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China's Grand Strategy under Xi Jinping: Reassurance, Reform, and Resistance
Abstract
China's grand strategy under Xi Jinping is clearly distinctive. It does not, however, fundamentally break with the grand strategy that China has embraced since the early 1990s—one that aims to realize what is now labeled “the dream of national rejuvenation.” Leaders in Beijing have implemented three different approaches to this strategy. In 1992, the approach to rejuvenation followed Deng Xiaoping's admonition for China to hide its capabilities and bide its time. In 1996, Beijing shifted to a more proactive approach, peaceful rise, seeking to reassure others that a stronger and wealthier China would not pose a threat. In 2012, Xi again recast the grand strategy of rejuvenation to realize the Chinese dream. His approach is distinguished by its combination of three efforts: (1) continuing earlier attempts to reassure others about the benign intentions of rising China, (2) moving China from rhetoric to action in promoting reform of an international order that has facilitated China's rise, and (3) resisting challenges to what the Chinese Communist Party defines as the country's core interests. Xi's bolder approach has further clarified China's long-standing international aspirations and triggered reactions abroad that raise doubts about the prospects for his approach to realizing the goal of national rejuvenation.
... Beyond energy security, scholars have described Beijing's desire to export excess capacity in terms of steel, cement, and metal with a workforce skilled at building infrastructure as major incentives for pursuing the BRI (Frankopan 2018, 100). Indeed, skeptics have argued that the BRI is little more than an outlet for Chinese companies faced with problems of excess capacity because of declining domestic demand for large-scale infrastructure projects (Goldstein 2020). Home to seven of the world's ten largest construction companies, analysts have suggested Chinese state-owned enterprises have an overriding incentive to build, with overseas markets viewed as particularly promising. ...
... Almutairi (2018) finds that China's investments in the GCC have largely been confined to the energy sector. 16 Scholars have suggested that the BRI represents the most significant part of Xi's effort to promote a Chinese vision of an international order (Goldstein 2020). To a greater extent than previous Chinese foreign policy initiatives, the BRI has been viewed as a proactive foreign policy, in contrast to prior foreign policy efforts which were seen as non-interventionist (Miller 2011 ...
Arab Gulf countries have emerged as important targets of Chinese economic investment. This paper investigates attitudes toward China’s growing economy among nationals of Arab Gulf societies using original data from over 13,000 citizens in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. I find that one in five believe that China’s growing economy is a good thing for their respective countries and that positive attitudes toward China’s economic rise are more common for older respondents, men, and those with higher levels of education—factors associated with more stable economic opportunities in Arab Gulf societies. Attitudes are also more positive within-subject over time after a respondent begins a new job. Finally, I find that attitudes toward China became more negative after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, but only for economic “outsiders.” Taken together, these results suggest that Chinese economic growth and associated investments are viewed skeptically by less economically advantaged individuals who likely expect that China’s economic influence will be mediated through elite-driven projects with unclear benefits for their lives and livelihoods.
... In addition to this, there are legal provisions related to national security such as the "Anti-Secession Law" (2005), the "Food Security Law" (2009), the "Counter Espionage Law" (2014), the "Counter Terrorism Law" (2015), the "Cybersecurity Law" (2016), the "National Intelligence Law" (2017), the "Nuclear Security Law" (2017), the "Cryptographic Law" (2019), the "Biosecurity Law" (2020), the "Regulations on the Work of Counter Espionage Security" (2021), and the "Foreign Relations Law" (2023). In terms of national strategic guidelines, since the founding of the People's Republic of China, the term "national security strategy" was not mentioned until January 2015, under the guidance of the holistic approach to national security, the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee adopted the "National Security Strategy Outline," which is the first comprehensive national security strategy since the founding of the People's Republic of China and is an urgent need to effectively maintain national security, indicating that China has begun to address the relationship between national security and national development from the perspective of national grand strategy (Goldstein, 2020;Hu, 2016;Liu, 2016;Özdemir and Karagül, 2024). Subsequently, the "Opinions on Strengthening National Security Work" passed in December 2016, the "National Security Strategy (2021-2025)" reviewed in November 2021, and the "Opinions on Accelerating the Construction of a National Security Risk Monitoring and Early Warning System" reviewed at the first meeting of the 20th Central National Security Commission on May 30, 2023, all aim to more accurately grasp the historical position and the situation and tasks facing China's national security, and to recognize the importance of strengthening national security work. ...
National security risk assessment is an indispensable key component of the national security system, serving as a foundation for national security decision-making, crisis prevention, and protection of national interests. While national security encompasses a broad spectrum of risks, including political, military, economic, technological, and social dimensions, this study focuses specifically on political security risk assessment as a case study within the broader framework of national security. Currently, there is no consensus on standardized requirements , processes, and methods for assessing national security risks. This study aims to develop a comprehensive national security risk assessment model, and the assessment path is explored from three dimensions: risk control processes, relationships among assessment factors, and the assessment model itself. To validate the model's feasibility, we conduct an empirical study focusing specifically on China's political security as one critical domain within the broader national security landscape. Using a game theory combination weighting method, risk indicator weights were determined, and political security risk assessment was calculated through the simulated annealing optimized projection pursuit evaluation method. The results indicate that China's political security risk has generally declined, dropping from 76.39 in 2001 to 24.99 in 2022, with projections suggesting a continued decline to 11.00 by 2032. Among the five predictive models compared, the BP neural network model achieved the highest determination coefficient (R 2 = 0.9967), demonstrating superior predictive performance. The proposed model provides a methodological framework that can be applied not only to political security but also adapted to other domains of national security, offering theoretical guidance and methodological support for comprehensive national security risk evaluation.
... Much like his predecessors in the reform era, Xi has defined China's rejuvenation as the essence of the nation's grand strategy without placing limitations on precisely how it is to be achieved (Goldstein, 2020). However, this does not mean that he has overturned the hierarchy of policy tools established by Deng Xiaoping. ...
Since the initiation of its Belt and Road Initiative, China’s economic statecraft has drawn considerable attention in academic circles. Yet less attention has been given to why the Chinese leadership first chose to pursue its national interests through economic means in the post-Mao period. This underexplored part of China’s economic statecraft can serve as a useful starting point to understand China’s foreign economic policies on their own terms. Employing a neoclassical realist framework and surveying statements made by Chinese leaders throughout the reform era, this study argues that the country’s leaders have gradually modified the strategic importance of the country’s economic statecraft in response to changes in their perceptions of the world order. Meanwhile, China’s form of economic statecraft has largely been determined by reform of its state-owned enterprises in the domestic realm.
... Како и да ли уопште ове дискурзивне стратегије обезбеђују позицију Кине? Да ли ове дискурзивне стратегије указују на то да спор у вези са Јужним кинеским морем кристалише тежњу Кине да добије статус велике силе, као што то тврде научници (Hsiung, 2015;Zou and Ye, 2020;Goldstein, 2020)? У целини, утврдили смо да иако кинески дискурс остаје исти за време свих администрација САД, кинески правни дискурс варира у зависности од развоја спора. ...
This paper investigates these questions from the perspective of official Chinese discourses related to the South China Sea dispute. Beginning with the key assumption that what matters more to understanding how the Chinese view the international order is not what they say but how they say it, this article uses a mixed-method approach to critical discourse analysis in order to unpack the implicit meanings of official Chinese narratives. The quantitative analysis of these speeches reveals that emotions (humiliation, anger, and feelings of superiority) are important, along with the political use of history to create narratives aiming to legitimize China's desire to remove the United States from the management of Asia-Pacific issues. The paper will also show that while the Chinese discourse remains the same under all US administrations, the Chinese legal discourse has fluctuated as the dispute has evolved. Such findings provide a better understanding of Chinese political communication on international law and on the present international order.
... Highquality development has a very high status in China's modernization and indicates the direction of work for modernization [1][2][3]. China has made great achievements in realizing reform and opening up as well as in socialist modernization, and its economic strength has undergone a historic leap, with the gross domestic product (GDP) growing from 54 trillion yuan in 2012 to 121 trillion yuan in 2022, which provides a solid material foundation and important guarantee for China's continued steady progress [4][5][6]. While China's socialist construction endeavors have made notable achievements, it must be soberly seen that although China has entered a new era, there are still shortcomings in the corresponding work. ...
The downward pressure on China’s economic growth under the new normal is increasing year by year. In the case that traditional drivers such as investment-driven, factor-driven and export-driven cannot drive the economic growth strongly, this paper constructs a mathematical model to explore the driving mechanism of internal and external capital flow in FTZs from the perspective of the regional economic development. The study applies the Sill entropy value and the intertemporal savings-investment model (F-H model) to measure the regional economic development gap and the internal and external capital flows in the FTZ. Afterwards, the sample data from 2014-2023 are selected to construct a multiple regression model to analyze the impact of internal and external capital flows in FTZs on regional economic development in the eastern, central and western regions. The eastern, central and western regions of China show the values of R² of 0.933, 0.915 and 0.963 after regression, indicating that the fit of the model is relatively high. The growth of the regional economy is influenced by the flow of internal and external capital between different regions in the FTZ, as shown by empirical results. It will flow to the eastern region with faster economic development, providing favorable conditions for the further development of the eastern region’s economy, but this will further increase the development gap between the eastern and western regions of the economy and make the regional economic growth unbalanced.
