China's Fragmented Approach toward the Indo-Pacific Strategy: One Concept, Many Lenses

Bo Ma

《The China Review An Interdisciplinary Journal on Greater China》 20卷3期 (2020/08) Pp. 177-203

摘要

Since the Trump administration endorsed the concept of Indo-Pacific in 2017 and later rolled out a US Indo-Pacific strategy, the Chinese government and China's academic and policy community have maintained a high interest in understanding the strategy in terms of its conception and substance. However, Chinese officials and scholars have been divided in assessing the nature, purposes, and impacts of the strategy and have reached no consensus on policy responses. This fragmentation has appeared before, as we have seen among international law scholars on some thorny international law issues. This article argues that the larger the scale of the issue, the higher the degree of fragmentation is likely to be in China's policy and academic community. The US Indo-Pacific strategy is a good example of that parallel and vertical fragmentation. Chinese scholars, coming from different academic backgrounds, have offered different assessments and recommendations on the Indo-Pacific strategy, which have made the policy debate in today's China quite vibrant and sophisticated.