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The limits to China's non-interference foreign policy: pro-stateinterventionism and the rescaling ofeconomic governanceRuben Gonzalez-VicentePublished online: 28 Nov 2014.

To cite this article: Ruben Gonzalez-Vicente (2015) The limits to China's non-interference foreignpolicy: pro-state interventionism and the rescaling of economic governance, Australian Journal ofInternational Affairs, 69:2, 205-223, DOI: 10.1080/10357718.2014.978740

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The limits to China’s non-interference foreign policy:pro-state interventionism and the rescaling of

economic governance

RUBEN GONZALEZ-VICENTE*

China’s foreign policy has been long committed to a principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign countries. While one couldeasily point out past and present-day inconsistencies in its implementation,this article argues that defenders and critics of the principle both rely on alimited interpretation of ‘interference’ or ‘intervention’ based on an ideologyof Westphalian sovereignty. Particularly problematic is the conceptualdistinction between the ‘political’ or ‘diplomatic’, on the one hand, andthe ‘economic’, on the other. As Polanyi’s concept of embeddedness remindsus, markets, society and politics occur simultaneously, and can only act asdiscrete realms in epistemological abstractions. It is thus argued that non-interference is a semi-formal institution that governs China’s diplomaticengagements and affects its economic activities. While the totality of China’sinteractions with the world has diverse and sometimes contradictory impactson global governance, non-interference itself has apparent consequences forthe rescaling of regional economic governance. Specifically, this articlecontends that Chinese non-interference results in the empowerment ofpolitical elites at national levels, and thus in the (re-)emergence of the nationstate as a gatekeeper and facilitator of the advancement of capitalistenterprises. As a result, through non-intervention, China’s foreign policyundermines supranational regulatory approaches and fosters state-basedregional architectures.

Keywords: bilateralism; embeddedness; foreign policy; non-interference;People’s Republic of China

Introduction

Just as ‘democracy promotion’ has guided the USA’s international relationssince Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, ‘non-interference’ (不干涉) has taken acentral position in China’s contemporary foreign policy discourse. However,whereas the contradictions of the first have been frequently scrutinised (see, forexample, 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>

Australian Journal of International Affairs, 2015Vol. 69, No. 2, 205–223, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10357718.2014.978740

© 2014 Australian Institute of International Affairs

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analysed in the context of changing global geopolitical architectures. The debatehas instead focused on whether the non-interference principle has any merit, andwhether China’s actions actually conform to its own legal sovereignty-baseddefinition of non-interference. Most existing scholarship approaches thequestion of Chinese non-interventionism within wider debates on ‘humanitarianintervention’ and the ‘responsibility to protect’. Recent studies thus observe thatwhile the People’s Republic of China (PRC) began implementing its non-interventionist standards after officially joining the international community inthe 1970s, it increasingly seeks to balance this doctrine with pressing interna-tional expectations to act as a responsible great power (Carlson 2004; Li andZheng 2009; Liu 2012; Pan 2012; Pang 2009; Suzuki 2011). Some analyseshave also tangentially explored the issue of Chinese non-interventionism withindiscussions about the potential empowerment of African and Latin Americanstates in an increasingly Asia-centred era (Condon 2012; Gonzalez-Vicente2011). However, fewer efforts have been put into understanding what kind ofinterventions lay behind China’s narrowly defined version of non-intervention-ism, or into carefully examining the links between non-interference and shiftingeconomic governance architectures.

The limitations of China’s non-interventionist stance have not gone unno-ticed. Recent research on Chinese international development cooperation alertsagainst taking China’s non-interventionist stance at face value (Mawdsley2012a; Tan-Mullins, Mohan, and Power 2010, 876). Besides some inconsisten-cies in the principle’s application, these analyses recognise that any economic ordevelopment-based encounter is, at a minimum, a political intervention insupport of the prevailing institutions, norms and political elites. As Mawdsley(2012a, 267) puts it: ‘when China talks about “respect for sovereignty”, there isno acknowledgement that sovereign power may be contested from below, andthat it by no means necessarily translates into an empowering relationshipbetween a nation-state and its citizens’. The issue is not only the reliability ofChina’s non-interference discourse, but also the narrow ideology and practicesthat underlie non-interference. Surprisingly, while there is an abundance ofanalyses of hegemonic geopolitical constructs emerging from the West (Agnewand Corbridge 1995; Said 2003), the linkages between contemporary Chinesegeopolitical discourse and behaviours remain under-researched (a few notableexceptions are Agnew 2010; Callahan 2004, 2009; Fairbank 1968; Yeh 2009).

