The Foreign Service Journal, January-February 2023

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2023 93 But more than color and spice, these vignettes offer insights that may surprise even experienced China hands. with the perceived black eye the concur- rent financial crisis gave the Western economic model. He discusses the impact of the Soviet Union’s 1991 dissolution on China and U.S.-Chinese relations, quoting former Chinese officials explaining that this event not only left the PRC as the only major communist power, but removed the single most important reason for the U.S. to cooperate with China. Yet another important section describes how U.S. officials were wrong to assume that PRC membership in international organizations would lead it to embrace liberal democracy. “Chinese leaders always saw it as a validation of their rule, never as a slippery slope that would end in the Communist Party losing power,” Martin notes. Martin’s sparse use of statistics magnifies those he does present to mark China’s growth on the global stage. For instance, foreign investment in China shot from $7.6 billion in 2000 to $57.2 billion in 2005. China was a member of one interna- tional organization in 1971 and of 37 in 1989, and in 2019 became the second- largest contributor to the U.N. budget and the largest provider of U.N. peace- keepers. Also in 2019, China surpassed the U.S. as the country with the greatest number of diplomatic missions. There are also colorful revelations about top PRC leaders, like Mao’s vindic- tiveness in denying medical care to Zhou when the latter was first diagnosed with bladder cancer. But more than color and spice, these vignettes offer insights that may surprise even experienced China hands. Martin relates, for example, how impressed former Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan was by his Indonesian counterpart’s simple act of turning on a faucet and passing him a towel in the men’s room. As Martin quotes Tang: “It not only reflected his respect and friendship for China, but also his wish to establish a personal friendship from deep within his heart.” Similarly, Martin tells of a Chinese ambassador to Vietnam who felt snubbed by his American counterpart because the American never spoke to him at recep- tions. When the American ambassador called at the Chinese embassy, Martin quotes the PRC diplomat, “I served tea, but didn’t put out dried fruit.” If the book slips a bit, it is in sev- eral broad generalizations. One is the repeated refrain that a weakness of China’s diplomatic corps is that institu- tional constraints “leave its practitioners with little space to improvise,” and they are forced to advance positions driven by domestic politics. I know diplomats from many countries (including our own) who have felt the same. Elsewhere Martin seems to imply that certain tactics and characteristics origi- nated with the PRC, when they have, in fact, been used by China’s governments for millennia. One example is the elabo- rate and flattering hospitality used to win over foreign offi- cials—recall Madame Chiang Kai Shek’s famous “charm offen- sive” in the mid-20th century. Another is the assumption that big and powerful countries get to play by different rules. For most of its history, the Middle Kingdom was the military, technological, and cultural center of the world, and it used this position to force tribute from all and sundry. The belief that power should be exploited persists. (I wish I had a nickel for every time a Chinese official asked me why, as the world’s only superpower, the U.S. bothered to follow U.N. and World Trade Organization rules, or how we could spend trillions of dollars in Iraq and not even take the oil!) Such quibbles aside, Peter Martin does an excellent and engaging job of describing the evolution in substance and style of PRC diplomacy. The result is a thought-provoking book that explains why China’s diplomacy is what it is—and why the author concludes that the PRC system “makes its envoys effective in making demands, but poorly equipped to win hearts and minds.” n Philip A. Shull is a retired FSO who served in China (three times), the Philippines, Argentina, Korea, and Hong Kong during 31 years with the Foreign Agricultural Service. He lectures frequently on China and food security, and is a retiree representative on the current AFSA Governing Board.