Author's Response: Covid-19, Great-Power Competition, and the Future of China's Approach to the Protection of Its Interests Overseas

Abstract

Author's Response:Covid-19, Great-Power Competition, and the Future of China's Approach to the Protection of Its Interests Overseas Andrea Ghiselli (bio) It is difficult to find anything more rewarding for a scholar than to have leading experts in the field thoughtfully engage with their work. Thus, I am extremely thankful to the four reviewers for taking the time to do this with my book, Protecting China's Interests Overseas: Securitization and Foreign Policy. I must also thank Asia Policy for providing a venue for such a discussion to take place. The four reviewers are well-known experts in Chinese foreign policy, each focusing on different issues. As such, I am happy that they all concur with the argument presented in my book and found it of interest. At the same time, they all touch upon similar issues in their comments, despite the different angles from which they discuss the book. In particular, they emphasize how I barely refer to the role of China's relations with other countries in the analysis. They also point out that I discuss the possible evolution of China's approach to the protection of its interests overseas, as well as implications for other actors in the international system, solely at the end of the book. To a large extent, these were deliberate choices that I made for two reasons. The first, as Jonathan Fulton notes in his comments, was a focus on approaching the study of China's strategy to protect its interests overseas through the lens of foreign policy analysis rather than international relations. This approach means that I referred to other countries only to the extent that the Chinese authors I consulted as sources did so. The second is that I have always found making predictions a difficult endeavor. The critical role of contingency in the origin and evolution of China's strategy to protect its interests overseas convinced me of that even more. After all, I doubt that this book would have been written without the Libyan crisis in 2011. Against this backdrop, I am thankful to the reviewers for pushing me to elaborate more on the findings and implications of the analysis presented [End Page 171] in my book, though I fear that addressing those issues has become even more difficult today. One of the key factors that made China consider protection of its overseas interests was the steady expansion of its economic and human footprint abroad over the past decades. This trend may change, however, especially regarding the large presence of Chinese nationals abroad. According to the latest data released by the Chinese government, the number of Chinese infrastructure workers overseas declined from about 800,000 in 2019 to less than 500,000 at the end of 2020, likely because of the Covid-19 pandemic.1 Of these workers, 163,000 were located in the Middle East and North Africa, about 100,000 less than in 2019. This is the biggest drop in the number of Chinese infrastructure workers abroad ever recorded both in those regions and at the global level. Notably, this figure does not include other categories of Chinese citizens overseas, such as entrepreneurs and students. Moreover, given that the number of workers in the Middle East and North Africa recovered quickly after the 2010–11 Arab Spring, a similar resurgence could happen again after the pandemic, but it should not be taken for granted. Chinese policymakers and scholars have also long known that foreign governments want Chinese projects to contribute to local employment and economic growth. As China's economic engagement with other countries continues to adapt, this pressure could lead to the reduction of China's human footprint overseas, especially in the developing world. At the same time, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has caught up 6,000 Chinese nationals, makes the future even more uncertain.2 Over the past decade, China managed to successfully evacuate thousands of people from countries such as Yemen, Iraq, and Ethiopia due to better preparation at the embassy level, improved cooperation with local governments, and—in Yemen—the option to use the military. Although Chinese nationals have continued to be victims of attacks amid conflict...