyone who does not, there exist relations of

power which are not purely and simply a projection of the sovereign’s

great power over the individual; they are rather the concrete, changing

soil in which the sovereign’s power is grounded, the conditions which

make it possible for it to function (Foucault, 1980: 187). Giorgio

Agamben describes the intersection of voluntary servitude and objective

power as the “production of a biopolitical body… uniting power and bare

life’ (Agamben, 1998 [1995]: 6).Chris Lipscombe Student ID 300102972

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conceptions of natural sovereignty were consolidated as the

‘natural condition of mankind’ (Giddens, 1987: 259).

Building on the growth of European nationalist movements

over the preceding two hundred years, ‘the idea of national

self-determination legitimised the primacy of the nation-

state as the universal political form of the current era’

(Holsti, 2004: 52). The nation-state emerged as an

‘imagined political community… both inherently limited and

sovereign’ (Anderson, 19991: 6), and the modern view of the

state has now become inseparable from the right to self-

rule. ‘Under contemporary international law, a polity that

does not have self-rule cannot become a state. It is some

sort of dependency, and this does not have a crucial element

of statehood’ (Holsti, 2004: 55).

More recently historical sociologists have extended the idea

of sovereignty as residing in a global state. According

Martin Shaw, ‘what has changed in the global era is not that

the state as a monopolist of violence has disappeared:

rather that the relations of violence have changed, and the

contemporary state has taken a new form.’ (Shaw, 2000: 16).6

6 Shaw agrees with Michael Mann’s definition of the state as a

‘differentiated set of institutions… embodying centrality… to cover a

territorially demarcated area over which it exercises some degree of

authoritative, binding rule making, backed by some organised force’

(quoted in Shaw, 2000: 16) but maintains that global state structures

are starting to appear in what he calls ‘global state conglomerates’.

In this view, ‘states are not constituted by sovereignty – rather ideas

of sovereignty are part of the social relations of states.’ (Shaw, 2000:Chris Lipscombe Student ID 300102972

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This alternative strand in the development of the state runs

directly counter to the development of the nation-state, and

helps explain external intervention in states’ affairs as a

clash of sovereignties, rather than a change in the concept

of sovereignty itself.

The literature

Since the 1970s, China has been under significant pressure

to conform to Western norms of international behaviour. For

two writers, Allen Carlson and Chih-Yu Shih, the nature of

sovereignty and its relationship to the process of state

formation currently underway in China is central to an

understanding of China’s current performance as an

international player, and the underlying intentions of

Chinese political leaders.

Allen Carlson follows Alexander Wendt in recognising that

sovereignty is a work-in-progress, ‘always in the process of

being substantiated and refined’ (Carlson, 2005: 1).7 He

also takes a leaf out of Krasner’s book by unbundling

sovereignty onto four different components – territory,

26). For Shaw, these developments have their genesis and claim their

legitimacy in the management of new forms of violence. 7 In the early 1990s Alexander Wendt was Allen Carlson’s dissertation

chair (Ph.D. dissertation ‘Constructing a New Great Wall: Chinese

Foreign Policy and the Norm of Sovereignty’, Yale University, 2000).

Carlson acknowledges his debt to Wendt in the Preface to his book

Unifying China, Integrating with the World: Securing Chinese Sovereignty in the Reform Era

(Carlson, 2005: xi).Chris Lipscombe Student ID 300102972

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jurisdiction, authority and economic rights. As indicated

earlier in my comment on Krasner’s work, this approach

obscures the meaning of sovereignty, which is grounded in

the relationship between government and governed. In

Carlson’s more nuanced approach, these components are

treated as the ‘lines between states’, and the types of

sovereign boundaries being created between China and the

rest of the world as ‘exercises in articulating

sovereignty.’ (Carlson, ibid.). Carlson however holds back

from including internal (and internalised) boundaries as

constitutive of sovereignty.

According to Carlson, ideational (or normative) and material

pressures for change have forced a reappraisal of

sovereignty. Thus for Carlson, sovereignty is not only

externally articulated, but externally mediated. Following

his component-based approach to sovereignty, Carlson

maintains that during the 1990s ‘Chinese policies preserved

a static interpretation of territorial sovereignty, promoted

an unyielding and increasingly combative stance on

jurisdictional sovereignty, and permitted a transgression of

the lines created by the economic and authority components

of sovereignty’ (Carlson, 2005: 3). These developments are

put forward as evidence of how ‘“old” Chinese approaches to

sovereignty are being buffeted by new and unexpected

domestic and international challenges’ (Carlson, 2005: 4),

and creating a world where ‘China is both integrating with,



and differentiating itself from, the international community

in which it is now firmly embedded’ (Carlson, 2005: 5).

