Of the many readings for this week, the one I found more interesting was Feng Zhang’s “Chinese Thinking on the South China Sea and the Future of Regional Security”, which analyzes the competing views within Chinese government and society when formulating security policies for the South China Sea.
When interpreting the actions of foreign states, especially those whose political systems are not Western style democracies, both academics and policy makers of any given country have a tendency to view the other side as a monolith. Their actions are more often than not interpreted through a single lens, as if all of them were part of a single cohesive strategy. That bias leads in many instances, in my opinion, to gross misinterpretations.
Understanding the inner workings of a foreign country, how its foreign/security policy is actually formulated and implemented, the competing visions that exist behind it, should always be a priority of any country’s decision makers. This type of analysis helps avoiding unnecessary conflicts and provides inputs for different courses of action.
One reply on “Week 4 – Murilo”
Murilo,
I fully agree with your point in this blog. But the problem we face in understanding and dealing with highly autocratic and repressive regimes, like the current Chinese regime, is that it doesn’t tolerate dissonant voices. Such people are either arrested–and sometimes permanently disappeared (if they represent a serious threat to the regime)–or they are forced to flee the country. So it is often only expatriates who can speak without fear of retribution.
But your larger point, I suspect, is that we need to guard against xenophobic bias where we fail to make the effort to understand the details and nuances of a competing system and why things are done differently. Of course, in the Chinese case, there seems to be little doubt that Xi Jinping has tightened the grip of the CCP very considerably–to the point where dissent and the presentation of alternative views is now more or less forbidden. –Professor Wallerstein