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Introduction
Dr. Jinghan Zeng is Professor of China and International Studies in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University. His research lies in the field of China's domestic and international politics.
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Publications (42)
Leading military forces around the world have expressed enormous interest in artificial intelligence (AI) due to its military potential. This policy paper examines Chinese perceptions of the military use of AI by studying Chinese-language scholarly materials. A key finding is that, while the Chinese strategic community has explored the military use...
The rise of the Digital Silk Road has significantly shifted the focus of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. This change in emphasis has produced sizeable political and academic analyses, considering that the Digital Silk Road is Beijing’s coherent top-down geopolitical—if not grand—strategy. This article challenges this view. By adopting a slogan po...
With the growing challenges brought by Artificial Intelligence (AI)'s rapid development, multiple global AI governance initiatives have been developed to set up AI norms and standards. With China's open ambition to be an AI superpower in 2030, China is keen to play a leadership role in nascent global AI governance regimes. This article argues that...
This book provides the first book-lengthy study focusing on Artificial Intelligence (AI) with Chinese characteristics, in line with China’s open ambition of becoming an AI superpower by 2030. China’s unique domestic politics has developed distinct characteristics for its AI approach. By analysing national strategy, security and governance aspects o...
This article studies the security politics of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in China. Using securitization as an analytical framework, it examines the official Chinese AI discourse and how AI is becoming a security matter. The article argues that the Chinese central government is securitizing AI to mobilize local states, market actors, intellectuals...
China’s open embracing of the age of artificial intelligence (AI) has attracted considerable academic and media attention. Many argue that China has taken advantage of its national approach to contest for AI supremacy and geopolitical dominance. The relevant analyses assume China’s AI plans as being Beijing’s coherent top‐down geopolitically driven...
This final chapter reflects on the arguments made in this volume and considers how strategic narrative analysis can offer analytical traction to study the future evolution of EU–China relations. We outline how the chapters in this volume have explored how Chinese narratives are presented in European news media—and how European narratives about Chin...
This book explores the emerging EU-China relationship with a focus on the impact of the Belt and Road Initiative. It takes a narrative approach to understanding the EU-China relationship as a means to highlight how scholars in the EU and China interpret the narrativization of EU-China bilateral relations and to how this bilateral relationship is re...
China has adopted a proactive and strategic approach to embrace the age of artificial intelligence (AI). This article argues that China's bold AI practices are part of its broad and incoherent adaptation strategy to governance by digital means. AI is part of a digital technology package that the Chinese authoritarian regime has actively employed no...
This book studies the three most important Chinese foreign policy concepts under Xi Jinping’s leadership – “New Type of Great Power Relations”, “Belt and Road Initiative” and “Community of Shared Future for Mankind”. Those signature concepts are often considered as China’s well-thought-out strategic plans reflecting Beijing’s concrete geopolitical...
This chapter studies how the concept of “New Type of Great Power Relations” was gradually established in China. It argues that this concept is a multifunctional political slogan. It shows how this concept functioned to assert not only Xi Jinping’s power as the then new top leader but also China’s rising great power status. This concept was introduc...
This chapter summarizes the key arguments of the book. It points out two key common conceptual development patterns of “New Type of Great Power Relations”, “Belt and Road Initiative” and “Community of Shared Future for Mankind”. While these three concepts reflect new development under Xi Jinping’s leadership, they are built on the thinking of previ...
This chapter studies the concept of “Community of Shared Future for Mankind” and how it was gradually established in China. This chapter argues that the concept should be understood as a symbolic political slogan instead of concrete policy ideas. Being enshrined in both the CCP’s and the PRC’s constitutions, this concept holds a theoretical high gr...
This chapter studies the concept of “Belt and Road Initiative”. Many international analyses consider it Beijing’s grand strategy to achieve regional dominance, reflecting China’s geopolitical ambition. This chapter argues that this view is mistaken. By studying how the concept is gradually established in China and how other actors respond to this e...
This chapter studies different forms of slogans politics in the eras of Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping. It shows not only how the slogans can be deployed by top leaders to test loyalty of political actors, but also how those actors can manipulate the slogan by using a series of tactics including (a) crafting and pr...
This article investigates the escalation of US-China trade disputes and the implications for Sino-US relations. Both structural realism and liberal institutionalism have failed to pay sufficient attention to the evolution of the US-China economic relationship, and this article strives to highlight this crucial issue. The article employs a historica...
This book studies the three most important Chinese foreign policy concepts under Xi Jinping’s leadership – “New Type of Great Power Relations”, “Belt and Road Initiative” and “Community of Shared Future for Mankind”. Those signature concepts are often considered as China’s well-thought-out strategic plans reflecting Beijing’s concrete geopolitical...
Debates over the implications of China's rise for global governance have reached an impasse, since evidence exists to support both 'revisionist' and 'status-quo' intentions. This means that neither is strictly falsifiable and hence the debate, as currently structured, is irresolvable. However, contradictions are explicable if we recognise that Chin...
This article studies the formation process of China's belt and road initiative (BRI) – the most important Chinese foreign policy initiative under Xi Jinping. It argues that the BRI was put forward as a broad policy idea that was subsequently developed with relatively concrete content. During this process, the shifting international landscapes have...