This article aims to contribute to this literature. It explains that China’sprevailing interpretation of its international role rests on a very limited idea of‘non-interference’. Drawing on Polanyi’s (2001) concept of ‘embeddedness’, itis argued that markets, society and politics occur simultaneously, and can onlyact as discrete realms in epistemological abstractions. The Chinese concept ofnon-interference is limited to the legal-diplomatic realm, and rests on anunproblematic acceptance of the Westphalian state order and the capitalistmodel of development as the naturalised modes of political economic organisa-tion 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 regionalismarchitectures. In this manner, Chinese non-interference is not the absence ofpolitical action. It is a very particular norm of political and economicengagement, which is at odds with some other forms of supranational orregulatory regionalism that diffuse national state power or rescale it upwards ordownwards away from the state. Instead, Chinese non-interference enhancesbilateralism 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 Chineseinstitution of non-interference contribute to the rescaling of regional govern-ance? The article explores the discourse and practices of Chinese non-interference, and does not aim to analyse the whole range of impacts thatChinese foreign policies and commercial relations have on regional economicgovernance. However, Chinese non-interference is, in its own right, one of themost salient characteristics of China’s international engagement, with apparentconsequences 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 ofChinese international relations and foreign policy, and discusses its genealogy.Drawing on scholarship on ‘embeddedness’ and critical studies of Westphaliansovereignty, it then discusses flaws in the Chinese conceptualisation of non-interference and limits in its implementation. The next section contends thatChinese non-interference is an active rule of economic and political intervention.As such, it regulates Chinese economic exchanges with the world. Thisillustrates how non-interference contributes to the rescaling of economicgovernances by enhancing the leverage of national governments, bringing backthe national state as a key regulator of economic activity.

Chinese foreign policy and non-interference

The government of the PRC adopted the idea of ‘non-intervention’ or ‘non-interference’ as its foreign policy’s guiding principle soon after 1949. Theconcern with interventionism at this early stage was mostly related to domesticmatters. Following more than a century of ‘national humiliation’ and onerousconditions imposed by foreign powers, and after observing during the KoreanWar that Third World countries would become likely cold war battlegrounds,Chinese leaders were obsessively preoccupied with preserving China’s territorialintegrity and national sovereignty (Cohen 1967). The dual dimension of non-interference, where foreign policy objectives are tightly linked to the mainten-ance of China’s political system, remains a defining trait of China’s diplomaticapproach. These concerns were first reflected in the Five Principles of PeacefulCoexistence drafted in 1954 in the context of Sino-Indian relations. ThePrinciples were also included in the final communiqué of the 1955 BandungConference.

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The Five Principles rested on the Westphalian assumption that nation states,through their central governments, were the only actors entitled to act as thesovereigns of territories and the people these contained, and to participate ininternational relations. The First Principle of Peaceful Coexistence henceemphasised the ‘mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sover-eignty’, while the remaining four placed their focus on ‘mutual non-aggression,mutual non-interference in each other’s internal affairs, equality and mutualbenefit, and peaceful co-existence’ (UN 1958; my emphasis). In this formula-tion, the mutually respecting entities were invariably states as formallyrecognised by international law, thereby taking for granted that the worldneeded to be organised as a constellation of states. This common geographicpresupposition has been described by Agnew (1994) as international relations’‘territorial trap’— that is, the assumption that the relationship between state,territory and society is a natural and just one, and the belief in the necessity of a‘domestic/foreign polarity’ reigning over the organisation of the internationalsociety. The Chinese perspective equated absolutist sovereignty with legaljurisdictions as enshrined in international law, without questioning where theright to govern resides or what constitutes ‘legitimate sovereignty’.

In practice, though, and in fact due precisely to this rigid legalisticinterpretation of sovereignty, the leaders of the Communist Revolution inChina needed to juggle some significant incongruences in their non-interferenceapproach. While, on paper, the principle recognised equality between sovereignstates, a series of strategic considerations prevented the Chinese governmentfrom determinedly implementing non-interference at an early stage. Key amongthese was the fact that the PRC was not fully accepted as a member of theinternational society until 1971, when it was granted a seat in the UnitedNations (UN). This meant that at the same time as the Chinese regime enshrinedlegal jurisdiction as the basis of the international society, it also needed tochallenge the consensus on the international system of states. Internationalrecognition was to become the early PRC government’s main diplomaticpriority. Paradoxically, Chinese leaders became both advocates and challengersof an international order of nation states where they played no official part.

