Just days into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Dmitri Medvedev, the former president and prime minister of Russia, took to social media to post a chilling message. He raged against Western sanctions on his country and suggested darkly that Russia could rip up some of its most important agreements with the West. He mentioned the New START treaty, the nuclear arms reduction agreement signed with the United States over a decade ago, but the threat was broader still: the sundering of all diplomatic ties with Western countries. “It’s time to hang huge padlocks on the embassies,” he wrote.

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After months of watching hundreds of new nuclear missile silos being dug in the dirt northwest of Beijing, it is welcome news that President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping seemingly agreed at last week’s summit on the need for strategic stability talks. Strategic stability — the idea that nuclear-armed countries should not be able to gain decisive advantage over one another — has taken on new importance as China expands and modernizes its nuclear arsenal.

China is expected to quadruple its number of warheads in the next decade, and is upgrading its nuclear capabilities with new missiles, submarines and bombers. Over the summer, it reportedly fired a missile from a hypersonic glide vehicle while testing its fractional orbital bombardment system (FOBS) — a technical advance that, if true, means the Chinese can attack targets from space with nuclear weapons. Although China insists it will never be the first to use nuclear weapons, this claim has less credence than in the past, when the country’s nuclear force was much smaller.

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For as long as policymakers and scholars of international relations have sought to understand the actions of actors on the global stage, they have also debated the intentions of governments and the role those intentions play in statecraft. In a new article in the Journal of Chinese Political Science, Center Fellow Oriana Skylar Mastro proposes a new research agenda for deciphering Chinese intentions. She argues that the current treatment of intentions in international relations is not granular enough to allow for a nuanced understanding of what China wants, how it plans to achieve it, and what the implications will be for the United States and the U.S.-led world order.

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Mastro suggests that there are theoretical and empirical issues with how existing scholarly accounts have defined, measured, and operationalized intentions in the context of understanding China’s rise. She presents five propositions that should drive research moving forward. 

Her first point in advancing a theory of intentions requires a definition distinct from aspirations, motives, preferences, objectives, goals, and grand strategy. She argues that “intentions consist of purposefully designing or manipulating means to achieve some end,” implying “clear formulation and deliberateness.”

Second, a theory of intentions should analytically separate ends from means but include both process intentions and outcome intentions, says Mastro. Process intentions refer to “the preferred methods and the factors that influence how a country thinks it is best to achieve its goals,” outcome intentions to “what one wants to bring about, accomplish or attain.” Scholars thus need to differentiate between what China wants and how it plans to achieve those goals. For example, some argue that China is a “revisionist” power seeking to increase its influence by changing aspects of the international order to further its interests, not a “revolutionary” power intending to upend the system entirely. But more accurately, Mastro notes, “China has revisionist outcome intentions, not process intentions, with respect to international institutions; countries are revolutionary powers when they have both.”

Another problem is that existing measurements of intentions tend to rely on values that are largely subjective and uninformative in explaining what a country is doing and how others should respond. For example, scholars often see revisionist intentions as bad and status quo intentions as good. But Mastro points out that the United States was revisionist after WWII: it set up the network of international institutions that make up the current international system. Why, then, should we ascribe a negative label to China’s revisionist efforts to leverage those institutions for its benefit? According to Mastro, it is more accurate to assess whether intentions are detrimental or beneficial for specific actors. For example, “Chinese intentions to control more of the South China Sea are detrimental to U.S. interests, even if China pursues those interests without using force." 

Fourth, Mastro contends that states’ intentions vary not only by issue area but also within a particular issue area, and therefore it is empirically problematic to analyze one variable describing everything a state wants. She argues that a state’s intentions can vary even within specific spheres of activity, such as security, and in many cases, a particular issue cannot be dissected cleanly into economic or security tropes like China’s One Belt, One Road initiative.

Her fifth proposition addresses a debate in the literature about uncertainty and intentions: while there may be uncertainty about intentions, that does not make them unknowable. Mastro suggests that, in practice, “current intentions are knowable to a great degree... future intentions are less knowable, as states have yet to formulate them — but how the pursuit of current intentions unfolds largely shapes future intentions.”

