Decoding the deliberate ambiguity of China’s expanding core interests
- Beijing’s finely tuned ranking of its vital concerns reveal how China assesses its place in the world in relation to the US
- The Chinese leadership adopted the term in the early 2000s as part of an effort to persuade Washington to regard the rising power on equal terms
The concept was first introduced to China’s foreign policy in the early 2000s, as Beijing sought to persuade Washington to accommodate its ascendancy while avoiding the historical trap of confrontation between a ruling power and a rising one. Similar to the US, China’s national interests are roughly categorised into three levels: core, important and secondary.
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A further attempt was made in September 2011, with a Chinese government white paper which summed up China’s core interests as: “state sovereignty, national security, territorial integrity and national reunification, China’s political system established by the constitution and overall social stability, and the basic safeguards for ensuring sustainable economic and social development.”
As many China watchers have pointed out, the white paper underlined Beijing’s global ambitions and growing confidence, in particular when dealing with Washington as an equal. “If only Washington would recognise this logic and yield its remote, peripheral, noncore interests in Asia in favour of China’s truly essential, ‘legitimate’ interests, then the two sides can enjoy peace,” said veteran sinologist Andrew Nathan in 2013.
It was just three weeks ago that China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi made another rare attempt to fine-tune the ranking of core interests, which seems vital to understanding how a rising Beijing assesses its place in the world vis-à-vis Washington.
It was during a meeting with visiting second-ranking US diplomat Wendy Sherman that Wang laid out the three “bottom lines” of China’s core interests. Unlike 10 years ago – when sovereignty and territorial claims were ranked at the top – Beijing appears now to put greater emphasis on defending its party-state authoritarian system and unique development model.
But it has remained deliberately ambiguous about whether other hot button issues – such as the maritime disputes in the South and East China Seas and expanding Chinese interests overseas – have also been classified as core interests.
Despite intense speculation since 2010, Beijing has never confirmed or denied the elevation of the South China Sea to core interest status. The only exception to this ambiguity came just days after the 2016 international arbitration which rejected China’s historically-based claims. In what appeared to be a one-off comment, Wu Shengli, former commander of the PLA Navy, described the disputed waterway as a core Chinese interest.
In the East China Sea, the core interest status of another sovereignty issue is shrouded in mystery – the Japanese-controlled Senkaku islands, known to China, which also claims them, as the Diaoyus. In April 2013, China’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying made international headlines when she said “the Diaoyu islands are about sovereignty and territorial integrity. Of course it’s China’s core interest”. Her remarks were later removed from the official transcript.
China’s intentional ambiguity gives Beijing flexibility and room to manoeuvre in its handling of these sensitive issues, while helping to ward off domestic criticism that it is not assertive enough.
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Perhaps the most lucid explanation of Beijing’s thinking behind its repeated referral to core interests when dealing with the US came in a 2012 article co-authored by China’s ambassador to Washington Cui Tiankai, who retired this year, and diplomat Pang Hanzhao.
“China has never done anything to undermine US core interests and major concerns, yet what the United States has done in matters concerning China’s core and important interests and major concerns is unsatisfactory,” they said.