This situation required the elaboration of a new non-interference rationalethat legitimised some forms of intervention. Among those, Chinese intellectualslegitimised intervention in defence against imperialism, the internationalbourgeois law or the illegal occupation of ‘Chinese territories’— i.e. Taiwan(Cohen 1973). The Chinese government was also eager to rhetorically andmaterially support fraternal ‘liberation’ movements across Africa and South-East Asia, such as those in Vietnam and Cambodia.1 Consequently, the PRC’srelations with over a dozen countries were severed due to ‘the behaviour ofChina’s diplomats in overseas postings during the Cultural Revolution’(Foot 2001, 6). In this context, the implementation of ‘non-interference’remained contingent and limited during the first two decades of communist rule.

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Two milestone events transformed China’s non-interference discourse into amore coherent strategy: the Beijing government’s acceptance, in 1971, as China’ssole representative to the UN, and Deng Xiaoping’s ascent to power in the late1970s, which initiated a process of economic reforms that progressivelytransformed China into a capitalist economy. While the UN seat finally madethe implementation of China’s non-interference idea a real option, China’ssocio-economic reforms represented an ideological turn to flexible andutilitarian pragmatism and away from Maoist dogmatic utopianism (Pye1986; Qiu 2000).This resulted in a quest for tangible and quantifiable material goals,

notwithstanding the prevalence of a Leninist party. Communist rhetoric andinstitutions, rather than constraining China’s pursuit of economic growth, weregradually adapted to support capitalist means for a vaguely defined ‘socialistmodernisation’ (Jiang 2002). More importantly, the ideology of pragmatismalso influenced China’s approach to international relations (Medeiros andFravel 2003; Zhao 2004a). China’s revised foreign policy rhetoric relinquishedits revolutionary ideals and is today centred on ‘win–win’ economic deals,‘comprehensive’ cooperation, bilateral friendships and industrial complementa-rities. The revolutionary anti-bourgeois narrative has been almost entirelyabandoned (except for a few references to common anti-colonial backgroundsand anti-imperialist struggles—see Xinhua, March 25, 2013). It has beenreplaced with a business-centric discourse that depicts development andmodernisation as endeavours to be pursued within the confines of the market.China’s new approach to international relations is hence based on business

objectives and on the respect of the international state system. Chinaprogressively became a defender of the non-interventionist status quo, just asthe Western consensus was beginning to embrace human security and theresponsibility to protect (Foot 2001), and supranational forms of governanceemerged. China is also a ‘system exploiter’ which benefits from the existingrules of international political economic engagement (Kim 1994). For example,Chan (2008) notes that, overall, Chinese leaders have little interest in alteringthe rules which have allowed their country to grow exponentially in the lastthree decades. There is thus conformism with an international politicaleconomic order that allows for the expansion of the capitalist enterprisedomestically and abroad, while also ensuring the maintenance of one-partyrule in China. Though not necessarily a coherent discourse or strategy, thisconservative non-interventionism has become an important foundation ofChina’s distinct approach to international engagement.Key to this approach is the belief that non-interference is pragmatic and

apolitical. This proposition is not unique to China’s leadership. It is oftenreinforced by some Western academic analyses. For example, Mitchell andMcGiffert (2007) describe China’s engagement in the developing world after1979 as one defined by ‘the decline of ideology’. However, while the Maoistfocus on Third World solidarity and anti-imperialism was overtly political, the

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more covert pro-market approach adopted subsequently is no less ideological.Business pragmatism has engendered a depoliticised discourse of marketengagement and non-interference that is deeply contradictory in its formula-tions. Critical development scholars have engaged the apparent depoliticisationof intervention for decades, demonstrating how the use of technocraticdiscourses, quantitative targets and an appearance of neutrality depoliticisedevelopment and conceal ideological campaigns and technologies (Ferguson1990; Jaeger 2007; Milne and Adams 2012). Their insights can be pertinentlyapplied to the study of China’s non-interference approach.

For very particular historical reasons, discourses of development have alsobecome deeply depoliticised in China. Tsinghua University’s intellectual histor-ian Wang Hui (2006) contextualises this process of depoliticisation in Chinawithin a broader de-revolutionising process that put an end to China’srevolutionary century in 1989. Wang (2006, 32) notes that, in marked contrastwith the earlier communist period, ‘(e)ven within the party it is not easy to carryon real debate; divisions are cast as technical differences on the path tomodernization’. Today, in China, we find frequent references to pragmaticleadership that obscure the politically loaded character of China’s reforms andnaturalise their adverse social and environmental corollaries. For example,the China Daily (Fu and Xie, 2013) praised Xi Jinping’s ‘candid nature andpragmatism in implementing structural reform at home even at the cost of aslower pace of economic growth’. An opinion piece in the same newspaperexpressed that ‘many lessons can be learned from China’s pragmatic, goal-oriented approach’ in its relationships with Africa (Attias 2013). The message isclear: China’s international relations are not about politics, but about marketoperations that bring about benefits for everyone— ‘win–win’ relations in theofficial discourse. Of course, the market principles that China increasinglyfollows within its non-interference framework constitute a form of depoliticised(but not apolitical) intervention, and China’s diplomatic conservatism is not acomprehensively non-interventionist strategy. In its attempt to present itself as abenign power, the Chinese state has elaborated a discourse that separatesdiplomatic aspects from other interrelated dimensions, such as economics,politics at scales other than the interstate system, society and culture. Thesedifferent dimensions are, however, intimately connected, and diplomatic non-interventionism has important consequences for each of them. Thus, it isnecessary to contextualise non-interference within those wider political eco-nomic processes.