The study of China and its intentions must be more granular and deeply data-driven, Mastro concludes. The view that “China is revisionist/bad and the United States is status quo/good” risks creating a series of assumptions that hamper good policy, she warns. Embracing the five propositions she lists will allow for a more productive research agenda and policy recommendations based on data instead of “wishful thinking.” For Mastro, this new framework is an important launching pad from which U.S. policymakers not only can better consider China’s intentions but also think innovatively about how to win over partners and build new types of power.

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Conceptualizing China as an Unconventional Great Power

Most studies on China’s presence in Southeast Asia tend to focus on China’s power dynamics and how it wields it to gain influence within the region. The emphasis is on intention and causation: how China willingly uses its power to coerce, coopt, or persuade Southeast Asian states to behave in particular ways. This characterization, Han argues, ignores the contemporary Chinese state as fragmented, decentralized, and internationalized. Han goes beyond this conventional approach to explore the variety of actors and the intended versus unintended outcomes associated with China’s presence in Southeast Asia. It is necessary to understand such nuance and complexity, he claims, if we are to make sense of China’s relations with Southeast Asian states.

China’s presence in Southeast Asia is by no means monolithic, notes Han. Rather, it takes numerous everyday forms and involves not only state actors, such as diplomatic missions and state-owned enterprises, but also non-state actors that may or may not be closely associated with the Chinese state. These include civil society organizations, private businesses, and ordinary Chinese citizens who reside in Southeast Asia for work, study, or retirement, in addition to Chinese tourists. The actions of these multiple stakeholders can have intended and unintended consequences, Han argues. In particular, the effects of non-state Chinese actors’ daily encounters with local communities in Southeast Asia deserve attention, he says.

Shadow Economy and Offshore Gambling in Eastern Myanmar

Consider, for instance, the case of the “new city” of Shwe Kokko in Myanmar’s Southeastern Kayin State (known as 'Karen State' among the ethnic-Karen population living there), on the border with Thailand. The emerging “Chinatown” project in Shwe Kokko began attracting international attention as capital investment flowed into the former farmland on the banks of the Moei River and residential complexes, hotels, shops, Chinese restaurants, and glitzy casinos sprang up. Allegations of Chinese mafia involvement have plagued the massive city project, and media outlets and Western observers attributed culpability to the Chinese government, portraying the project as part of the Belt and Road Initiative.

However, Han points out that empirical details show that the new city project was led by a company headed by a fugitive Chinese businessman fleeing the Chinese government’s crackdown on illegal offshore gambling. Therefore, Shwe Kokko is not quite a case of Chinese Belt and Road Initiative expansionism using complex networks of PRC citizens and ethnic Chinese in a neighboring country to fuel dangerous activities colluding with Chinese officials and government agencies. Instead, it demonstrates how shadow economies like the online gambling industry are responding to regulatory attempts by the Chinese state. According to Han, to make sense of the Shwe Kokko story, one must understand who the non-state actors are and how they interact with local communities in Southeast Asian borderlands.

Market Demand and Agricultural Transformation in Northern Myanmar

Now turn to Northern Myanmar, where Han conducted fieldwork in 2019. Over the past decade, he explains, Northern Myanmar has undergone accelerated deforestation due to rising agricultural production in response to increasing demand for grains such as maize and their elevated global commodity market prices. In Myanmar’s Shan State, which borders China, the expansion of maize cultivation is closely related to a surge in Chinese demand for animal feed resulting from the rising domestic consumption of meat. However, a Chinese state ban on maize import from Myanmar had created rampant smuggling coupled with irregular enforcement of border inspections and schisms between the commodity production cycle and financing for local farmers.

One may draw a correlation between the rising demand for meat consumption in China that seemingly created a ripple effect in Myanmar, leading to the expansion of maize cultivation, deforestation, and economic precarity for local farmers. But then again, is this a case of Chinese influence operations? There is no evidence pointing to such deliberate attempts by the Chinese state to influence its neighboring country, although the resulting economic and environmental consequences are related to conditions in China.

Thus, Han argues, understanding an increasingly globalized China and its variegated impacts around the world requires conceptual flexibility. In particular, when referring to China's presence and influence in Southeast Asia, one must not assume a monolith with hegemonic designs for its neighboring states but rather differentiate between multiple types of actors with long histories and multifaceted consequences, both intended and unintended.