... China has, indeed, put emphasis on political issues. Goldstein (2020) argues under Xi, China has devoted more attention and resources to ensuring that it has the capabilities to defend the core interests. It is well known as followings: 1) state sovereignty; 2) national security; 3) territorial integrity; 4) national reunification; 5) China's political system established by the Constitution and overall social stability; and 6) basic safeguards for ensuring sustainable economic and social development. ...
... It is also about shaping the world for China's rise. 5 China has entered the phase where it seeks to exert influence in the world, and for this purpose, China has changed its strategic objective from keeping a low profile to "striving for achievement." 6 On more than one occasion, Xi Jinping has used the expression, "the world today is undergoing major changes unseen in a century . . . ...
This paper argues that China intruded at multiple points along the LAC in May 2020 to showcase strength amidst the COVID-19 pandemic which is believed to have originated in Wuhan. COVID-19 led to large scale deaths and a global economic meltdown with Beijing severely criticized for the emergence of COVID-19 pandemic, poor regulation of the animal markets, suppressing information and failure to prevent the spread of COVID-19 beyond China’s borders. This caused immense damage to China’s international reputation and status, its economy, and relations with other countries. Border incursions by China in May 2020 were a guise to highlight China’s strength lest India consider China in a weakened state and gain leverage over Beijing in the bilateral relationship. Through border incursions, Beijing wanted to mask its vulnerability created by COVID-19 and showcase its willingness to not compromise over its security interests. China is both powerful and insecure about its status. This combination makes it undertake a particularly pessimistic security-centric outlook and more likely to engage in risky behavior. Like in the previous instances, the use of military force against India in the year 2020 stemmed from a sense of vulnerability caused by loss of status due to Covid19.
... For a country like China, with centralized power and the government system under party-state integration, the strategic perspective has both deep and wide impacts on handling its internal and external affairs (Li and Lee, 2009). Under Xi's administration, the grand strategy of rejuvenation to realize the Chinese Dream is emphasized (Goldstein, 2020). No matter how outward-looking or ambitious it might have shown to seem, it should not be overlooked that "the highest priority of Xi and his fellow Politburo members is 'regime survival'" (Scobell et al., 2020: 26). ...
... Eğer bu bilgi doğruysa, bu sayı ABD ve Rusya'nınkiyle karşılaştırıldığında yaklaşık %10'a denk gelmektedir. Çin'in silahlanma yarışından uzak durmaya çalıştığı söylenebilir, ancak bu durum Xi Jinping yönetimi altında değişmeye başlamıştır (Goldstein, 2020). Hong Kong'daki iddiası, Tayvan'a yönelik tehditleri ve nükleer silahlar için yeni alanlar açması gibi gelişmeler bu değişimi yansıtmaktadır (Broad & Sanger, 2021). ...
Günümüz uluslararası ilişkilerinde konvansiyonel ve nükleer güçler arasındaki etkileşim, devletlerin tehdit algılarını ve davranışlarını önemli ölçüde etkileyen karmaşık bir dinamik yaratmaktadır. Çin’in 2021 yılının ortalarında üç yeni füze silosu inşa ettiğinin ortaya çıkması, Çin’in geleneksel “asgari nükleer caydırıcılık” stratejisinde bir değişiklik olup olmadığına dair soruları gündeme getirmiştir. Bu çalışma, Çin’in uzun süredir devam eden nükleer stratejisinden saptığını ileri sürmektedir. ABD ve Çin arasındaki konvansiyonel dengede meydana gelen olumsuz değişiklikler Çin’i nükleer kabiliyetlerini arttırmaya ve konvansiyonel kabiliyetlerini geliştirerek nükleer gücünün caydırıcılık kabiliyetini arttırmaya teşvik etmiştir. Bir devlet nükleer caydırıcılığının hasmının konvansiyonel yetenekleri tarafından zayıflatılabileceğini algıladığında, nükleer caydırıcılığını güçlendirerek karşılık verme eğilimindedir. Benzer şekilde, nükleer kuvvetlerinin beka kabiliyetini arttırmak için konvansiyonel kabiliyetlerini de geliştirebilir. Çinli uzmanlar ABD’nin konvansiyonel hassas vuruş kabiliyetlerini Çin’in garantili misilleme kabiliyeti için önemli bir tehdit olarak görmektedir. Ayrıca, Çin’in nükleer cephaneliğinin geçmişe kıyasla daha çeşitli konvansiyonel tehditlerle karşı karşıya olduğuna inanmaktadırlar. Bu çalışma, Çin’in nükleer füze silolarını genişletmesinin ardındaki nedenleri analiz etmeyi amaçlamakta ve nükleer silahların Çin’in askeri doktrinindeki rolünü ve Çin ordusundaki son modernizasyon çabalarını incelemektedir. Çin’in tehdit algılarına bağlı olarak gelişen nükleer kabiliyetlerini ve bunların küresel güvenlik dinamikleri üzerindeki etkisini anlamak bu araştırmanın odak noktasıdır.
... China has, indeed, put emphasis on political issues. Goldstein (2020) argues under Xi, China has devoted more attention and resources to ensuring that it has the capabilities to defend the core interests. It is well known as followings: 1) state sovereignty; 2) national security; 3) territorial integrity; 4) national reunification; 5) China's political system established by the Constitution and overall social stability; and 6) basic safeguards for ensuring sustainable economic and social development. ...
... 10 Conversely, China under President Xi Jinping's rule has imposed stronger social control over its citizens. 11 For example, human rights abuse in Xinjiang, political oppression in response to Hong Kong's social movements, and strictly enforced lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic all point to Beijing's refusal to embrace Western political freedoms and legal rights. 12 More recently, China launched misinformation campaigns to undermine Taiwan's democratic elections in 2020 and 2024. ...
Strengthening ties with Taiwan is the best chance
the United States has to preserve the liberal international order
in Asia and improve its security relative to China. This study
offers a normative perspective on how Taiwan can contribute
to US-led international institutions and the Asian regional order
and reduce conf lict risk. It concludes with recommendations
for the United States and its partners
... 86 To begin with, China has tapped its growing capabilities to harden its approach to safeguarding more resolutely what the CCP defines as the country's "core interests," including national sovereignty, national security, territorial integrity and national reunification, China's political system, and overall social stability. 87 In the South China Sea, China pushed ahead its contested sovereignty claims to land features and their associated maritime rights by constructing artificial islands on top of reefs and low-tide elevations that it controlled in the Spratlys islands. Faced with an adverse arbitral award, China dismissed it as "nothing more than a piece of wastepaper." ...
It is a common refrain for policymakers, scholars, and journalists to declare that the United States and China are heading toward, or already engaged in, a New Cold War. International legal theory holds that powerful states tend to use international law as an instrument to stabilize their dominance. However, when powerful states see the existing international legal order as severely constraining their policymaking discretion, they may seek to adjust the system to make it more compatible with their own preferences or even replace international law with domestic law. It is therefore unsurprising that the United States has recently announced that there are cracks in the foundations of international economic order developed after the Second World War and that to compete with China, it is essential for the United States to build an international economic system fit for contemporary geopolitical realities. This article seeks to document the nascent features of international economic law in the era of great power rivalry, explain how such new features have disrupted the conventional wisdom of international economic law, and speculate on their trajectory. It argues that the great power rivalry has a profound impact on both the normative premises and substantive rules of international economic law. The new features of international economic law in the era of great power rivalry include: (1) the transformation of the guiding philosophy of international economic law from economic interdependence to economic de-risking; (2) the shift of the style of settlement of international economic disputes from judicialization to "de-judicialization"; (3) the normalization of unilateralism in international economic regulation; (4) the securitization of international economic relationships; (5) the return of industrial policy to redraw the boundary between the government and market; and (6) the death of multilateralism and the rise of value-based regionalism. Moreover, the new features outlined in this article will not be temporary, but an integral part of international economic law for a long time to come. The future of international economic law is likely to be more fragmented and more embedded in domestic policy goals of a nation-state. However, despite the decline of the international legal framework governing global economy established over the past seventy years, this article argues that, both descriptively and normatively, international economic law will still play an important role, albeit much smaller than before, in managing the U.S.-China great power rivalry.
... El tercer enfoque parte de una actitud más audaz, ya que lo que propone es alcanzar lo que el Partido Comunista ha definido como los intereses centrales. En la era de Xi, estos intereses se relacionan más con las aspiraciones internacionales de larga duración de China y que ha provocado reacciones en el extranjero que plantean dudas so-bre las "verdaderas" razones que encierra la política exterior (Goldstein, 2020). En pocas palabras, estos intereses se encierran en la afirmación del rejuvenecimiento de la nación china. ...