Re-embedding non-interference

In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi (2001) elaborated the concept of‘embeddedness’ to explain that, contrary to the free market ‘liberal creed’, theeconomy cannot be fully abstracted from other forms of social interaction. Freemarketers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries attempted to disembed

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the economy from society and, in doing so, dislocated societies to the extreme,‘smashing up ... social structures in order to extract the element of labor fromthem’ (Polanyi 2001, 172). Nonetheless, people found refuge in enduringinstitutions and social relations, or created new ones in order to avoid thedrastic effects that a complete disembedding would have brought about. MarkGranovetter (1985) argues that, in fact, modern economies have not been assuccessful at disembedding themselves from society as Polanyi hinted. Grano-vetter insists that ‘even when markets are impersonal ... they are still embeddedin a larger institutional framework, and a culture, and a set of rules andsituations that have somehow been put there by a social process’ (Krippner et al.2004, 115). But while Polanyi and Granovetter might have disagreed on moderneconomies’ actual level of embeddedness, they concur that it is impossible toentirely extract economies from the wider social forces encompassing them.Following Polanyi and Granovetter, the term ‘embeddedness’ has gainedconsiderable traction, and is now pervasive in economic sociology and economicgeography. Geographers, for example, widely accept that economic actors areembedded in territories and production networks that shape economic processes(Coe et al. 2004; Henderson et al. 2002). What this broad literature emphasisesis that markets exist in society; economy, politics and society are separate realmsonly in epistemological abstractions. They are, as Nicole Biggart has put it,‘useful fictions’ (Krippner et al. 2004, 119).The concept of embeddedness highlights the limits of Chinese non-inter-

ventionism. The discourse of non-interference has created the ‘useful fiction’that respect for absolute state sovereignty equals non-intervention. The PRC’selites see China’s role in the world as occurring within a natural order of statesthat is above other world processes. This misconception resembles the way inwhich free marketers perceived the economy as an entity outside of society. Inthis line of thought, as long as the natural state order is not altered, the PRC isnot intervening in foreign affairs. This world view rests on the idea that the statesystem is disembedded from other world dynamics—that it precedes andcontains other processes while remaining detached from them. From thisperspective, space is predetermined, delineated and ordered exclusively througha permanent system of self-contained nation states. Socio-economic and culturalprocesses are not involved in the production of space, or regional configurationsfor that matter, but instead occur in already fixed geographies. It is only fromthis point of view that non-interference becomes an actual possibility.The flaws in this philosophy are apparent. Human geographers in particular

have taken issue with the notion that space is but a pre-existing container forsocial relations. Instead, spatial configurations are the product of socialrelations, and these are affected by ‘political technologies’ that are implicatedin ‘the production of particular constellations of (power)’ (Johnston 2009, 707).Our current international state system can be thus easily traced back to aparticular European form of sovereignty that evolved from the Peace ofWestphalia in 1648, only then it was agreed that states should assume absolute

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sovereignty over their national territories and the people contained in them—while as Agnew and Corbridge (1995, 193) emphasise, ‘a pure world ofWestphalian nation-state actors has probably never existed’, for ‘states havealways had to share some of their powers’. Osiander (2001), in fact, argues thatthe ‘ideology of sovereignty’ did not become a dominant paradigm in Europeanpolitics until much later, and that it only acquired its current ordering rolethrough the work of nineteenth- and twentieth-century international lawyers. Asphilosopher Miguel Abensour (2011, xxxviii) reminds us, the state is not theonly possible form of political community and we need to ‘recognize that thereexisted, that there exists, that there could exist political communities other thanthe State’.