Carlson concludes that China has developed a ‘malleable’

approach to sovereignty, with ‘a systemic turn away from the

use of military force to secure contested territory and a

concomitant rise in the use of international legal and

political forums to mediate disputes’ (Carlson, 2005: 225).

I believe, however, that Carlson draws the wrong conclusion

from his reading of Chinese politics over the past two

decades. What is ‘malleable’ is the Chinese conception of

the state. What remains the same is the sovereignty that

underpins effective governance. This is not to deny the

importance of Deng Xiaoping’s pragmatism of the 1980s or the

impact of ‘external forces (material forces and new

normative influences)’ of the 1990s (Carlson, 2005: 234). I

merely believe that these forces have been brought to bear

on the state, not on sovereignty itself.

In contrast to Allen Carlson, Chih-yu Shih sees Chinese

sovereignty as internally articulated, in ‘the psychological

space created when Western modernity and Confucian tradition

meet’ (Shih, 2003: 1). Essential to Shih’s approach is an

understanding of what he calls ‘alterity’, forms of

existence beyond the ‘statist analyses’ shared by realists,

liberals, and constructivists (Emmanuel Lavina, quoted in

Shih, ibid.).



As an alterity, China is in search of itself. In the

transition from a celestial to a territorial order, China

develops not so much as a state as a ‘counter-state’, a

Western-styled state designed to protect China from the

totalising West, which at the same time embeds a sense of

inferiority amongst Chinese (Shih, 2003: 23). Behind the

defences of the state, shored up by an enlisted belief in

state-based sovereignty, Chinese cannot help but critically

examine their own beliefs in cultural superiority. What Shih

calls ‘reflexive Orientalism’ is a considered search for a

meaning of Chineseness, ‘China’s desire to use its own

method to enter modernity, which is modeled after the West

only in material terms’ (Shih, 2003: 44).

China’s readiness to defend its territorial boundaries is

also internalised through the juxtaposition of a presupposed

permanent external threat with the inward defence of a

harmonious social being. In this way, “National defense,

which perpetuates the feeling of being threatened, sustains

a nation discursively rather than physically” (Shih, 2003:

47). Concomitant with this perpetuation of threat is the

moral requirement to win people’s hearts. For Shih, this

implies ‘the ultimate insufficiency of territory in

maintaining Chinese state identity… the discourse of

national defense is far more important than the achievement

of national defense’ (Shih, 2003: 57). Nationalist feeling

is generated via national defence, a ‘dependent nationalism’

born out the willing sacrifice of the ‘lesser self’ for the



‘greater self’ (Shih, 2003: 67-8) and the purging of

unwanted hybrid influences within – influences which are

nevertheless perpetuated through China’s 'othering' of the

West (Shih, 2003: 74).

Shih concludes that the ‘repeated failures of the Chinese

state to be modelled after realist statism, the current

ambiguity of the state system by the China-Taiwan

reunification issue, and the Japanese discursive inability

to express a complex of feelings towards China in

realist/liberalist terms’ together open the door to an

ontology of alterity in East Asia in the twenty-first

century (Shih, 2003: 164). The future for China is seen in

a new international as well as East Asian discourse that

celebrates these alterities.

Shih’s work assists in clarifying non-statist and non-

Western concepts of sovereignty. However, he leaves

unanswered the question of what polity or form of government

might be more conducive to an exercise of Chinese

sovereignty in the future. In the following section, I hope

to show that federalism is for China a viable alternative

form of government to the unitary state.

China’s search for legitimacy and security

Carlson’s analysis clearly identifies the external pressures

on the Chinese unitary state. Shih’s analysis emphasises the

internal (and internalised) aspects of this same phenomenon.

Some commentators have in the light of these pressures Chris Lipscombe Student ID 300102972

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forecast the disintegration of the Chinese Party-State.8

Despite these predictions, however, China seems to be

working its way towards a balance of hierarchical control

and effective local autonomy that preserves both unity and

national diversity, and builds on an increasing

institutionalisation and professionalisation of the

bureaucracy and Party (Naughton and Yang, 2004: 7, 9, 12-

18).