El capítulo busca contribuir a la tesis de que China está encaminando sus esfuerzos hacia la construcción de un conjunto de instituciones que se presentan como un subsistema interestatal alternativo al que emergió en la segunda posguerra, a partir de identificar los elementos que se prefiguran como uno de los rasgos de ese proyecto. Se trata de la estrategia que a partir del esquema de cooperación implementado por China a través de la Belt And Road Initiative, de la Global Development Initiative y de la Global Security Initiative, se manifiesta en una suerte de “emulación temprana” de la estrategia hegemónica norteamericana de la segunda posguerra. La “emulación” se sintetiza en un doble proceso: en primer lugar, en la manera en que actualmente China va articulando un entramado institucional en el marco de la intensificación del presente caos sistémico; es decir, en un momento previo o “temprano” respecto a aquel en el que podríamos considerar como claro el ascenso de una nueva potencia hegemónica. Los autores argumentan que dicho entramado opera bajo la lógica de un diálogo político que permite acuerdos comerciales y fomenta una estrategia de desarrollo a partir del cambio estructural. En segundo lugar, y de manera análoga al consenso multilateral que apun-taló el proyecto estadounidense basado en la promoción del “desarrollo” desde el norte hacia el sur con un papel fundamental de la cooperación y la ayuda, China hoy despliega un argumento similar promoviendo el alcance de “una comunidad de futuro comparti¬do” con sus socios estratégicos y al que cada vez más Estados buscan sumarse, donde la Global Developement Initiative y la Global Security Initiative son sus ejes fundamentales.
Purpose
This study uses Sri Lanka as a case study to explore and compare the outcomes of projects funded by both the World Bank and Chinese financial institutions.
Approach and Methods
By constructing a distinctive metric and rubric‐based framework for data analysis and empirical evaluation, the research employs statistical tools such as the two‐sample t ‐test, Mann–Whitney U test, and probit regression to examine the effectiveness of these projects. This innovative approach enables a comprehensive assessment of project performance, offering critical insights into overall impact and efficiency.
Findings
The findings suggest that World Bank‐funded projects, especially loans, are more effective than those financed by Chinese institutions, probably due to the latter's higher levels of opacity. Adherence to the original budget and timeframe of projects also contributes significantly to project effectiveness.
Policy Implications
The results of this analysis offer insights into key factors relating to the effectiveness of infrastructure projects. This study also underlines the importance of the project implementation process, which has valuable implications for other nations and international development institutions in terms of improving project outcomes.
This paper focuses on the new characteristics of China's engagements in global governance and how these engagements are transformative in world politics. This paper adopts secondary data collection and implements a quantitative approach for data analysis retrieved from Kaggle. This study follows statistical tests in SPSS to analyze how China's economic performance relates to its responsibilities in the international system. The research findings mean that while China's GDP and economic growth correlate with its rising power, the state and character of foreign affairs dip, diplomacy, and geopolitical governance are not a direct function of economic power. This work further enriches the global governance debate by discussing the comprehensive coverage of the multi-faceted aspects of the Chinese appearance and providing support to the arguments regarding the concept of a gradual, multilayered process where economic indicators do not divide power. This study explores that more forceful efforts should be made to incorporate the other political, cultural, and institutional variables into the study and to learn more about the impacts of China's strategic actions on the modern international system.
The 110 years between the start of the first Opium War in 1839 and the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 are commonly identified as the ‘Century of (National) Humiliation’. Despite the removal before and after 1949 of the humiliations that had been suffered, the narrative of this century of trauma has undergone a revival in China since the early 1990s. Against the background of top-down strategic nationalist narratives on the Century of Humiliation primarily constructed around the US and Japan, the chapter addresses the absence of the EU in China’s narrative of humiliation. Given the fact that while the EU itself did not exist at the time, major member states were primary actors in the Century of Humiliation, and that the EU and its member states have increasingly engaged in actions that from the perspective of China might be seen as reminiscent of those during the Century of Humiliation, the exclusion of Europe from current narratives appears a deliberate strategic choice. The chapter argues that strategic narratives may be strategic not only in what they say but also in what they do not say.
China's policy of peaceful rise emphasizes the dual commitment to peace and rise. However, as China rises on the global stage, it may unavoidably encounter disputes with neighboring countries, which requires China to handle these disputes adeptly to align with its principles of peaceful rise. To effectively manage such disputes, as observed in incidents like the 2012 Huangyan Island standoff with the Philippines and the 2017 Doklam standoff with India, China employs “strategic deception” to address these issues non-militarily and prevent further escalation. This strategic deception includes employing strategic ambiguity, inducement, and limited coercion toward relevant countries, ultimately transforming disputes into nonviolent and peaceful change and fostering a border order conducive to its rise while ensuring peace. Research on “strategic deception” holds significant theoretical importance as an unconventional strategic study, providing valuable insights into China's approach to managing regional stability and security during its rise.
The United States established diplomatic ties with the Republic of China (ROC), the recognized government of China at the time, in the early twentieth century, particularly after the ROC was founded in 1912 following the fall of the Qing Dynasty. After the Chinese Civil War ended in 1949, the government of the ROC relocated to Taiwan, while Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party took control of Mainland China, establishing the People’s Republic of China (PRC) (Wiratama 2017). Until 1979, the United States maintained its recognition of the ROC as the legitimate government of China despite the shift (Rich 2009).
How do observers abroad assess the intentions of rising powers? Influential research in international relations suggests that rising powers can reassure others by using both behavior and rhetoric, but there is scarce rigorous evidence on the relative effectiveness of these strategies. In this article, we study whether and to what extent variation in behavioral and rhetorical foreign economic policies of a rising power moderate threat perceptions among observers in a declining power. We used scenario-based survey experiments administered to an elite sample of foreign policy think tank and nongovernmental organization staff and members of the public in the United States. In the experiment, we systematically varied a hypothetical rising power’s foreign aid and investment behavior and rhetoric such that it was represented as either revisionist or status quo oriented. We found that status quo-reinforcing behavior by the rising power generally lowered perceptions of threatening intentions more than status quo-reinforcing statements. However, there was also evidence that when rising powers adopted aid and investment behaviors that were consistent with prevailing norms, rhetorical assurances of satisfaction substantially reduced threat perceptions further. The findings contribute to international relations research on rising power preferences for international order as well as these states’ attempts at reassurance amidst power transitions, particularly in the context of international development.
As relations between the United States and China have grown tenser, how has the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) portrayal of the United States changed? And what might portrayals of the United States tell us about domestic messaging in China? This study systematically investigates CCP messaging about the United States in the contemporary era. To do this, we hand code, categorize and analyse 1,761 editorials about the United States published between 2003 and 2022 in People's Daily , the Party's flagship newspaper. In addition to showing a sustained rise in critical portrayals since 2018, we identify and elaborate three distinct critical narratives about the United States: it is a dangerous hegemon abroad, it has poor values at home, and it is increasingly weak and in decline. These narratives appear both independently and in combination and are often framed to contrast with portrayals of China. We argue that these narratives are not just negative propaganda to discredit the United States but can also be a strategy to promote a positive vision of the CCP's virtues and governance at home. This study contributes empirically and theoretically to research on propaganda and legitimation in China.
The aims of this research is to explain the US's interest to preserve its hegemony, as well to
which length it may lead to achieve interest through strategic maneuvering in the Central
Rimland region The Central Rimland region has emerged as flashpoint for the strategic and
political maneuvering with the emergence of china as economic power in the East. This article
discloses the dynamics of the Rimland introduced and used by the Halford Mackinder in his
geopolitical theories highlighting the significance of the heartland and the Rimland encompass
the Eastern Europe, Middle East and Central Asia. US containment policies towards Rimland
to counter China’s rise illuminate the reminiscence and the complexities of the new Cold War.
This article probes the developments and the implications of this maneuvering guided by US�China rivalry. It raises the question regarding reliable credibility of India and the intensity of
instability in result of the US strategic maneuvering and United States’ Anti-China China
Neighboring Allies. Further, this article aims to foster severe concerns regarding South Asian
Third World or developing states about United States obnoxious conspiratorial face in order to
meet its interests. This article begot through secondary data collection, drawing from a range
of scholarly articles, books, policy documents, and reputable news sources as well editorials.
The United States Navy possesses a preeminent peacetime role in U.S. national security: “naval forward presence,” or the maintenance of combat-credible naval forces worldwide to deter adversaries, reassure allies, respond to crises, and perform constabulary functions for the global commons. To many, naval forward presence is nearly-synonymous with American grand strategy. But since the post-Cold War defense drawdown, forward presence has constrained the Navy’s efforts to prepare for great power war. To support forward presence, the Navy has organized its force structure around fixed-wing-capable platforms and their supporting multi-mission combatant warships. The politics and spiraling costs of building such ships have stymied efforts to expand the fleet.
Presence also requires that the surface navy remain continually visible and busy. Too few ships thus face too many demands. The resultant operational tempo overwhelms maintenance and training cycles, and grinds away at the economic viability of American shipyards. In this way, naval forward presence consumes the Navy’s structural readiness, or its capacity to engage in severe and sustained combat with a peer competitor, such as the People’s Republic of China. And in so doing, presence consumes its own promises – deterrence and reassurance.
