China's Rising Foreign Ministry engages with a popular discourse on “assertiveness” in Chinese foreign policy and is a major contribution to the academic study of PRC politics. The book asks two corollary questions: how is China's foreign policy “assertiveness” manifested and represented? And perhaps more importantly, how do other state actors perceive and construct Chinese foreign policy behaviour? In his study, Dylan Loh focuses on an understudied set of agents – officials working in the PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) – as he notes that “relatively little is known about how MOFA and its diplomats contribute to foreign policy and the reasons for, and effects of, this more muscular diplomacy” (p. 2). Loh defines PRC assertiveness as “the tendency to use its power and influence to impose costs on others to extract compliance and/or police behavior” (p. 2), with a subset of what he calls “diplomatic assertiveness” defined as “using various diplomatic levers to extract concessions, police behavior, and impose costs” (p. 16).
Loh's book investigates PRC foreign policy activities in Southeast Asia during the 2009–2020 period and uses mixed-qualitative methods drawing from an impressive selection of resources, including over 100 interviews with PRC diplomats/secondary diplomatic actors and non-Chinese diplomats, primary texts and participant observation data drawn from closed-door conferences, track 1.5 and track 2 diplomatic dialogues with Chinese participants during 2013–2015. Loh mines this data cache to map China's “assertive” and “cooperative” behaviour in the 11-year period across diplomatic, economic and military realms. Substantively, the book uses a range of illustrative case studies, including, amongst others, Wang Yi's 2016 Canada visit, where “he broke diplomatic protocol and demanded to meet with Canada's prime minister” (p. 47), ASEAN South China Sea statements, and the November 2016 episode when Singapore's Terrex armoured vehicles were seized in transit following military exercises in Taiwan.
This landmark study into Chinese diplomatic praxis joins existing work on MOFA's rise – like Andrea Ghiselli's Protecting China's Interests Overseas: Securitization and Foreign Policy (Oxford University Press, 2021) and Peter Martin's China's Civilian Army: The Making of Wolf Warrior Diplomacy (Oxford University Press, 2023). It also joins a growing body of research that applies practice theory beyond Western cases, led by scholars like Deepak Nair. Loh is indeed the first author to focus on PRC MOFA agents’ practices, “the doings and sayings of actors in the world” (p. 10). He examines diplomatic practice, specifying how MOFA actors accrue influence in policy processes through “advising, implementing, and facilitating/coordinating” (p. 9), complemented by material objects (books, meeting room infrastructure) and technological platforms (WeChat, Twitter). These quotidian bureaucratic functions, tangible objects and online spaces constitute PRC diplomacy and help others understand and create “China.” Through his study, Loh finds that “Chinese envoys (compared to diplomats before 2009) are more incentivized and entrusted to practice and represent assertiveness” (p. 7, emphasis original), indicated by their increased funding to MOFA, the agency's higher profile diplomatic activities in real life and online, and MOFA's ability to wield authority and power through its capacity to counsel, its capacity to implement and its coordinating functions. Loh also concludes that the perception of PRC assertiveness is frequently correlated with MOFA performance of assertiveness.
Like all excellent studies, Loh's pathbreaking work leaves the reader wanting to learn more. For example, how can we understand the variation in China's performative assertiveness across time, by functional issue or diplomatic domain? Understanding why such variation occurs and the implication of such variation is certainly a preoccupation for diplomats with bilateral relations in reset or stabilization. Future research could address how Loh's study travels beyond its Southeast Asian setting. For example, practice theory is well-applied to multilateral settings, though researchers note their limitations in studying PRC foreign policy elites’ practices (for example, see Jess Gifkins's reflections in Inside the UN Security Council: Legitimation Practices and Darfur [Oxford University Press, 2023]). Loh's detailed analysis is a departure point to consider how multiple diplomatic audiences might receive the same diplomatic display of “assertiveness” in social settings where multilateral practice, tradition, custom and habit are already so deeply entrenched. Lastly, the book opens avenues into considering how diplomatic assertiveness by MOFA officials augments well-reported, non-military action taken by other PRC agents, like individual sanctions or detentions, for example, which surely shape foreign understandings of “China.” After all, as Loh acknowledges, MOFA may be the body that represents interests and values of the Party or the PRC state, but it is not the only agent that expresses “assertiveness” for observers to perceive.
Loh's careful analysis is a thoughtful and thought-provoking addition to the study of PRC politics and international relations. China's Rising Foreign Ministry will surely be of interest and utility for academic and practitioner communities.