Ideas of state sovereignty were, in fact, quite foreign in pre-nineteenth-centuryAsia, where power and influence were diffused and not organised around‘bounded communities’ (Anand 2009, 233). It has been argued that, in fact,Chinese premodern nationalism, or ‘culturalism’ as it is sometimes described,had attitudes towards the nation that were ‘flexible and pragmatic, enabling itto endure ruptures, discontinuities, contradictions and competing loyalties,without disintegrating’ (Townsend 1992, 127). Only with the emergence ofnationalism in late nineteenth-century China were the inalienable links betweenstate sovereignty, discrete territoriality and the Westphalian state order accepted.As Zhao (2004b, 16) indicates: ‘[modern] nationalism came to China alongwith many other Western ideologies and ideas in the late nineteenth century asan instrument for China’s regeneration and defense’. This, of course, led tomany of the geopolitical disjunctures that still characterise the region today. AsHorowitz (2005, 482) recapitulates, Sun Yat-sen’s Han nationalism sought tocreate a new Chinese space that brought the Han, Manchus, Mongols, Muslimsand Tibetans together not on the grounds of a common history, culture orethnicity, but on account ‘of their coinhabiting the national territory of China’.

Yet, despite its flaws, the non-interference discourse remains powerful, as itsuccessfully draws on the nationalist feelings that emerged from China’s‘century of humiliation’, and a powerful—if ambiguous—narrative of Third-Worldism. The concept has also been successfully adapted to China’s shiftinginternational relations practices. Recent Chinese scholarship bends the conceptto suggest that participation in joint international sanctions or peacekeepingoperations does not trump non-intervention, but instead reinforces ‘participat-ory advocacy’ and displays a positive image of a responsible great power(Pan 2012; Zhang 2010). Chinese non-interference is nonetheless not necessarilytaken at face value outside China, as examples of Chinese intervention are easilyavailable—as will be enumerated later. But existing analyses do little more thanacknowledge that China is not picky when choosing its economic partners orthat it seeks to provide patronage to ruthless dictators, and hence its commercialrelations hold as much economic potential as prospects of repression.2 Instead,I emphasise here that ‘non-interference’ in itself is a form of interventionismwith wider economic impacts.

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This is why it is necessary to conceptually ‘re-embed’ non-interference and theWestphalian interstate system in the wider networks of social and develop-mental dynamics in which they are intimately merged. Chinese non-interferencein the context of deepening economic relations only makes sense if onedisembeds the diplomatic from other complex aspects of human society. Non-interference serves to perpetuate and privilege existing modes of state-to-statediplomatic interaction. However, the diplomatic order where Chinese leadersclaim not to intervene is, in fact, continuously interfering in modes of socialorganisation. Intervention becomes apparent once we explore the ways in whichChina’s diplomatic conservatism facilitates the reinforcement and expansion oftwo major systems of intervention in contemporary world societies: the (post-)Westphalian state system and the global capitalist economy.More specifically, and in line with the broader theme of this special issue,

Chinese non-interference has significant implications for the configuration andscale of economic governance. Non-interference signifies a preference forbilateralism, which empowers the central governments of China’s counterparts,subsequently reinvigorating the role of central state elites as regulators ofregional economic governance.3

However, before continuing, it is important to clarify that Chinese ‘embeddedinterventionism’ exists alongside other forms of direct intervention in the policymaking and governance of other countries. A non-comprehensive list of Chineseinterventions in the internal affairs of sovereign countries includes: (1) China’sactive role in interventionist international finance institutions and the WorldTrade Organization, which is often criticised for eroding democracy by limitingthe decision-making capacity of central governments and thus hinderingnational sovereignty (Boyce 2004; Rodrik 2011);4 (2) the non-cooperativeattitudes of Chinese state-owned enterprises that refuse to comply with thenorms and decisions of national governments (Gonzalez-Vicente 2013); and (3)Chinese-funded special economic zones in Asian and African countries, whereinnovative ‘sovereignty regimes’ (Agnew 2005) operate so as to liberatecompanies of the burdens of state-based legislation.5 It is thus clear that China’simpact on economic governances is not homogeneous or unidirectional. Yet, asthe following section explains, China’s non-interference reinforces the state asan agent and regulator of regional economic governance.

Non-interference and the transformation of regional governance

If Chinese non-interference is, indeed, a particular form of interventionism thatis conducive to a specific form of regionalisation, how exactly is it reconfiguringregional economic governance? Non-interference should be understood as asemi-formal institution governing the PRC’s external engagements. It hasfeatures of informality, in that it is contingently applied and remains a socialconvention and legitimising discourse more than a written law. But it retainstraits of formality, in that it figures prominently in China’s White Papers on

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Chinese engagement in various regions of the world (see, for example, Xinhua,2008) and Chinese officials consistently refer to non-interference to explain thePRC’s international behaviour.