Why, given its internal tensions, does naval forward presence remain a governing strategic concept for the U.S. Navy, even in the shadow of a major international threat? What lies behind the rhetorical consensus on the value of naval forward presence for U.S. national security? This dissertation takes a popular strategic concept to task, illuminating the ideas, politics, and organizational processes that sustain it, even as its costs and risks accumulate, and even as international conditions change.
The inquiry comprises three parts: a history of presence and its implementation; a theoretical analysis of presence through the lens of political science literature; and a case study of the reform agenda following the U.S. Navy’s surface ship accidents of 2017. I find that naval forward presence, as an idea, ran away from the Navy. Initially elevated to prominence for bureaucratic reasons, presence was sustained both by organizational processes outside the Navy’s control, and by policymakers’ belief in the very benefits the Navy had claimed presence could deliver. Naval forward presence is rooted in deep-seated American foreign policy beliefs that cross ideological divides. The idea that the nation, and the world, cannot survive without a navy whose peacetime roles include deterring adversaries, preserving national credibility through crisis response, and policing the international system, is a uniquely American conceit. Ultimately, it also abuts against a physical reality: a navy tasked to do all these things, cannot do them all well.
These findings have two implications. First, attempts to solve the trade-off between presence and structural readiness by building more ships are unlikely to succeed, as presence demands, sustained by the power of the idea and organizational processes resistant to change, will continue apace and even rise as the fleet grows. Second, the rise of populist nationalism may challenge consensus support for presence by calling alliance commitments into question. However, hyper-partisanship associated with this movement could doom efforts to restore Navy structural readiness regardless. Therefore, whether presence remains popular or not, presence must be substantially reduced to preserve the United States’ ability to deter, or if necessary, defeat China.
As China has emerged as the fastest-developing country in history and the next superpower poised to replace the US, its power can no longer be dismissed as a mere contingent factor. In a world where China boasts the largest economy, the largest military, the largest population, and dominates global trade and resource production, “what China wants China has”. Amid this systemic redistribution of power, the geographical, political, and social pillars become increasingly strategic. The first step of the rising giant will take place in the South China Sea (SCS). More precisely it will have to address its greatest initial obstacle: Taiwan. Taiwan is not merely a distant island that China hopes to reclaim, but rather an active threat to its domestic stability and international power, gradually exploiting both internal and external vulnerabilities. Since its inception in 1949, the PRC has been relentlessly fixated on reclaiming Taiwan, which it views as its stolen territory, sparing no effort or determination. Scholars have vividly predicted China's rise as the high church of Realpolitik and anticipated an inevitable war over Taiwan. For them, the question is no longer whether a war will occur, but rather when it will happen. China's reunification with Taiwan is undoubtedly one of the most pressing issues in IR. In parallel, the war in Ukraine, which involves a similar clash between self-determination and historical/national legitimacy, will shape the tenure of the strategic setup in SCS and Taiwan, and send a message to China about how force can be used in the international system. In the ongoing effervescence of major geopolitical events and the bourgeoning accumulation of power, a comprehensive analysis of China’s decision-making is necessary to evaluate the conditions that could lead to a conflict over Taiwan. This study aims to move beyond the friction-based and power-driven analyses of China and present a hard case against conventional wisdom, proposing that China is not solely motivated by power and that the likelihood of conflict in the current opening window of opportunity, and closing window of vulnerability, is very low. To study the variables and the model of China’s decision-making, as well as how Taiwan intersects and influences, Chinese domestic politics with internal development strategy and China’s relations to the IS with external development strategies, this research will pioneeringly fill the gap in the existing studies by integrating Chinese domestic politics (1) into the analysis of the power-driven international system (2) and the issue of Taiwan (3). To conceptualize Chinese decision-making in relation to the international system and the special issue of Taiwan, the study defines three fundamental paradigms that frame China’s grandstrategy: a Realpolitik paradigm, a Nationalist paradigm, and a Domestic/Confucian paradigm. These paradigms help us put in light the relevant variables for the model
of China’s political decision-making and construct a new framework for how the Taiwan issue emerges
in relation to the other two variables (i.e., domestic politics and the IS). Ultimately, this proposal is not
to test but to rearticulate the three paradigms, anchoring Confucian domestic stability as the supreme
element of every political decision, in which nationalism is viewed as a tool used by pragmatic leaders
to maintain regime legitimacy in the face of great crisis (e.g., Taiwan, Democratization, US
militarization of the SCS, etc.) rather than a vindictive discourse for a nationalist crusade in the region.
In the end, we present a model that balances the expected utility of conflict over Taiwan according to
the great domestic instabilities happening inside China. We demonstrate that we can rest assured that no
illegitimate war will occur over Taiwan as long as China remains Chinese.
The concept of civil–military integration (CMI) was officially introduced in the
1990s in the United States to transform industrial bases in defense amidst shifting
geopolitical dynamics. CMI aims to blur the lines between civilian and military sectors,fostering the sharing of resources and technological advancement. This paper looks at the practice of CMI in China and its shift to military–civil fusion (MCF). Though the concept only emerged in the late 20th century, CMI in its other forms such as defense conversion and diversification has been practiced in China since the Mao era. However, the transition from CMI to MCF underscores the evolution of China’s strategic priorities, aligning military and civilian resources for technological advancement and national rejuvenation. Under Xi Jinping’s leadership, China has elevated MCF into a national strategy. MCF is considered essential for achieving China’s strategic goals and has entered a rapid stage of development, reflecting Xi’s commitment to modernizing the PLA and advancing national rejuvenation to realize the “Chinese Dream.” China’s efforts to achieve self-sufficiency in defense production and assert its military prowess on the global stage propelled by the MCF strategy under Xi Jinping have global geopolitical implications.
As new quality productivity (NQP) emerges as a rising star of productivity that can effectively leverage technological innovation and sustainability, this study aims to explore the relationship between NQP and environmental innovation, with a particular focus on the roles of managerial empowerment and board centralization within the context of China A-share listed companies. Utilizing the entire sample of China A-share market from 2013 to 2022, the study analyses the effectiveness of various dimensions reflecting innovation engagement among Chinese listed companies. For measuring NQP, the entropy method is employed to calculate the weights. By controlling for industry and year effects, the study examines both the main and moderating effects of managerial empowerment and board centralization. Additionally, heterogeneity tests, robustness checks, and two-stage least squares (2SLS) estimation were conducted to address endogeneity concerns. The results demonstrate that NQP significantly enhances environmental innovation, with managerial empowerment supporting this positive effect and board centralization obstructing it. The positive effect of NQP is particularly evident in state-owned enterprises, while in heavily polluting industries, the anticipated positive moderating effect of top managers disappears due to strict regulatory environments. Furthermore, board centralization negatively moderates environmental innovation, especially in lightly polluting sectors where internal governance is more sensitive. The study underscores the importance for policymakers to tailor regulations that balance managerial empowerment and board centralization to enhance the transformation of NQP into environmental innovation. Future research is needed to further investigate different background settings and the mechanisms through which NQP influences sustainability.
When do costly signals of reassurance enhance trust between nations? While previous research has established the role of dispositions in costly signaling, this paper highlights the critical influence of situational context. Employing an interactionist framework, we theorize that the effectiveness of costly signals depends on the complex interplay between situational contexts, such as crises and non‐crises, and individual dispositions, particularly hawkish and dovish orientations. We test our theory through two identical survey experiments fielded among Taiwanese citizens—one conducted during a crisis and the other during a non‐crisis period. Our findings show that during crises, China's costly reassurances are ineffective and even backfire among hawkish individuals. In contrast, China's costly reassuring signals enhance trust in non‐crisis situations, particularly among dovish individuals. Our findings contribute to signaling theory by underscoring important boundary conditions and the value of integrating contextual and psychological factors in analyzing the efficacy of costly signals. Moreover, by demonstrating that backfire effects emerge when hawks encounter reassurance during crises, we provide preliminary evidence on the scope conditions of this phenomenon. These insights offer empirical implications for policymakers, emphasizing the need for tailored reassurance strategies that account for timing and audience to effectively build trust between nations.
The introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed by the authors in the subsequent chapters of this contributed book. It argues that, as the Ukrainian war demonstrates, the United States no longer hegemonically implements the projection of Eurasian security, diplomacy, economy, and cyberspace. It indicates that the Eurasian superpower, China, and great powers Russia, India, the European Union, and the United Kingdom, middle powers, such as Iran, Turkey, Japan, and South Korea, also play important roles, with their numerous initiatives, organizations, and integration programs for the Eurasian continent. The introduction argues that the main competition is going on between the collective West (the United States, EU, and UK) and the Sino-Russian tandem. It mentions that, in the future, it will be hard for middle and small states to maintain neutrality. They have to choose between competing poles. This study offers Multipolar World Order 2.0 as a definition for the current world order, where the main actors will continue their struggle mostly for the Asia-Pacific, Central Asian, South Caucasian, Southern and Eastern Asian, Central and Eastern European, Middle Eastern regions, and Eurasian cyberspace. In some fragile regions this struggle can bring proxy or total wars, as is happening in Ukraine and in Syria. International norms and laws will be interpreted in different ways. Tough competition with usage of weaponized sanctions for markets of technologies, vaccine distribution, and spheres of influences between great and middle powers, their financial institutions and international organizations, will continue to create unstable situations in the Eurasian continent.