Legitimacy and security are located in systems of governance

that defy Western inter-state and intra-state definition and

practice. The status of Tibet and Xin Jiang as Autonomous

Provinces both recognises and problematises their status as

‘not provinces’. At the same time, China has successfully

integrated Hong Kong and Macau as Special Administrative

Regions (SARs) within its overall system of governance, thus

creating ‘not countries’. Taiwan remains in an ambiguous

relationship with the mainland, defined by its own exclusion

as ‘not China’. As these examples show, China is no longer

following the Western state sovereignty script (Krasner,

1999).

8 See Barry Naughton and Dali Yang’s review of this ‘disintegration

thesis’ in their Introduction to Holding China Together: Diversity and National

Integration in the Post-Deng Era. The editors conclude that ‘the

“fragmentation” view of China was mistaken because advocates of this

view failed to take into consideration the strength of some of the

essential institutions holding China together, and they misunderstood

the key adaptive processes in which economic transition reshaped state

and society relations’ (Naughton and Yang, 2004: 5).Chris Lipscombe Student ID 300102972

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Tibet

Tibet, formally regarded as a ‘dependent ally’ of China, was

neither part of the interior empire ruled by the Qing, nor

was it outside the imperial realm. It was treated as part of

the ‘exterior empire’ (Warren Smith, quoted in Oksenberg,

2001: 95). For nearly three centuries, both the rulers in

Beijing and the Dalai Lama were prepared to tolerate a level

of ambiguity regarding their relationship that cannot be

recreated in today’s Western-based system of states

(Oskenberg, 2001: 98).

Statements by the 14th Dalai Lama suggest that he would

consider favourably a relationship with the Chinese

government under the ‘one country, two systems’ policy as

applied to Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. According to his

blueprint, however, ‘“the map of Tibet” should cover Tibet

and the whole of Qinghai (to form what he calls Inner

Tibet), one-fifth of present-day Xin Jiang, two-thirds of

Gansu and half of Yunnan (to form what he calls Outer

Tibet). This would occupy an area of 2.40 million square km

or one-fourth of Chinese territory’ (Li, 2004). These

conditions, including a requirement that ‘Tibet would take

control of national defense and foreign affairs’ are

obviously unacceptable to China’s political leaders, and are

rejected through reference to the ‘love and support’ shown

by people of the Tibetan ethnic group for the Chinese

government, and criticism of the Dalai Lama as threatening



to ‘split the unity of the motherland’

(Li, 2004).

Since the events of 1989, China has consolidated its rule

over Tibet. At the same time, the demands of Tibetans for

self-rule, especially among the expatriate community, create

difficulties for the Chinese government, and actions such as

the recent awarding of the U.S. Congressional medal to the

Dalai Lama by the U.S. President George W. Bush add fuel to

the fire (Chang, 2007). No Western-style state-based

solution matches the usefulness of the concept of a

tributary state, ‘an institutional structure that allowed

Beijing to claim some authority over far-flung areas that it

could not govern effectively on an ongoing basis’ (Krasner,

2001: 325). According to Michael Oskenberg. “A China

explicitly organized along confederal lines would seem to be

in the interests of all concerned, including Beijing’

(Oskenberg, 2001: 101).

Hong Kong

The return of Hong Kong in 1997 made China’s claim of

sovereign control over the territory a political reality.

Yet China did not unilaterally establish Hong Kong as

another province of China. Chinese leaders, driven by the

need to resume formal control over Hong Kong but at the same

time preserve its economic dynamism, agreed a trade-off

between that James Smith describes as ‘indeterminate by

design’ (Smith, 2001: 111).



The solution proposed by the Chinese ensured that the Hong

Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) would be able to

enjoy ‘a high degree of political autonomy and to maintain

its social and economic system for fifty years after the

transition… Although China retains control over foreign and

defense affairs, the Joint Declaration and Basic Law provide

Hong Kong the specific authority to forge international

agreements; to participate independently in international

organizations and conferences under the name “Hong Kong,

China”; to maintain it own currency; to enforce its own

customs regulations as a free port; to establish trade or

economic missions abroad; and to issue its own passports’

(Smith, 2001: 107). This solution is unique in world

affairs.

In agreeing to this solution, China was applying the “one

country, two systems’ formula originally introduced for

Taiwan, a specifically Chinese interpretation of sovereignty

which echoes the division between the interior and the

exterior empire mentioned in the case of Tibet above.

