【英文】兰德报告：中国的军事干预：模式、驱动力和标志（209页）

英文研究报告 2021年10月11日 06:16 管理员

Historically, Chinese forces committed to combat and security missions have involved the largest number of troops; those committed to other activities, including the recent increase in stabilization missions, have been notably smaller. Of course, this does not necessarily mean that stabilization, deterrence and signaling, or advisory missions are not significant in political or strategic terms, only that they typically involve dramatically smaller numbers of Chinese troops. As noted in the previous chapter, the nature of the threat faced by Chinese forces provides one important explanation. In the Cold War, Chinese leaders faced an acute sense of danger from powerful rivals, such as the United States and the Soviet Union. In such an environment, combat interventions could help weaken a rival, forestall more threatening attacks, or deter adversaries. The more benign environment faced by China in the post–Cold War period has mitigated this incentive, permitting smaller-scale interventions for the more-limited purposes of addressing primarily nontraditional threats.China sent a limited number of personnel to take part in a UN mission to Haiti in the 2000s, but they were law enforcement, not military personnel.15 This pattern likely reflects the combined effect of lower levels of Chinese interests in these latter regions, lower levels of transnational threats to Chinese interests from these regions, and limitations on Chinese power projection capabilities. Putting together the regional and activity type lenses further illustrates the clear regional differences in how China has used its military forces abroad (see Figure 3.7).

China has undertaken combat missions frequently in East and Southeast Asia and, to a lesser extent, in other regions that it directly borders. Within its home region, five of the six interventions in Northeast Asia have been combat missions, involving either Korea or Taiwan, with the other focused on security. PRC activities in Southeast Asia have been somewhat more mixed, with nine of the 15 interventions involving combat (mostly in Vietnam or Myanmar), with the remainder split among advisory, security, stabilization, and deterrence missions. The combat missions in Eurasia and South Asia include China’s conflicts with the Soviet Union and India in the 1960s. This pattern underscores the importance of intense threat perceptions, especially in the Cold War, as drivers of Chinese intervention behavior and the role of territorial disputes in aggravating those threat perceptions. Outside of these adjacent regions, however, China has not engaged in a combat intervention. Instead, Chinese interventions in Africa and the Middle East have been largely focused on stabilization, with limited advisory and security missions. The threats to Chinese interests in these regions have been primarily nontraditional in nature, such as threats to economic interests from civil wars and upheaval or natural disasters. In some ways, China’s focus on interventions outside Asia underlines the general security and stability of its situation in Asia. Figures 3.6 and 3.7 together suggest that there may be two distinct geographies in how China thinks about military interventions: a “near abroad” where combat has been frequent (albeit not since the end of the Cold War) and regions further afield where Chinese forces may be present but only in more-limited numbers and only engaged in less-violent activities.