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DOMESTIC DETERMINANTS

Here, we focus upon how, where and by whom foreign policy is constructed in China and India. Our initial focus upon domestic factors, structures and understandings should not obscure their centrality to ideational great power accounts concerning how states conceive, make and deliver foreign policy. Such an importance also interlinks the domestic and international spheres, indicating how foreign policy is specific to states and institutions, and represents ‘the substance of a nation’s efforts to promote interests vis-à-vis other nations’ (Christopher Hill quoted in Gupta & Shukla, 2009: 2). Rather than overlooking domestic factors, as materialist and realist accounts predominantly do, the interplay between different elites – either as individuals or as groups – and the nature of the international system are underscored. This approach echoes Modelski’s definition of foreign policy as ‘the system of activities evolved by communities for changing the behavior of other states and for adjusting their own activities to the international environment’ (1972: 6).

Comprising assemblages of internal values, central understandings and policy precedents that are reflective of a particular state’s international interaction, foreign policy is thus conditioned, regulated and even restricted by its domestic context. Historically contingent, a state’s self-conception is transmitted from generation to generation of political elites and leaders, further underlining how critical it is that a state’s domestic political features are examined. On this basis, ‘shared meanings and intersubjective structures can be as important in shaping international outcomes as material interests’ (Nicholas Onuf quoted in Fierke, 2007: 3). The domestic also retains a critical significance for the maintenance of any leader’s legitimacy, position and political centrality. With regard to our two subject states, which are developing, modernizing, post-colonial states that desire to be great powers, such a dynamic is of particular contemporary significance.

The chapter begins with an exposition of how Beijing and New Delhi’s political systems function, and outlines their key governing structures (both legislative and executive). Here, an analysis of the decision-making process and its generational evolution – in democratic India and authoritarian China – is included. We discuss the viewpoints of major political parties in both states concerning foreign policy, and their various ideological biases, before considering the role of each entity’s bureaucrats. The chapter then evaluates the growing and diversifying non-governmental influences upon foreign policy-making, in particular from expanding indigenous security communities, as well as expanding discussion via mass media. It concludes with some deliberation concerning nationalism as a foreign policy issue that links together China and India’s relative internal and international spheres.

Core Political Dimensions

Domestic institutional political capabilities are the means by which states implement their political agendas internally and, through specific foreign policy-making regimes, externally. Setting themselves apart from lower-tier states, and in order to lay claim to being a great power, they must have the ‘willingness and ability to promote [their] interests further abroad’ (Lanteigne, 2013: 21), which requires a combination of high institutional capabilities and political volition. A better understanding of a state’s central political dimensions also underpins the key constructivist notion that ‘identities are at the basis of interests’ (He, 2009: 117). This greater appreciation of intangible factors – such as ideology – also acknowledges not only that Western ideologies and concepts are irrevocably coupled with (most) current notions of what constitutes a great power (Suzuki, 2008: 51), but also that, as India and China emerge to prominence, their specific values (in isolation and perhaps collectively) will gradually challenge this preponderance.

There is a ‘negligible separation’ in China’s authoritarian political system ‘between the apparatus of government and the structure of the CCP’ (Lanteigne, 2013: 24), the Chinese Communist Party, which is the country’s paramount political actor. In an essentially one-party state that is highly centralized, hierarchical and subservient, the CCP controls all major institutional appointments via a nomenklatura system based upon fixed vertical transition, which runs in tandem with the governance structure. The CCP therefore sees itself as providing the ‘political leadership of the country’ (Brown, 2013: 6–7) – a central position it has enjoyed since the consecration of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. Enshrining such a position has resulted in the strong state-led (and hence CCP-led) nature of modern Chinese politics, economics, foreign affairs and societal issues as a whole. The CCP has also sought periodically to consolidate its political supremacy, most notably during the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s, when its founding leader, Mao Zedong, first demolished, and then rebuilt, most state and party apparatuses.

Born out of the aftermath of the rebellions, ethnic tensions, myriad instabilities and economic crises of the 1800s that culminated in the nationalist revolution of 1911, the CCP came into being in the 1920s. This period was also punctuated by China’s crushing defeats by Britain in the Opium Wars of 1839–42 and 1856–60, and by Japan in the 1894–5 Sino-Japanese War (and later its full invasion of China in 1937), as well as unfair trade concessions given to the United States, France and Germany. China’s international stature was consequently seen by the CCP to be debased, as personified by its negative treatment under the Treaty of Versailles of June 1919, which transferred German-occupied portions of Shandong to Japanese control. It was protests against the Treaty that led to the anti-imperialist 1919 May Fourth Movement, and inspired the 1921 formation of the CCP. Collectively these events constituted a ‘Century of Humiliation’ (bainian guochi) for China, and spurred Mao to urge it to ‘stand up’ again in the international system (D. Scott, 2007). The CCP would base its legitimacy to rule upon defeating Japan in 1945, and winning the subsequent civil war against the nationalist Kuomintang that ended in 1949, which led to a generation of war-hardened leaders who would influence the party until the 1990s.

China’s past helped shape the bedrock upon which the CCP’s foreign policy and self-image would be based. Indicating that power relations and perceptions of threat dictate policy, Mao stated his aim to have his ‘poor country . . . changed into a rich country, [and from] a country denied her rights into a country enjoying her rights’ (quoted in Lewis, 1963: 261). The CCP’s long revolutionary history was also instructive in forming its central organizational tenets. Based upon Leninist principles, and thus having a structure akin to that of the Soviet Communist Party, its organization was underpinned by three critical notions: democratic centralism (whereby binding decisions, which must be implemented, are made by a small number of leaders); minority protection (through which views can be held and voiced, and all decisions are based upon consensus); and, in the post-Mao era, collective leadership (to avoid over-concentrating power in one individual). Additionally informed by a traditional Chinese worldview, these approaches synthesized, leading to a China-specific ‘Sinification of Marxism’ (Nathan & Ross, 1997: 33).

With over 85 million members (Xinhua, 2013), the CCP is the world’s longest ruling political party and, overall, the world’s second largest political party (the first being India’s Bharatiya Janata Party, BJP). There are also currently over 86 million members in the Communist Youth League of China (CYLC), and competition to join the party remains high, with the CCP accepting only 14 per cent of the 21 million applications made to it in 2010 (BBC, 2011). CCP membership thus provides representation and core benefits to over 6.2 per cent of the population (and to an additional 6.3 per cent if CYLC members are included) – benefits that permeate to family members and relatives. CCP members dominate positions within public institutions, as realized by the concurrent nature of the CCP and the Chinese government in a party-state model, resulting in a necessary, mutual and complementary dynamic through which a proportion of the population has a vested interest in continued CCP governance. The position of ‘princelings’ (gaogan zidi – the offspring of senior CCP leaders, including Xi Jinping) also underlines the continuance of CCP rule from one generation to the next. In recent years, the CCP has diversified its membership based upon myriad different backgrounds, ages, geographical foci, (foreign) education and interpersonal connections (guanxi). The party has also accepted capitalists since 2001, reflecting China’s fiscal liberalization since 1978 and the centrality of economic growth to its current legitimacy (see Chapter 4). This diversification indicates a crucial need for political consensus-building, so as to avoid ‘the same fate as communist parties further...