Power and Restraint in China's Rise by Chin‐HaoHuang, New York, NY, Columbia University Press, 2022, xviii + 216 pp.

Abstract

Chin-Hao Huang's Power and Restraint in China's Rise is an ambitious book about "one of the most consequential developments in Asian security and international politics" (p. xiv)-namely, "the rise of China as a political phenomenon" (p. xiii). The book offers a provocative challenge to at least three conventional narratives about China, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and US strategy in Asia. Underlying all three is a power politics narrative about the strategic utility and efficacy of material and coercive power. Empirically rich, the book offers, at the very least, good reasons to question the Melian Dialogue's most cited passage: "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must" (Thucydides cited by Huang; p. 137).Among the book's values is its effort to complicate what are one-dimensional depictions of China, ASEAN, and the ASEAN states. On China, as he puts it, "the conventional wisdom tends to see that China will define its power in purely material terms and pursue more direct confrontation that would upend the global balance of power in its favor" (p. 133). Huang's argument is not that Chinese decision-makers do not seek material power or believe in its utility, but rather that China's use of coercive military power is variable and contingent. A South China Sea case study serves to illustrate China's behavioral patterns in an effort to uncover the conditions of "strong state restraint" between 2012 and 2018. His study finds that China's restraint "closely corresponds" with the presence of a "strong ASEAN consensus" as expressed at ASEAN leaders' summits. This lends support to his basic hypothesis and argument: "the stronger and more cohesive the consensus on regional security norms, the more likely it is for China's foreign policy to reflect that consensus and support the regional, multilateral security agreement" on questions like the South China Sea (p. 15). And similarly, the opposite would be true.This has implications for understandings of China's motivations as a strategic actor because ASEAN consensus is not accompanied by threats of material sanction. Chinese restraint also "occurred irrespective of China's growing material capabilities" and US deterrence actions. Put another way, "the variation in a large, powerful state's foreign policy behavior rests on the presence of a nonmaterial, ideational, and external factor: strong ASEAN consensus" (p. 56).To illustrate China's consideration of normative factors and what Huang calls, "strongstate restraint as a legitimation strategy," Huang's discussion also delves into China's 180 THE DEVELOPING ECONOMIES