Smith maintains that the commitments ‘enshrined in the Joint

Declaration and Basic Law ‘resemble federalism, but the

relationship is not a simple division of authority between

the central government and a political subunit’ (Smith,

ibid.). As we shall see when we turn to the case of the

United States of America, federalism has in the past rarely

been a simple division of authority, and might well include

‘elaborate institutions that went beyond confederation, but Chris Lipscombe Student ID 300102972

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stopped short of being an internally sovereign state’

(Deudney, 1996: 191).

Taiwan

Taiwan’s 51-year occupation by Japan and its 58-year

‘separation’ from China have severely compromised China’s

historical claim to Taiwan as part of Chinese territory.

The long rule of the Kuomintang Party in Taiwan (until

1999), and the shared concept of ‘one China’ (albeit with

different rulers), acted as a brake on independence. More

recently, however, the people of Taiwan are starting to

think of themselves as Taiwanese rather than Chinese, and

aspiring to separate statehood.

According to Stephen Krasner, Taiwan now finds itself in ‘a

kind of never-never land’ (Krasner, 2001: 17). Taiwan has

many of the trappings of a Western-style sovereign state,

but lacks the recognition that is the crucial determinant of

statehood in the Western system of states. For Chinese

leaders, the solution is simple – Taiwan must acknowledge

that there is ‘one China’, and Taiwan is part of it. Both

sides can then decide what ‘one China’ means (Oskenberg,

2001: 99).

For Taiwanese leaders, the solution is not so simple.

Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui’s description of the China-

Taiwan bilateral relationship in 1999 as ‘special state-to-

state’ was for him a statement of Taiwan’s state-based

sovereignty, and one that he was unable to back away from. Chris Lipscombe Student ID 300102972

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Talks between China and Taiwan were frozen as a result.

Chinese President Hu Jintao’s offer at the opening of the

Communist Party’s 17th Congress to resume talks was snubbed

by current Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian, ‘saying

Taipei would never sign what he called a “surrender

agreement” based on Beijing’s “one-China” principle”’ (AFP,

2007). For Shih, Taiwan’s status as ‘not China’ sets its

leaders an impossible task – to prove selflessness to China,

helpless dependence to Japan and the United States, and

defiance to its own people (Shih, 2003: 158).

Despite booming bilateral trade, investment and tourism

between Taiwan and China, political tension has again

increased. China’s anti-secession law is still on the

books, and can be used to justify reunification by force.

Some kind of federal union may yet result between Taiwan and

China, but the threat or use of force by China remains a

real possibility (Madsen, 2001: 182-3).

A federal future for China?

The government of the People’s Republic of China currently

administers 22 provinces, 5 autonomous regions, 4

municipalities and 2 SARs. The Communist Party of China

exerts top-down control through these administrative units,

with the People’s Congresses at local, provincial and



national level providing representation and legitimacy

(Naughton and Yang, 2004: 12-14)9.

Within and between these units, however, exist a range of

centre-periphery, large-small and us-them relationships

that, pace Shih, are a combination of a ‘deep-rooted

alienation from the modernist values of the statist world’

and a reconstruction of subjectivity as a ‘hybrid of

Confucian values, socialist legacy, and global institution.

By practising different identities in accordance with the

situations calling upon them, all values appear legitimate

in certain occasions, but never universally’ (Shih, 2003:

166).

This flexible, contingent arrangement of states within a

larger governance structure seems to fit a definition of

federation as a framework suited to the exercise of Chinese

sovereignty.

Some more definitions

Federation can be understood both as a description of how

authority is shared across constituent political units, and

as a way of integrating previously separate states or 9 Such tendencies should not however be thought of as ‘democratisation’,

but more as a growing diversity and localisation of representation. The

Communist Party still exerts significant influence on the system, and

not only by appointment. For example, ‘most provincial level party

secretaries – 23 out of 31 as at March 2003 – also serve concurrently as

chairmen of provincial people’s congresses’ (Naughton and Yang, 2004:

14). Chris Lipscombe Student ID 300102972

of 39


polities. A characteristic of these systems is that

sovereignty resides in the multiple and sometimes shifting

relationships between states, polities and publics, rather

than in a single relationship between government and

governed. Federation can be a ‘safety-valve’ when a unitary

state is too oppressive or does not match the cultural or

political aspirations of its constituent units (Dodd, 1999).