China’s massive ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI) – designed to build infrastructure and coordinate policymaking across Eurasia and eastern Africa – is widely seen as a clearly-defined, top-down ‘grand strategy’, reflecting Beijing’s growing ambition to reshape, or even dominate, regional and international order. This article argues that this view i...
China’s rise and America’s global retreat have made China’s role in global governance more important than ever before. By analysing Chinese (mainly academic) literature, this article studies contemporary Chinese views of global economic governance. It finds that the 2008 financial crisis is a notable point of the Chinese discourse. In addition, dia...
The impact of rising powers generally and the BRICS - Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa - in particular on the existing global order has become controversial and contested. Donald Trump’s nationalist foreign policy agenda has raised questions about the BRICS willingness and capacity to provide leadership in place on an American administ...
With China’s rise, many argue that its foreign policy has been increasingly assertive. A principal aspect of this assertiveness is to secure China’s “core interests”—a term that suggests a non-negotiable bottom line of Chinese foreign policy and has been increasingly used by the Chinese government to legitimate its diplomatic claim. Built on a prev...
China's remarkable economic development has had profound domestic and international effects. Among the most important of these is China's growing impact on the region of which it is an increasingly important and influential part. For countries such as Australia, which has rapidly become deeply economically integrated with – even dependent on – Chin...
Under Xi Jinping's leadership, China has actively promoted “Internet sovereignty” as a means to reshape the discourse and practices of global cyber governance. By analyzing Chinese-language literature, this article unpacks the Chinese discourse of Internet sovereignty. Despite significant interest in promoting it as China's normative position on cy...
The rise of China as a global power has significantly reshaped its global ambition. Under the leadership of Chinese president Xi Jinping, China has proposed a series of diplomatic initiatives – most notably ‘new type of great power relations’ and ‘one belt one road’ – in order to shift the international order in its favour. Does Europe matter in Ch...
The rise of big data has brought with it enormous possibilities, for better or worse. In China, the government has been enthusiastically preparing for the coming of the era of big data. This article examines how the authoritarian regime in China has been employing big data to improve its governance and to move towards a ‘Big Brother 2.0’ model. The...
The rise of China has been reshaping how the country sees its own role in the world. China has become increasingly willing to move from being a norm and system taker to a norm and system shaper (if not yet maker). One example is Xi Jinping's promotion of ‘a new type of Great Power relations’ designed to create a strategic space in which to operate....
Amidst China’s emergence as a global power, Xi Jinping is pushing through a range of ambitious reform plans that are reconfiguring both Chinese domestic politics and foreign policy. A fierce anti-corruption campaign has led to the dismissal of a large number of powerful figures, while a major effort has begun to bring party, state, and military pow...
Provide the first comprehensive study of Chinese discourse of new type of great power relations Contribute to a broader understanding of how new political concepts and ideas are gradually established in China Use content analysis to study 141 Chinese academic articles with title ‘new type of great power relations’ in the title’
China’s re-emergence...
Ideological campaigns in post-Deng China have a strategic function of discerning loyalties of local leaders. Previous empirical studies have found that Jiang Zemin’s followers are more likely to echo Jiang’s ideological campaigns. Through a content analysis of provincial newspapers between 2005 and 2012, this study suggests that the manner of displ...
This article provides an overview of securitization in Chinese climate and energy debates. Scholars have debated the merits as well as the potentially problematic implications of securitization, or framing issues as ‘security,’ since the early 1990s. Early concern focused on the potential problems with linking environmental issues with ‘security,’...
The economic importance and strategic significance of Australia's relationship with China means that bilateral ties have become a major focus of attention in the scholarly and policymaking communities in Australia. Understandably enough perhaps, less attention has been given to the way the relationship is understood in China. This article addresses...
Policy experimentation has been widely considered a ‘magic bullet’ of policy improvement and key to economic prosperity in China. This article, however, argues that policy experimentation in China does not always seek policy efficiency. Rather, it can be manipulated as a political symbol without actually affecting practices. By taking a case study...
As China has grown stronger, some observers have identified an assertive turn in Chinese foreign policy. Evidence to support this argument includes the increasingly frequent evocation of China's ‘core interests’—a set of interests that represents the non-negotiable bottom lines of Chinese foreign policy. When new concepts, ideas and political agend...
To transfer power successfully at the top and prevent a leadership split during this process has always been extremely challenging for authoritarian regimes. Yet, power succession in China has demonstrated a high degree of stability in the past two decades. How did the authoritarian regime in China perform its leadership transition in an orderly an...
This article identifies continuities, new trends and shifts in emphasis in the Chinese elite debate about political legitimacy by analysing 125 Chinese articles concerning legitimacy published between 2008 and 2012. It reveals a remarkable cleavage between the international perceptions of the Chinese state and the pessimistic views among Chinese in...
This article analyses the selection criterion of China’s most powerful leading body—the Politburo Standing Committee—by using Qualitative Comparative Analysis and the latest data of the 18th Party Congress in 2012. It finds that age, combined with institutional rules, is one of the dominant factors in deciding the appointment of leaders in 2012, su...
