Beyond the hinterland: exploring the international actorness of China’s Yunnan province

Abstract

The scholarly literature on paradiplomacy has tended to focus overly on subnational governments in federal systems rather than those in unitary and centralized countries. However, it is important to note that some subnational governments in these countries have been increasingly proactive in international relations (IR). This study explores the paradiplomatic activities of Yunnan, a province in the south of China which, since the early 1990s, has actively engaged in cross-border cooperation. Combining the concept of paradiplomacy with the theory of actorness, this study first argues that Yunnan has been incentivized to conduct paradiplomacy through the decision of Beijing to open China’s borders; the inefficiency of the central government in managing border-related issues; and the interprovincial competition over economic and diplomatic clouts in the Mekong subregion. Second, this study argues that Yunnan’s new external affairs powers have been consolidated by a host of new opportunities stemming from the external environment. Third, it argues that Yunnan’s new external affairs powers have enabled it to leverage two broad instruments (infrastructure development and economic statecraft) to make neighboring countries more dependent on cooperation with it. And finally, it is argued that Yunnan’s role as an IR player has been acknowledged both by neighboring countries and by Beijing.

Chinese Paradiplomacy: A Theoretical Review

“…The analysis of actorness, which aims to address the question of who can be recognized as an international player, is one of the most systematically developed frameworks used in paradiplomacy studies. Actorness is understood in this article as the group of characteristics requisite for subnational governments to be actors in international relations (Liu & Song, 2019). The concept focuses on the external relations of subnational actors; namely, autonomous regions, federated states, non-autonomous provinces, and provinciallevel municipal units.…”

“…The other research gap in Chinese diplomacy is that a limited number of scholarly works on the foreign agendas of Chinese provincial governments have been constrained by a geographic bias (Liu & Song, 2019). From the early 1990s, the scholarly spotlight has been fixed on the coastal regions, leaving other areas rather like a huge tract of underdeveloped landmass.…”

“…More crucially, under China's nomenklatura (personnel) system, not only have local leaders been subject to cadre transfer and exchange regulations (Zheng, 2007), but they have also been constrained by the non-native principle (Yang, 2014). These regulations have succeeded in preventing provincial leaders from exercising significant regional influence, and consequently from posing a threat to central government (Liu & Song, 2019).…”

“…For illustrative purposes, we take the Yunnan province of China as an example. Yunnan's capability in external engagements can be seen in its strategic use of infrastructure and diplomatic instruments to woo its neighboring countries into cooperation (Liu & Song, 2019). For example, Yunnan's investment in various cross-border projects to improve regional transportation connectivity.…”

Strategic competition and the evolving role of Indo-Pacific paradiplomacy

“…The term paradiplomacy first coined in 1961 by Rohan Butler, become more widely used beginning in the early 1990s (Kuznetsov 2014;Lequesne and Paquin 2017). Soldatos (1990) used the term to refer to the international activities of sub-national actors that operated in parallel with the nation-state, thus 'para' diplomacy (Liu and Song 2019;Lequesne and Paquin 2017). Much of the focus in the literature on paradiplomacy centres on the international activities initiated by sub-national actors (McMillan 2016).…”