GEORGE BARTLE: Beijing’s Strategic Ends: Harmony Through Hierarchy and the End of Choice.

Returning U.S. analytical models to a historically grounded understanding of China’s goals and methods refocuses efforts along a path that accepts China as being Chinese, not something that can be molded into a Western partner or that can be fully understood through Western political science theories. According to the neo-liberal and neo-realist theoretic perspectives guiding U.S. foreign policy, Chinese paradigms of empire, tribute, and vassalage had been relegated to the past, and therefore could be sublimated through a rules-based order governed by U.S.-created and led multilateral institutions. However, neo-liberal ideology failed to grasp that while the People’s Republic of China is a modern nation-state, it also maintains attributes of an ancient empire. This is not to say that China wants to abolish the current system or upend a rules-based order. Rather, Beijing seeks to bend global rules so they conform to its own worldview in an effort to define and direct international behavior, norms, and rituals.

Ultimately, a Stalinist-infused neo-tributary approach to international relations, particularly in the Indo-Pacific, seeks an end state where smaller countries are locked into a hierarchical relationship with Beijing—managed not just through hard power, but also deference and ritual—where freedom of choice and the ability to pivot between great powers give way to Beijing’s preferences. While Chinese academics have yet to coalesce around a single Sino-centric theory of international relations, one way of conceptualizing how Beijing achieves its strategic ends was articulated in a 2015 article by Su-Yan Pan and Joe Tin-Yao Lo, two scholars from the Hong Kong Institute of Education, who argued that China’s foreign policy is best understood through a neo-tributary framework that takes into account four core imperial concepts that continue to shape the Chinese Communist Party’s worldview.

Millions for defense, not one cent for tribute.