The Routledge Handbook of Chinese and Eurasian International Relations explores China’s relations with the Eurasian continent’s regions and countries in a multipolar era, providing an equal and balanced platform for scholars and practitioners from East, West, North, and South. This diversity enriches the contribution, giving it a dynamic ability to examine sources in different languages and cover a vast geography.
Divided into ten parts, this handbook analyses the major powers in a Multipolar World Order; China’s political and economic interests in post-Soviet Eurasia, Middle East, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Arctic; and China's relations with the US, Russia, Eurasian Economic Union, NATO and other players. International technology and environmental experts consider the impact of the Belt and Road Initiative, along with other international economic and transport corridors, and examine China’s multilateral relations and Digital Silk Road and e-governance roles. The Routledge Handbook of Chinese and Eurasian International Relations also contains official documents detailing the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and several European and Asian states, making it an authoritative source on diplomatic affairs.
This groundbreaking book will be of interest to policymakers, businessmen, scholars, and students of international relations, area studies, cybersecurity and digitalization, economics and the politics of international trade, security studies, foreign policy, global governance, international organizations, and environmental studies.
This chapter analyzes the consolidation of China’s 21st-century-style postmodern global power identity associated with the construction of a new, Chinese-led international order. The latter relies on a set of Chinese multilateral institutions that prominently include the Belt and Road Initiative. The process of Chinese socialization it enacts is examined in detail in a separate subchapter, which points to the creation of an international center-periphery structure based on patron-client relationships. The same Initiative has been instrumental in the development of two Chinese-centered globalizations ‘from above’ and ‘from below.’ The former upgraded China the postmodern global power to a ‘head’ nation in control of new transnational economic flows and institutional mechanisms of global governance. The ‘from below’ globalization led to the ‘transnationalisation of the Chinese nation-state’ based on the use of a deterritorial Chinese identity. Both reinforce Beijing’s international order as a thick order that relies on massive and diverse globalizing flows of goods and people. As a result, China’s 21st-century-style postmodern global power identity has finally reached maturity. At present, this identity plays an important role in shaping world politics. In the future, however, challenges that notably include the American counteroffensive might significantly alter both its features and its international impact.
This Chapter analyzes China’s socialization in multilateral institutions that resulted in the emergence and development of its 21st-century-style postmodern global power identity. To ensure the success of economic reforms, the post-1979 leadership in Beijing embraced multilateralism and international institutions. Details are provided of China’s participation in the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the international environmental regime, the UN Conference on Disarmament, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, and the international human rights regime. A common pattern of socialization is identified based on micro-processes of role playing/mimicking and social influence involving Chinese experts, high-ranking officials, and the political elite. However, this only led to Checkel’s first, less advanced type of socialization. Not all the norms of multilateral institutions were adopted and a reciprocal socialization phase typically followed the apprenticeship one. This is a Chinese effort to change the norms of multilateral institutions in ways beneficial to Beijing’s interests. This process often brought significant results but was unable to take China beyond the situation of a ‘body’ nation caught in a center-periphery economic relationship and subordinated to Western-controlled socializers. Before President Xi launched the construction of a new international order, China’s 21st-century-style postmodern global power identity was only half-developed.
This chapter provides an in-depth analysis of the 19th-century-type territorial empire identity that present China inherited from the Maoist period. Due to regime continuity, Deng’s reforms did not put an end to China’s perceived vulnerability to external threats. Events ranging from the fall of communism in Eastern Europe to the American intervention in Iraq convinced the leadership in Beijing of the need to preserve and strengthen China’s military instruments, which could be done only through the maintenance of the territorial empire. To avoid a Sino-American clash in the Pacific, President Xi’s construction of a new, Chinese-led international order took the form of a projection of normative power targeting the Global South. But the US ‘pivot to Asia’ convinced him of the critical importance of the protective role played by the hard power-based territorial empire, whose expansion and actorness he intensified. Its concentration of sovereignty and territoriality is well illustrated by the over-securitization process associated with President Xi’s concept of comprehensive national security and China’s involvement in various territorial disputes. Subchapter 3.4 concludes the chapter by scrutinizing the geostrategic dimension of the confrontation between China the territorial empire and the increasingly coherent and effective ‘networked security architecture’ created by the US Indo-Pacific Strategy.
In the last years, China and the United States of America (US) have engaged in unprecedented competition in emerging technologies (ETs), in a context of China’s growing presence and shifting position in the international system. Drawing on data between 2017 and 2023 and strategic decisions, such as bans and export controls directed at China’s companies and the changing alignment posture of Western states, we employ the Balance of Threat (BoT) theory to examine China’s changing aggregate power, offensive capabilities and aggressive intentions, while also establishing the vanishing importance of the geographic dimension. We then turn to the behavior of the US and Western states by drawing on the BoT theory, which suggests balancing as a prime strategy to counter the threat and identify instances of the formation of a balancing coalition against China. We demonstrate how the notion of threat in ETs can be approached and conclude with a characterization of balancing in the domain of ETs that resonates with the notion of “gradual balancing”, in addition to outlining suggestions for future studies.
China, which has made a major economic breakthrough, has become one of the most important actors in international politics by increasing its military power in recent years. China's increasing power and influence in the international arena arouses increasing curiosity about the country's foreign policy. With Xi Jinping becoming president, China began to display a more assertive attitude or behavior on many issues. This study basically seeks an answer to the question of what differences Xi Jinping brought to Chinese foreign policy. What kind of changes do these differences lead to in Chinese foreign policy? In this study, the general tendencies and directions of Chinese foreign policy during the Xi Jinping period are discussed. The assertive foreign policy approach that Xi Jinping is trying to implement is analyzed. In this context, the visions of "Chinese dream", "new type of great power relations", "new type of international relations", “Belt and Road Initiative" and "a community with a common future for humanity", which reflect Xi's assertive foreign policy approach, are examined. At the same time, challenges to the assertive foreign policy implemented under Xi Jinping are discussed. The study mainly questions the extent to which Xi Jinping's assertive foreign policy approach is successful. The study concludes that Xi Jinping's active foreign policy approach has not increased China's sphere of influence in the international arena to the extent expected. As China becomes more visible in the international arena, the country's foreign policy challenges seem to be increasing.
Given the question of China's role in international politics today, including the notions of China's pivots and priorities, it is mandatory to identify and explore the mechanisms that recast China's role in the world today. A great number of domestic and external factors weigh in on the analysis. Recognizing the relevance of these, this paper focuses explicitly on the aerospace industry and its development strategy. Accordingly, it is argued that—while a seemingly domestic set of developments—the emerging regulatory framework pertaining to China’s aerospace industry, along with the institutional interdependencies that it triggers, serve as an important component of a broader long-term strategy and related pivots and priorities that China pursues. To support this point, following the introduction, and the methodology section, the domestic and external factors influencing the evolution of China's role in the world are conceptualized and mapped. Against this backdrop, the case of the aerospace industry is examined in section four. Discussion and conclusions follow.
This paper analyzes the emergence of Korea’s economic statecraft based on strategic ambiguity in the context of such complex changes. First, I examine Korea’s attempt to strengthen cooperation with Southeast Asia as a regional strategy, especially in the case of the intensification of strategic competition between the United States and China at the regional level. Second, in the process of restructuring the supply chain, I explore how Korea has strengthened its cooperation with the United States while gradually diversifying the existing supply chain from China. Third, I reexamine Korea’s efforts to expand cooperation with like-minded countries based on the Korea-US alliance.
The Belt and Road initiative is five years old and has resulted in voluminous publications by scholars and policy pundits in many corners of the world. It is by far the most watched foreign policy initiative that the PRC has projected on the world stage. Departing from the standard focus on BRI’s external ambition, this article investigates the political dynamics inside the Chinese state, which has driven and will continue to shape the contour and magnitude of the BRI in the future. The article builds a theory of state fragmentation and argues that the Belt and Road is a mobilization campaign by the Communist leadership in order to deal with domestic and diplomatic challenges. Mobilization, however, intensifies fragmentation and results in the decentralized implementation of the BRI that diverges from the rhetoric of the strategy. Lower-level governments and major business groups leverage on the BRI and devise projects and programs that serve their economic interests. On the one hand, economic growth is being revived in the localities; on the other, restructuring and rebalancing of the Chinese economy are delayed.
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 is mistaken. Foregrounding transformations in the Chinese party-state that shape China’s foreign policy-making, it shows that, rather than being a coherent, geopolitically-driven grand strategy, BRI is an extremely loose, indeterminate scheme, driven primarily by competing domestic interests, particularly state capitalist interests, whose struggle for power and resources are already shaping BRI’s design and implementation. This will generate outcomes that often diverge from top leaders’ intentions and may even undermine key foreign policy goals.