Non-interference is effectively an intervention at multiple levels except at thestate-to-state level, where the Chinese government respects the particularities ofits central state counterparts and legitimises their rule. As such, non-interferencehas the effect of empowering central government elites, who are endorsed by theChinese state to make decisions on behalf of the totality of a country’s peoples,without regard to the kind of political regime in place or the legitimacy of aparticular government. Since bilateral state-to-state relations are the preferredchannel of interaction, the regulatory forces of regionalisms and the ongoingprocesses of regionalisation tend to be rescaled from multilateral or subnationalplatforms back to the central state. This does not mean that in a national-state-based system the region is irrelevant. State-led regionalisation is a fact, andChina’s economy has grown to be increasingly interconnected with those of itspartners, overcoming the USA in 2012 to become the world’s largest tradepartner (Guardian, 2013) and increasing its overseas investments.

However, the question of whether China’s involvement in economicregionalisation in Asia has been accompanied by processes of regionalism isless clear. In this sense, China’s preference for bilateral negotiations has turnedregional organisations, such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations(ASEAN) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, into multilateral forumsfor cooperation, while China’s actual commitments have been more oftenachieved through bilateral agreements with member states rather than throughsupranational regionalism schemes. For example, the Shanghai CooperationOrganisation’s biggest economic success has arguably been the signing of energyagreements with Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, all of which werebilaterally negotiated (Kerr 2010, 147). The important exception in this case isthe ASEAN–China Free Trade Agreement (ACFTA). But various analysts havepointed out that the ACFTA is a weak agreement when it comes to actuallyliberalising trade flows, other than those already existing between China andindividual countries:

The poorest four ASEAN members, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Myan-mar, will not need to cut tariffs to the same levels till 2015. Meanwhile,every country may list dozens of sensitive areas where tariffs can still apply,from ports to cars to popcorn. And with no rigorous mechanism for settlingdisputes, doubts remain about whether the deal will have real teeth(The Economist, 2010).

Of course, the ACFTA is by no means politically insignificant, not least becauseit reflects the growing economic integration between China and South-East Asia.But rather than being an example of China openly embracing an economicregionalism project that constrains state control over national economies, the

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ACFTA resembles more an expansion of the network of bilateral tradeagreements that China already holds with other countries outside ASEAN.Moreover, it is widely understood that China resents ASEAN securitycooperation and seeks instead to promote bilateralism in security matters.During the 2011 ASEAN Regional Forum, for example, the Chinese foreignminister, Yang Jiechi, submitted that: ‘bilateral rather than multilateralnegotiations [are] the key to resolving competing territorial claims in the SouthChina Sea’ (Beeson 2013, 314). China’s bilateral relations with Cambodia,characterised by no-strings-attached investment and aid, were also critical inblocking ASEAN’s 2012 joint communiqué on territorial disputes in the SouthChina Sea (Dahles 2013). This tendency towards bilateralism in economic andsecurity issues comes as no surprise to scholars of regionalism in Asia. Bilater-alism is, in fact, an enduring characteristic of Asian regionalism and regionalisa-tion, where countries are often weaved together through a multitude of bilateralagreements (Breslin 2010; Ravenhill 2006). And while these overlappingnetworks of bilateral relations may facilitate increased economic integration,some scholars hold that the proliferation of free trade agreements may not beconducive to community-building or regionalism (Dent 2006).Latin America clearly demonstrates how Chinese non-interference has

facilitated the return of the state to the centre of regional economic governance.This is, of course, an ongoing process that has been mostly directed by localactors involved in post-neo-liberal struggles within the region (Grugel andRiggirozzi 2012). However, the geopolitical dimension is also significant, andChinese non-interference has further enhanced endogenous trends. A clearexample is that of Ecuador, a country which defaulted on its sovereign bonds in2008 under the claim that its US$3.8 billion in foreign debt was illegitimate.President Rafael Correa’s assertive stance against Western lenders, and refusalto accept conditional credits, made Ecuador an unlikely candidate for multilat-eral lending. Gallagher, Irwin, and Koleski (2012) found that during the 2005–11 period, China lent a total of US$6.3 billion to Ecuador, while the WorldBank and Inter-American Development Bank together provided the countrywith US$2.6 billion. This is part of a wider trend in the region. China lent atotal of US$87 billion to Latin American countries from 2005 to 2012, and its‘loan commitments of $37 billion in 2010 was more than the World Bank,Inter-American Development Bank, and the United States Export-Import Bankcombined for that year’ (Gallagher, Irwin, and Koleski 2012, 1). While Chineselending is not necessarily the most attractive in terms of its market rates (Myers,Sherr, and Tissot 2011), its no-political-strings-attached approach has beenembraced by countries in the region that want to escape from the regulatoryrequirements of Western-based financial institutions.6 Interestingly, the lendingprocess in Ecuador is no longer regulated at the multilateral or private levels,but is now a bilateral affair. Consequently, the Ecuadorean government is notunder pressure to relinquish sovereignty over its internal economic matters.

