The New Imperative: Protecting China's Overseas Interests

• In Event: China's Responses to its Evolving Security Environment

Abstract

This paper argues that China’s intensifying focus on what it calls “overseas interests” 海外利益 are driving its ambitions for a blue-water navy, its pursuit of expeditionary capabilities, and its acquisition of overseas bases and logistics facilities beyond Djibouti. This costly expansion is occurring even though China has other instruments – local military protection, private security companies, evacuations, international partnerships, and consular instruments – that may be cheaper. This paper surveys China’s discourse on the evolution of “overseas interests” across three phases: (1) from a growing awareness that they exist to (2) an elevation of them in key Party and state documents to (3) a focus on linking them to the military, especially the PLAN. It then discusses how this linkage has been operationalized and explores the ways in which China’s overseas interests discourse dovetails with the Belt and Road and clashes with China’s principles on non-interference. The paper also explores how China defines its overseas interests, when these became a serious concern for its leadership, how these concerns have evolved, what China means by the military concept “areas crucially related to China’s overseas interests,” and what the focus on overseas interests might mean for China’s naval strategy and posture.

Author

• Rushabh Doshi, Brookings Institution