Considering the mounting criticisms concerning Chinese aid practices, the present paper investigates whether Chinese aid projects fuel local-level corruption in Africa. To this end, we geographically match a new geo-referenced dataset on the subnational allocation of Chinese development finance projects to Africa over the 2000–2012 period with 98,449 respondents from four Afrobarometer survey waves across 29 African countries. By comparing the corruption experiences of individuals who live near a site where a Chinese project is being implemented at the time of the interview to those of individuals living close to a site where a Chinese project will be initiated but where implementation had not yet started at the time of the interview, we control for unobservable time-invariant characteristics that may influence the selection of project sites. The empirical results consistently indicate more widespread local corruption around active Chinese project sites. The effect is seemingly not driven by an increase in economic activity, but rather seems to signify that the Chinese presence impacts norms. Moreover, Chinese aid stands out from World Bank aid in this respect. In particular, whereas the results indicate that Chinese aid projects fuel local corruption but have no observable impact on short term local economic activity, they suggest that World Bank aid projects stimulate local economic activity without any consistent evidence of it fuelling local corruption.
Since the leadership transition in China in November 2012, there have been significant changes in Chinese foreign policy. It has been widely observed that under the new leadership headed by President Xi Jinping, Beijing has become more assertive in international affairs. This paper ex- amines the emerging contours of China's foreign policy under Xi and the implications for the future regional order in the Asia Pacific. It argues that recent international behaviour of China is the manifestation of a new phase of Chinese foreign policy that could be defined as ‘peaceful rise 2.0’. In this analysis, while Beijing still adheres to its declared ‘peaceful development’ policy aiming to maintain a stable external environment conducive to its ascendance, the manner in which it seeks to do so are considerably different from past decades. The paper further argues that despite China's growing power, President Xi faces greater difficulties than his predecessor to achieve his foreign policy objectives. Indeed Beijing's capacity to shape the regional environment in its favour in the near future is arguably declining rather than increasing.
After sixty-five years of pursuing a grand strategy of global leadership— nearly a third of which transpired without a peer great power rival—has the time come for the United States to switch to a strategy of retrenchment? According to most security studies scholars who write on the future of U.S. grand strategy, the answer is an unambiguous yes: they argue that the United States should curtail or eliminate its overseas military presence, abolish or dramatically reduce its global security commitments, and minimize or eschew efforts to foster and lead the liberal institutional order. Thus far, the arguments for retrenchment have gone largely unanswered by international relations scholars. An evaluation of these arguments requires a systematic analysis that directly assesses the core claim of retrenchment advocates that the current "deep engagement" grand strategy is not in the national interests of the United States. This analysis shows that advocates of retrenchment radically overestimate the costs of deep engagement and underestimate its benefits. We conclude that the fundamental choice to retain a grand strategy of deep engagement after the ColdWar is just what the preponderance of international relations scholarship would expect a rational, self-interested leading power in America's position to do.
The CCP government has adopted a very pragmatic strategy of “performance legitimacy” since China began its reform. It means
that the government relies on accomplishing concrete goals such as economic growth, social stability, strengthening national
power, and “good governance” (governing competence and accountability) to retain its legitimacy. While it is able to attain
considerable domestic support by implementing this strategy, it has no particular interest in pursuing democratization. This
chapter tries to make sense of the main reasons why it has adopted this strategy and to evaluate the political and social
outcome of its policies. The chapter intends to discover if China’s adaptation strategy is a “path dependent” decision, and
if it will function as a potential catalyst for significant political change in the future. The chapter also explores what
the Chinese government has achieved through its adaptation strategy and what and why it has been unwilling or unable to do
to obtain an “original justification” of power. Zhu skillfully travels back and forth between the terrains of theory and practice
to make better sense of legitimacy and governance in China’s experiences.
KeywordsLegitimacy–Governance–Adaptation–Accountability–Path-dependence
This study reveals a distinctive Chinese cognitive model of political legitimacy, and analyzes how political leaders in Beijing
have maintained its legitimacy through cultivating different elements of this traditional model. The central argument developed
in this study is that so far the government in Beijing has shown remarkable adaptability to a changing political environment.
However, the transition towards a market economy has redefined the meanings of the century-old cognitive model. Consequently,
the existing system of legitimization is being seriously challenged.
The liberal international order, erected after the Cold War, was crumbling by 2019. It was flawed from the start and thus destined to fail. The spread of liberal democracy around the globe-essential for building that order-faced strong resistance because of nationalism, which emphasizes self-determination. Some targeted states also resisted U.S. efforts to promote liberal democracy for security-related reasons. Additionally, problems arose because a liberal order calls for states to delegate substantial decisionmaking authority to international institutions and to allow refugees and immigrants to move easily across borders. Modern nation-states privilege sovereignty and national identity, however, which guarantees trouble when institutions become powerful and borders porous. Furthermore, the hyperglobalization that is integral to the liberal order creates economic problems among the lower and middle classes within the liberal democracies, fueling a backlash against that order. Finally, the liberal order accelerated China's rise, which helped transform the system from unipolar to multipolar. A liberal international order is possible only in unipolarity. The new multipolar world will feature three realist orders: a thin international order that facilitates cooperation, and two bounded orders-one dominated by China, the other by the United States-poised for waging security competition between them. © 2019 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Well before President Donald Trump began rhetorically attacking U.S. allies and the open international trading system, policy analysts worried about challenges to the liberal international order (LIO). Amore fundamental issue, however, has received little attention: the analytic value of framing U.S. security in terms of the LIO. Systematic examination shows that this framing creates far more confusion than insight. Even worse, the LIO framing could lead the United States to adopt overly competitive policies and unnecessarily resist change in the face of China's growing power. The "LIO concept"-the logics that proponents identify as underpinning the LIO-is focused inward, leaving it ill equipped to address interactions between members of the LIO and states that lie outside the LIO. In addition, the LIO concept suffers theoretical flaws that further undermine its explanatory value. The behavior that the LIO concept claims to explain-including cooperation under anarchy, effective Western balancing against the Soviet Union, the Cold War peace, and the lack of balancing against the United States following the Cold War-is better explained by other theories, most importantly, defensive realism. Analysis of U.S. international policy would be improved by dropping the LIO terminology entirely and reframing analysis in terms of grand strategy. © 2019 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Michael Pillsbury’s The Hundred-Year Marathon could distort the United States’ understanding of Chinese strategy.
This paper attempts to characterize China’s approach to global economic governance during the Xi Jinping era, and to provide details on how it is playing out. One finding is that China has moved away from the period of “hiding one’s strength and biding one’s time” and is now acting in a more norm-making and agenda-setting role in which it is seeking largely incremental change. Another finding is that China is doing these things through a variety of global governance forms such as inter-governmental organizations with a fairly highly degree of formality, looser international organizations that have weaker implementation capacity and unilateral initiatives which put China very much in a leadership position. Findings are based on an examination of major activities of the Xi period, including hosting the G20 leaders’ summit in Hangzhou, China, joint creation of new multilateral development banks, and the Belt and Road Initiative. The paper also touches on motives for China’s activities, including hedging against adverse developments in the international system, greater wealth, and a global power vacuum that has arisen with the rise of nativist and populist movements in the West, and possible constraints to the realization of China’s objectives such as slowing domestic economic growth and a backlash against China’s globalization, which could intensify.
One of the most important questions of human existence is what drives nations to war-especially massive, system-threatening war. Much military history focuses on the who, when, and where of war. In this riveting book, Dale C. Copeland brings attention to bear on why governments make decisions that lead to, sustain, and intensify conflicts. Copeland presents detailed historical narratives of several twentieth-century cases, including World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. He highlights instigating factors that transcend individual personalities, styles of government, geography, and historical context to reveal remarkable consistency across several major wars usually considered dissimilar. The result is a series of challenges to established interpretive positions and provocative new readings of the causes of conflict. Classical realists and neorealists claim that dominant powers initiate war. Hegemonic stability realists believe that wars are most often started by rising states. Copeland offers an approach stronger in explanatory power and predictive capacity than these three brands of realism: he examines not only the power resources but the shifting power differentials of states. He specifies more precisely the conditions under which state decline leads to conflict, drawing empirical support from the critical cases of the twentieth century as well as major wars spanning from ancient Greece to the Napoleonic Wars.
But lagging support for basic research may hinder ambitions to become a science superpower.
Could a conventional war with the United States inadvertently prompt Chinese nuclear escalation? The military-technical threat that such a war would pose to China's retaliatory capability—combined with wartime perceptual dynamics that might cause China to view this threat in an especially pessimistic light—could lead to reasonable Chinese fears that the United States might be attempting conventional counterforce, or considering or preparing for nuclear counterforce. China might see several forms of limited nuclear escalation as its least-bad response to this sort of threat to its nuclear deterrent, notwithstanding the country's no-first-use policy. This finding, derived from a more general framework about the military-technical and perceptual drivers of potential nuclear escalation in response to conventional counterforce, has broader ramifications for U.S. policy and military strategy, and it illustrates recurring dilemmas that the United States may face in conventional wars with other nuclear-armed adversaries.