We can say that a simple or pure confederation exists when

the constituent units have a natural right to secede. In

this case, the units have not transferred or shared any

sovereignty, only powers or functions (Calhoun, 1953). In a

federation, on the other hand, sovereignty is shared and

authority legitimated through the interconnecting web of

relationships mentioned above. There is ‘no reason why the

many tasks constituting authority cannot be undertaken

separately… In this situation, territory is rendered, not

divisible, but irrelevant for political purposes” (Onuf,

1998: 123). Thus a federal system opens the door to a non-

territorial definition of the state, which more closely

matches the Chinese concept of sovereignty explored

previously.

Functionalism is a particular variant of this political

impulse, used to describe the way that “Technically

competent personnel organized in narrowly defined functional

units would be finally responsible, not to states, but to

their own internalized standards of professional conduct and

technical accomplishment’ (Onuf, ibid.). Such descriptions Chris Lipscombe Student ID 300102972

of 39


are often driven by economic interdependence theory, but can

lead to circumstances where ‘authority is not just divided,

but dispersed” (Onuf, 1998: 128). In this situation,

government ceases to exist.

In most federal unions, however, a certain institutional

‘thickness’ is retained, and the constituent units

‘circumscribed and embedded in a constitution of the

negative – a cross-checking architecture of binded and bound

authorities.’ (Deudney, 1995: 194). The People’s Congresses

and the China Communist Party are two such interlocking

components.

One well-known federation is the Philadelphian system, the

United States of America between the establishment of the

union (1781-89) and the Civil War (1861-65). Although the

situation of the People’s Republic of China in the twenty-

first century and that of the thirteen American colonies of

Great Britain in the eighteenth century are hardly

identical, there are some important similarities which

strengthen the prospect of a federalist future for China.

The example of the United States

The drafters and signatories of the United States’

Declaration of Independence, acting in the belief that Life,

Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness were their inalienable

Rights, declared in 1776 that the united Colonies were Free

and Independent States. In so doing, they established a new

security regime of states, which they themselves described Chris Lipscombe Student ID 300102972

of 39


as a ‘foederation’ (Elazar, 1985: 115, 122) and which is now

known as the ‘Philadelphian System” (Deudney, 1995). At this

early stage in the formation of the Union, the thirteen

States of America were united only in their declaration of

independence from Great Britain. By the end of the American

Revolutionary War and the signing of the Treaty of Paris in

1783, however, the United States were speaking of themselves

as a ‘union of States’, an interpretation that was enshrined

in the description of a ‘more perfect Union’ in the United

States’ Constitution, adopted by the Constitutional

Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 (Deudney, 1995: 193,

211).

In 1782, the union of States was acknowledged in the

adoption of the motto “E pluribus unum” to appear on the

Great Seal of the United States. Translated from the Latin

as “Out of many (comes) one”, this motto is still printed on

most United States currency, and concisely describes the

principle of federation that lies at the heart of the United

States’ political system.

Two hundred years later, another newly emerging state,

wishing to establish a union of States in its own territory,

formulated a similar expression of unity out of diversity –

国一国国 (yi guo liang zhi). Translated from the Chinese as “One

country, two systems”, this slogan was distilled from a

nine-point plan establishing the preconditions for national

reunification with Taiwan and proposed in 1982 by Chinese

political leader Ye Jiangying (Evans 1997: 263-4). Under Chris Lipscombe Student ID 300102972

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Chinese Premier Deng Xiaoping, the principle was applied to

negotiations with British and Portuguese state leaders

regarding the return of the territories of Hong Kong and

Macau to the People’s Republic of China.

For the early United States and the People’s Republic of

China, these two slogans encapsulate the aspirations of both

polities to create a new type of political formation, one

that combines but does not submerge its constituent units.

Both polities also have at their core a need to address the

fear of elimination. The United States was forged during the

War of Independence from Great Britain and the People’s

Republic of China in the battle against Japanese aggression.

This fear of external threat both pre-dates and survives the

birth of the Chinese Republic. Other shaping influences are

geopolitical environment, institutional structures, and

social identities (Deudney, 1995).

Geopolitical separation and entanglement

Daniel Deudney maintains that ‘the position of the American

states relative to each other and in the international

system profoundly shaped the Union (Deudney, 1995: 210). As

did the early United States, the wealthy cities of the China

coast will eventually have to expand into their own

hinterland, and to establish a form of government that will



ensure its territorial integrity and at the same time open

up its own Frontier to Han settlement.10

Domestic regimes, state strength, and hegemony

According to Deudney, structural factors in and between the

states also played an important role in union formation

(Deudney, 1995: 212). In the same way that the federal

Constitution was written for a union of states of similar

domestic political regime types, so the United States of

China has a number of states all sharing the same

constitution and electoral processes.