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This is a process that, in Ecuador, as well as in other left-leaning countries inthe region, runs in parallel with increased national controls over naturalresource industries. Rosales (2013) actually holds that the expansion of stategovernance in the extraction of natural resources is the main characteristic ofthe ‘revolutionary left’ in Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia, emphasising how theshifting geopolitical context in Latin America has also played a role inenhancing endogenous transformations. Chinese investment in the naturalresource sectors of Venezuela and Ecuador has increased in the last decade,while nationalist resource policies have emerged and the inflow of Westerndirect investment has waned (Gonzalez-Vicente 2011). China’s non-interferenceapproach facilitated the transition from a market- and foreign-investment-basedapproach to a strategy of national-state-based governance of mining and oilresources, for which foreign investment is still essential. The Chinese govern-ment and companies, in stark contrast with those of Western nations,7 showedno opposition to the reforms in the extractive sectors, and it has been largelydue to China’s consumption and investment that resource statism has not beendetrimental to the expansion of resource industries. Bebbington and Bebbington(2011) demonstrate that there has been a broader aggressive expansion ofmining and oil extraction in the whole Andean-Amazonian region, regardless ofnational political tendencies.

Overall, post-neo-liberal governments in the Latin American region have beenable to secure a stronger role for the national state in regional economicgovernance and to resist liberal regionalisation initiatives such as a proposedFree Trade Area of the Americas. An emblematic non-liberal regional organisa-tion such as the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA, inits Spanish acronym) has emerged out of this empowered post-neo-liberalcontext. The late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez played a key role inALBA’s founding. His government, as in the case of Rafael Correa’s in Ecuador,enjoyed increased autonomy from Western pressures in great part thanks toChina’s no-strings-attached approach. China’s lending to Venezuela’s centralgovernment and Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) had reached US$38.5 billionby 2012 (Gallagher, Irwin, and Koleski 2012). ALBA openly claims back ‘ThirdWorld sovereignty’ and aims at restoring independent national sovereignty. Asympathetic analysis thus claims:

Where supranational regimes evoke rivalry between states through acompetition-based model, ALBA promotes harmony, reconstituting state-to-state relationships from competition and self-interest to complementarityand mutual advantage. ... For example, supranational finance has beendivorced from externally dictated policy reform. Borrowing nations nolonger need submit to reformative measures when seeking financial support(Al Attar and Miller 2010, 356).

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ALBA is not alone as an example of a new regional organisation that seeks toincrease, rather than diffuse, the role of the state in economic governance. TheForum on China–Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) epitomises the political eco-nomic approach implicit in China’s non-interference policy. FOCAC is ameeting of Chinese and African high government officials. It has been heldfive times since its inaugural session in 2000. The Beijing Declaration, acommuniqué published after this first meeting, drew heavily on China’s non-interference discourse to declare that: ‘no country or group of countries, has theright to impose its will on others, to interfere, under whatever pretext, in othercountries’ internal affairs, or to impose unilateral coercive economic measureson others’ (FOCAC 2000). Representatives of the African Union and the UNattended some of these meetings and, while the Beijing Declaration advocatedcooperation between China and subregional organisations in Africa, as well as‘people to people exchanges’, the Forums were mostly a space to facilitatemeetings between the political and business leaders of China and Africancountries. China also used FOCAC to announce loans, development assistanceand its intentions to increase further its investment in Africa, and all theseinitiatives were to be implemented on a bilateral basis. If issues of regionalgovernance were not on the agenda, the social concerns of sub- and transna-tional civil society groups were completely omitted. Alden recalls how, duringthe first of the five meetings, held in Beijing:

African leaders and business groups met with Chinese counterparts todiscuss trade and investment opportunities and by Sunday the watchingworld was told that US$1.9 billion in new business deals had been signed.Notably missing from the international gathering were African and ChineseNGOs [non-governmental organisations], though some of the former hadpetitioned the Chinese government to be allowed to attend FOCAC to noavail (Alden 2007, 2).