Does a great power need to formulate a long-term Grand Strategy to guide its foreign policy actions? While some scholars continue to debate the competing merits of various grand strategies, a growing literature now emphasizes emergent learning and improvisation as the keys to success, as opposed to implementing a long-term design. In this article, I explore these scholarly arguments by framing the debate as one between two schools of thought, Grand Strategy and Emergent Strategy. After presenting the main arguments and the historical examples associated with each school, I evaluate the two approaches across four categories: the type of international security environment each of them is most suited for, the way each approach deals with short-term vs. long-term priorities, the domestic political conditions needed for each approach to be successful, and the type of presidential management qualities each school demands. Lastly, I discuss the implications of these arguments for the scholarship and the practice of foreign policy and national security strategy.
This article examines China’s behavior in the dispute with Japan over the Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands. Before 2010, China adopted a low-key approach to the dispute. After 2010, however, China chose to escalate the dispute, first in response to Japan’s detention of a Chinese fishing vessel in September 2010 and then in response to the Japanese government’s purchase of three of the islands in September 2012. China escalated because Japan’s actions challenged China’s relatively weak position in the dispute. By escalating, China could counter Japanese actions and strengthen its position in the dispute. Since late 2013, the dispute appears to have stabilized. China’s patrols within twelve nautical miles of the islands have strengthened China’s position in the dispute, while Japan has refrained from developing the islands.
As China invests in its nuclear forces and U.S.-China relations become increasingly strained, questions of U.S. nuclear doctrine require greater attention. The key strategic nuclear question facing the United States is whether to attempt to maintain and enhance its damage-limitation capability against China. The answer is less straightforward than it was during the Cold War, because China's nuclear force is orders of magnitude smaller than the Soviet force was. Part of the answer depends on the military-technical feasibility of the United States achieving a significant damage-limitation capability: What would be the outcome of military competition over the survivability of China's intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and command and control, and over the effectiveness of U.S. ballistic missile defenses? The answer also depends on the benefits that a damage-limitation capability would provide; these could include contributions to homeland deterrence, extended deterren...
China is creating or co-creating new international economic institutions in areas such as trade, development finance, currency settlement and credit rating that parallel those that arose out of the Bretton Woods conference of 1944 or are tied to the interests of rich, developed countries. What are its reasons for doing this? What are the characteristics of the new institutions? How do the new institutions relate to the old institutions? Will China’s initiatives lead to better global economic governance? This paper attempts to answer these questions. Its main conclusions are that China is trying to create a new international economic order in which its political power is more commensurate with its economic power, its creation of new international institutions is an important part of this strategy, the institutions that China is creating are meant to be open and inclusive and to introduce “better practices”, and it is possible – though not necessarily probable – that China can make a major contribution to global economic governance provided it can overcome operational challenges, skepticism about its intentions and too narrow a view of its national interest.
China has played an inconsistent role in multilateral governance, sometimes contributing to the creation and maintenance of international regimes, sometimes free riding or even threatening to undermine multilateral regimes to improve its position. We show that the strategic context of a particular issue of international concern affects China's approach to multilateralism and argue that our approach adds additional leverage to existing theories that rely on assumptions about its inherent disposition or socialization processes. An emerging global power will be willing to invest more in supporting a regime when its outside options are relatively poor. When its outside options are good, it will free ride on the efforts of more established states if it is not a necessary player in maintaining regimes, and if it is seen as indispensable it will threaten to hold up regime support as a way to win concessions. We show that these two factors, outside options and indispensability, can help explain changes in China's strategy with respect to the issue of North Korea's nuclear program and the regulation of international finance.
Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a more assertive China. What happened to China's “peaceful rise” and “charm offensive”? What explains the changes in China's foreign policy? According to interviews with Beijing and Shanghai-based analysts, China's assertiveness between 2008 and 2010 can be divided into two waves, each triggered by a different cause. The first wave seems triggered by a sense in Beijing that Washington, DC was more differential to China's interests, and less committed to East Asia. The second wave seems best explained as China's response to what it perceived as a far more assertive and threatening United States. Both waves were amplified by two domestic challenges: Chinese leaders’ hypersensitivity to popular nationalism and poor bureaucratic coordination among an expanding number of foreign policy actors.
Since 2012, some scholars, both Chinese and foreign, have argued that China's assertive foreign policy is doomed to fail.
Nevertheless, after examining China's foreign relations in the last two years, this paper finds that China has experienced
improved relations rather than deteriorating ones. In comparison with the strategy of keeping a low profile (KLP), the strategy
of striving for achievement (SFA) shows more efficiency in shaping a favorable environment for China's national rejuvenation.
The author applies the theory of moral realism to explaining the role of the SFA strategy and argues that morality can increase
both international political strength and the political legitimacy of a rising power. The key difference between the KLP and
the SFA is that the former focuses on economic gains and the latter seeks to strengthen political support. That is the reason
that the SFA values the role of morality and the KLP does not. Due to these different goals, the SFA strategy differs from
the KLP strategy in aspects of tenets, general layouts, working approaches, and methods. So far, the SFA has achieved progress
beyond people's expectation from Xi Jinping in 2012. Xi's strong leadership may become a new case suitable for illustrating
the theory of moral realism.
Avery Goldstein is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Christopher H. Browne Center for International Politics at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of From Bandwagon to Balance-of-Power Politics: Structural Constraints and Politics in China, 1949-1978 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), and is completing a study entitled Deterrence and Security in a Changing World: China, Britain, France, and the Enduring Legacy of the Nuclear Revolution.
I would like to thank Jean-Marc F. Blanchard, Thomas J. Christensen, and the anonymous reviewers for International Security who provided helpful comments on various drafts of this article.
1. The new wave of scholarly interest in East Asian security and China emerged in about 1993. Just two years earlier, such matters received relatively short shrift in one of the first serious comprehensive overviews of the post-Cold War world landscape. See Robert J. Art, "A Defensible Defense: America's Grand Strategy after the Cold War," International Security, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Spring 1991), pp. 5-53. Capturing the spirit of the recent "China-mania," the February 18, 1996, New York Times Magazine carried as its cover story, "The 21st Century Starts Here: China Booms. The World Holds Its Breath," by Ian Buruma, Seth Faison, and Fareed Zakaria. The editors of International Security, sensitive to market demand, have published an edited volume of selected articles entitled East Asian Security, whose largest section is a collection of major articles under the heading, "The Implications of the Rise of China." Michael E. Brown, Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Steven E. Miller eds., East Asian Security (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996).
2. See Avery Goldstein, "Robust and Affordable Security: Some Lessons from the Second-Ranking Powers During the Cold War," Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 15, No. 4 (December 1992), pp. 478-479, 519.
3. For concise accounts of China's reforms, see Harry Harding, China's Second Revolution (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1987); Kenneth Lieberthal, Governing China (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995); and Nicholas R. Lardy, China in the World Economy (Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 1994).
4. On the increased importance of China for U.S. foreign policy, see then-U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher's May 1996 speech to a joint meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Asia Society, the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, and Business Week. "'American Interests and the U.S.-China Relationship' Address by Warren Christopher," Federal Department and Agency Documents, May 17, 1996, Federal Document Clearing House, from NEXIS Library, Lexis/Nexis, Reed Elsevier (hereafter NEXIS). For samples of the emerging scholarly literature, see Aaron L. Friedberg, "Ripe for Rivalry: Prospects for Peace in a Multipolar Asia," International Security, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Winter 1993/94), pp. 5-33; Richard K. Betts, "Wealth, Power, and Instability: East Asia and the United States after the Cold War," International Security, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Winter 1993/94), pp. 34-77; Denny Roy, "Hegemon on the Horizon: China's Threat to East Asian Security," International Security, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Summer 1994), pp. 149-168; Michael G. Gallagher, "China's Illusory Threat to the South China Sea," International Security, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Summer 1994), pp. 169-194; Richard Bernstein and Ross H. Munro, The Coming Conflict with China (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997); and Andrew J. Nathan and Robert S. Ross, The Great Wall and the Empty Fortress: China's Search for Security (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997).
5. For a brief introduction to the debate and references to some of the key positions, see William Curti Wohlforth, The Elusive Balance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), especially pp. 3-10.
6. On the strategic rationale for China resisting transparency, see Goldstein, "Robust and Affordable Security," pp. 485-491, 500-503; Alastair Iain Johnston, "China's New 'Old Thinking': The Concept of Limited Deterrence," International Security, Vol. 20, No. 3 (Winter 1995/96), p. 31, fn. 92. China's Defense White Paper in 1995 was an unrevealing disappointment. The PLA has reportedly begun a more forthcoming draft for release in late 1997. See "White Paper—China: Arms...