The states that entered the American union were all

relatively weak. Although there were significant differences

between say New York and Rhode Island in terms of size and

economic capability, few would have survived as separate

states. The states that will enter the United States of

China will all be relatively strong – although as for the

American union, few would survive (or want to survive) as

separate states.

The states that entered the American union had all been

subject to an external hegemonic power – Great Britain. 10 The emergence of a self-confident Chinese nation ready to shoulder

its ‘manifest destiny’ is likely to be both a pre-condition and an

outcome of a true Chinese sovereignty-based polity. In the words of

American political writer John Fiske, ‘“I give you the United States, –

bounded on the north by the Aurora Borealis, on the south by the

precession of the equinoxes, on the east by the primeval chaos, and on

the west by the Day of Judgement!”’ (Fiske, 1885: 102). Chris Lipscombe Student ID 300102972

of 39


Deudney claims that ‘This separated hegemon cast the mold

within which the colonies matured, and when they broke from

it, they were eager to provide a functional equivalent to

it’ (Deudney, 1995: 214). The common hegemonic experience of

the United States of China is that of America. If this

prediction holds good, then the model will allow for strong

central direction and global hegemonic aspirations.

People, class, and nation

Deudney states that Americans first and foremost thought of

themselves as free and virtuous, and that this was a ‘potent

and distinguishing basis of political identity’ (Deudney,

ibid.). Confucian, socialist and globalist ideas of

benevolence, selflessness and community likewise

characterise Chinese identity, perpetuated through political

and civic structures.

The Philadelphian system is also described as having

‘gravitational attraction and assimilative power… it is

often forgotten that the Philadelphian union absorbed

peacefully Utah and Vermont, two quasi-independent states,

and California and Texas, which were independent and

recognized as such by both the United States and the

European powers’ (Deudney, 1995: 217). A similar, peaceful

absorption may yet provide a path for Taiwan’s integration

into a Greater China polity.

The Philadelphian system and violence



Central to an understanding of the first American union of

states – and I believe also to the emerging United States of

China – are security concerns. As Deudney says, “avoidance

of the ultimate individual evil – violent death – is the

first and foremost negative freedom that liberalism aims to

secure’ (Deudney, 1995: 225).

The Philadelphian system is a system of security liberalism,

one that enlists violence as an inward defence against

revolution and tyranny as well as an outward defence against

war and empire. China may not be rushing to arm its

population right now, but the experience of arming ordinary

people to overthrow a corrupt or immoral regime is at the

heart of the Communist mythos, and was the justification for

the Cultural Revolution over the ten-year period 1976-86.

‘The Philadelphian system is based on popular sovereignty

but fears and seeks to constrain democracy. At the same

time it relies upon the people in well-regulated militias as

the ultimate guarantee of popular sovereignty. Kant relies

on the pacific nature of the people; the Philadelphian

system relies upon their violence capabilities and

prerogatives’ (Deudney, 1995: 226).

Conclusion

China’s choices for the future will be largely determined by

how well its leaders face up to the true nature of Chinese

sovereignty, and what kind of Chinese polity can be

constructed on its foundation.



I have shown how debates between neorealists and post-

modernists, neoliberalists and Marxists, and constructivists

and realists all centre on conflicting concepts of the

state.

I have also shown how Western-based sovereignty underpins

the Western-styled state, and how since the 1970s China has

been under significant pressure to conform to Western norms

of international behaviour. I have used recent work by

Allen Carlson and Chih-Yu Shih to illustrate the nature of

sovereignty and its relationship to the process of state

formation currently underway in China. In doing so, I have

emphasised the historically and culturally constituted

nature of sovereignty and opened the door to a description

of Chinese-based sovereignty.

By reviewing Chinese policy decisions over the past two

decades relating to Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan, I have been

able to show that the search for legitimacy and security by

Chinese leaders is pointing towards a federal future for the

People’s Republic of China. By referring to Daniel

Deudney’s work on the Philadelphian system and the

experience of the United States in early state formation, I

have also suggested that the pressures for legitimacy and

security felt by political leaders of the People’s Republic

of China parallel the experiences of those early state-

makers.



Sovereignties develop, but states are constructed. By

understanding the nature of Chinese sovereignty, and playing

back the development of the Philadelphian system through a

Chinese lens, we find ourselves watching the construction of

the United States of China.



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E pluribus unum? Constructing the United States of China

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