A final example of the kind of pro-state intervention which is inherent inChinese non-interference is that of development cooperation. It is precisely inthis area where the non-interference discourse looms larger and where China’sapproach is perhaps more openly distanced from that of Western countries.Mawdsley (2012a, 265) underscores that, regardless of its agenda, China hasarticulated ‘an alternative set of relations between sovereign states to thoseassociated with colonial and postcolonial hegemonies and hierarchies betweenNorth and South’. It is well known that, despite having ratified the UNConvention against Corruption (see Bräutigam 2010), Chinese aid is notconditional on political or economic reforms. While the impact of China’s no-strings-attached approach is open to debate, what seems clear is that itempowers national governments and subverts supranational regimes of aidgovernance. For example, a very critical appraisal by Naím (2007, 96) tells ushow, months after World Bank experts refused to fund a railway project in

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Nigeria, which they thought could be undermined by high levels of corruption,the Chinese government offered US$9 billion to rebuild the rail network withoutneed to reform. Examples like this abound. While empowering specific nationalgovernments through no-strings-attached cooperation, China also poses achallenge to the established supranational agreements on aid governance, suchas the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Directorate(see Mawdsley 2012b). It is thus no surprise that Western countries have triedrelentlessly to enrol China in the mainstream aid architecture, without muchsuccess to date (Mawdsley, Savage, and Kim 2014).

These various state-to-state engagement processes and initiatives are illustrat-ive of the kind of pro-state and pro-business interventions facilitated by Chinesenon-interference. Chinese non-interference is, today, basically a conservativepro-business and pro-national-level-governance foreign policy. It places nationalstates at the centre of regulation of economic activity. But the role of the state, asa catalyst of business, is in this case diametrically opposed to that of the neo-liberal state. Whereas the neo-liberal state promotes business through deregula-tion, re-regulation, and the rescaling of economic governance to subnationaland regional institutions, enhancing the formation of supranational and‘regulatory regionalism’, non-interference consolidates state regulatory powerand executive-based bilateralism.

Conclusion

This article has explored non-interference as a semi-formal institution thatregulates China’s foreign interactions. While non-interference is only one of themany vectors in Chinese international engagement, it has tremendous power inrearticulating regional governance architectures. In particular, non-interferencepromotes bilateralism and empowers national governments, rescaling economicgovernance back to the national state. In doing so, it is a form of interventionthat channels economic activity through the nation state, which becomes afacilitator of a business-centric logic of development. In a recent article, Breslin(2010, 715) explains how Marxist writers tend to understand regionalism as anattempt to legitimise capitalism, ‘constructing a space that allows capitalism toflourish and become widely accepted as the best (or only) economic system’.Instead, Chinese non-interference capitalism, drawing on Westphalian andThird-Worldist notions of sovereignty, has found its legitimising space in thenational state. While processes of regionalism remain complex and diverse,Chinese non-interference debilitates supranational regionalisms and empowersexecutive-based bilateralism. That, in essence, is the major interventionunderlying China’s non-interference.

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Notes

1. However, China’s support was not necessarily unconditional, and Beijing had its ownexpectations of the policies that national liberation movements should adopt (Van Ness 1971).

2. One exception that comes to mind is Ian Taylor’s (2008) article on China’s no-strings-attachedengagement in Africa. In his study, Taylor takes these arguments further to conclude that thenon-interference approach, by empowering autocrats, subverts developmental expectations ofeconomic growth.

3. It should be noted here that the empowerment of central state elites does not imply theempowerment of a country or people as a whole, whose interests might be better servedthrough decisions made at sub- or supranational levels.

4. While China has pushed for a more preponderant role for emerging economies within theseinstitutions, and even suggested ‘democratic consultation’ in the selection of the InternationalMonetary Fund’s managing director, it seems less concerned about how multilateral economicgovernance may trample independent policy making in poor countries with little internationalleverage to negotiate their position vis-à-vis hegemonic rules. Many Chinese companies have,in fact, successfully ridden the ‘neo-liberal wave’ and taken advantage of the liberal investmentregimes that pervade the developing world after three decades of neo-liberal hegemony(Gonzalez-Vicente 2012).

5. Chinese enterprises are the primary actors in these special economic zones, despite actingunder the auspices and with the assistance of the Chinese government, and while partnering, attimes, with national governments to generate local development opportunities (Bräutigam andTang 2011, 33). Unsurprisingly, in trying to facilitate Chinese accumulation overseas, Chinesebusinesses follow elite-driven agendas— ‘globalocentrism’ agendas, as Escobar (2001) wouldput it—which in other contexts have been proved to be conducive to political, economic andsocial exclusion (Raco 1998).

6. However, the negotiations of Chinese loans to Ecuador have not always been smooth. In2009, President Correa declared that the repayment conditions proposed by China’sEximbank were ‘really a threat against our sovereignty’ and concluded that, ‘all of a sudden,negotiating with China is worse than the IMF [International Monetary Fund]’ (El Universo,2010). The conditions were subsequently revised, the negotiations resumed and the loan wasapproved.

7. While the leverage that China gives to national governments is important, we should notsimplify the complex struggles around natural resources. In Ecuador, for example, Canadiancompanies lobbied hard to influence the drafting of the 2009 New Mining Law. The success ofthe pro-mining camp versus environmentalists is also due to the government’s ownpreferences.

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