Since the mid-1990s, much has been written about the potentially disruptive impact of China if it emerges as a peer competitor challenging the United States. Not enough attention has been paid, however, to a more immediate danger—that the United States and a weaker China will find themselves locked in a crisis that could escalate to open military conflict. The long-term prospect for a new great power rivalry ultimately rests on uncertain forecasts about big shifts in national capabilities and debatable claims about the motivations of the two countries. By contrast, the danger of crisis instability involving these two nuclear-armed states is a tangible near-term concern. An analysis that examines the current state of U.S.-China relations and compares it with key aspects of U.S.-Soviet relations during the Cold War indicates that a serious Sino-American crisis may be more likely and more dangerous than expected. The capabilities each side possesses, and specific features of the most likely scenarios for U.S.-China crises, suggest reasons to worry that escalation pressures will exist and that they will be highest early in a crisis, compressing the time frame for diplomacy to avert military conflict.
There has been a rapidly spreading meme in U.S. pundit and academic circles since 2010 that describes China's recent diplomacy as "newly assertive." This "new assertiveness" meme suffers from two problems. First, it underestimates the complexity of key episodes in Chinese diplomacy in 2010 and overestimates the amount of change. Second, the explanations for the new assertiveness claim suffer from unclear causal mechanisms and lack comparative rigor that would better contextualize China's diplomacy in 2010. An examination of seven cases in Chinese diplomacy at the heart of the new assertiveness meme finds that, in some instances, China's policy has not changed; in others, it is actually more moderate; and in still others, it is a predictable reaction to changed external conditions. In only one case—maritime disputes—does one see more assertive Chinese rhetoric and behavior. The speed and extent with which the newly assertive meme has emerged point to an understudied issue in international relations—namely, the role that online media and the blogosphere play in the creation of conventional wisdoms that might, in turn, constrain policy debates. The assertive China discourse may be a harbinger of this effect as a Sino-U.S. security dilemma emerges.
A series of moves in China's foreign policies since the global financial crisis in 2008 seems to suggest that China is now more confident than ever in its external behaviour. Indeed, some Western observers argue that China's new confidence even borders on arrogance. Domestically, there is an emerging debate over the famous "tao guang yang hui" (TGYH) strategy. Is China beginning to behave in an arrogant way? Will China change the TGYH strategy? This article documents the evolution of the TGYH strategy and explains why there is an emerging interest in it today. It argues that the TGYH strategy will be continued as a national strategy, though some modifications to it will be highly likely in coming years.
The heartbreaking plight in which a bipolarized and atom bomb-blessed world finds itself today is but the extreme manifestation of a dilemma with which human societies have had to grapple since the dawn of history. For it stems from a fundamental social constellation, one where a plurality of otherwise interconnected groups constitute ultimate units of political life, that is, where groups live alongside each other without being organized into a higher unity.
Wherever such anarchic society has existed—and it has existed in most periods of known history on some level—there has arisen what may be called the ‘security dilemma’ of men, or groups, or their leaders. Groups or individuals living in such a constellation must be, and usually are, concerned about their security from being attacked, subjected, dominated, or annihilated by other groups and individuals. Striving to attain security from such attack, they are driven to acquire more and more power in order to escape the impact of the power of others. This, in turn, renders the others more insecure and compels them to prepare for the worst. Since none can ever feel entirely secure in such a world of competing units, power competition ensues, and the vicious circle of security and power accumulation is on.
Two assumptions dominate current foreign policy debates in the United States and China. First, the United States is in decline relative to China. Second, much of this decline is the result of globalization and the hegemonic burdens the United States bears to sustain globalization. Both of these assumptions are wrong. The United States is not in decline; in fact, it is now wealthier, more innovative, and more militarily powerful compared to China than it was in 1991. Moreover, globalization and hegemony do not erode U.S. power; they reinforce it. The United States derives competitive advantages from its hegemonic position, and globalization allows it to exploit these advantages, attracting economic activity and manipulating the international system to its benefit. The United States should therefore continue to prop up the global economy and maintain a robust diplomatic and military presence abroad.
Successful deterrence requires both threats and assurances about the conditionality of those threats. The real security dilemma is how to be tough enough without being overly provocative. Deterrence across the Taiwan Strait is possible, but not simple. Here's how.
International anarchy and the resulting security dilemma (i.e., policies which increase one state's security tend to decrease that of others) make it difficult for states to realize their common interests. Two approaches are used to show when and why this dilemma operates less strongly and cooperation is more likely. First, the model of the Prisoner's Dilemma is used to demonstrate that cooperation is more likely when the costs of being exploited and the gains of exploiting others are low, when the gains from mutual cooperation and the costs of mutual noncooperation are high, and when each side expects the other to cooperate. Second, the security dilemma is ameliorated when the defense has the advantage over the offense and when defensive postures differ from offensive ones. These two variables, which can generate four possible security worlds, are influenced by geography and technology.
Robert S. Ross is Professor of Political Science, Boston College, and Research Associate, John King Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, Harvard University.
A later version of this article will appear in Coercive Diplomacy: Lessons from the Early Post-Cold War World, Robert Art and Patrick Cronin, eds. (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace [USIP] Press, forthcoming). The author is grateful to USIP for its support of research travel to China and to Robert Art, Patrick Cronin, Joseph Fewsmith, Steven Goldstein, Ronald Montaperto, Barry Posen, Alan Romberg, Robert Suettinger, and Allen Whiting for their helpful comments.
1. See, for example, John W. Garver, Face Off: China, the United States, and Taiwan's Democratization (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997); and Arthur Waldron, "How Not to Deal with China," Commentary, Vol. 103, No. 3 (March 1997), pp. 44-49.
2. The distinction between coercive diplomacy and compellence is not obvious. Thomas C. Schelling's description of compellence is nearly identical to Alexander L. George's later definition of coercive diplomacy (i.e., action that aims to "persuade an opponent to stop or reverse an action"). See Schelling, Arms and Influence (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1976), pp. 69-72; and George, "Coercive Diplomacy: Definition and Characteristics," in Alexander L. George and William E. Simons, eds., The Limits of Coercive Diplomacy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1994), p. 7. Either term can capture Chinese behavior. This article uses the term coercive diplomacy rather than compellence to describe Chinese policy, if only because coercive diplomacy has become the more familiar term.
Moreover, the difference between coercion and deterrence is often not clear. As Schelling observes, when a state seeks to end the continuance of another state's policy, there are elements of both deterrence and compellence (coercion). Schelling, Arms and Influence, p. 77. It can be argued that there are elements of both deterrence and coercion in Chinese behavior. But compellence/coercive diplomacy better captures Chinese behavior, because China took the initiative and maintained its policy of threatening the use of force until it received a response from Taiwan and the United States in terms of concrete policy change. Paul Gordon Lauren calls this pattern "defensive coercion." See Lauren, "Theories of Bargaining with Threats of Force: Deterrence and Coercive Diplomacy," in Lauren, ed., Diplomacy: New Approaches in History, Theory, and Policy (New York: Free Press, 1979), pp. 192-193. See also Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), pp. 195-196; and Lawrence Freedman, "Strategic Coercion," in Freedman, ed., Strategic Coercion: Concepts and Cases (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 15-20.
3. The relationship between reputation, credibility, commitment, and deterrence follows Schelling, Arms and Influence, pp. 42-43. For an extensive discussion of the relationship between reputation and deterrence, see Jonathan Mercer, Reputation and International Politics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), chap. 1.
4. Author interview with Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Peter Tarnoff. Much of the following analysis of Chinese policy is based on the author's extensive interviews conducted during visits to Beijing between 1996 and 2000 with senior civilian and military specialists on U.S.-China relations and Taiwan in government think tanks and universities. These policy analysts are advisers to such government agencies as the state council, the ministry of foreign affairs, the ministry of security, and the People's Liberation Army. They frequently participate in government meetings regarding policy toward the United States and Taiwan. For obvious reasons, I have not disclosed their identities.
5. On the role of the use of force in coercive diplomacy, see Alexander L. George and William Simons, "Findings and Conclusions," in George and Simons, Limits of Coercive Diplomacy, pp. 273-279; and Freedman, "Strategic Coercion," pp. 20-23.
6. This use of deterrence follows the definition of deterrence found in Glenn H. Snyder, Deterrence and Defense: Toward a Theory of National Security (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 3. Washington believed that its commitments were "interdependent," so that its follow-through in March 1996 on its commitment to Taiwan would affect the credibility of its future commitments to both Taiwan and other regional actors. On the...
What explains the nature of institutional change in post-1989 China? Dominant theories of institutional change focus on economic-rationalist, sociopolitical, or historical causes. Yet they have trouble explaining the pattern of institutional change in China. An alternative legitimacy-based perspective is proposed here that provides a more parsimonious and general theory of institutional change for China and potentially for other cases as well.
41. On the importance of power transitions and on their relevance China's rise, see A.F.K. Organski and Jacek Kugler
- See Zhang
See Zhang, "Lijie shibada yilai de zhongguo waijiao."
41. On the importance of power transitions and on their relevance China's rise, see A.F.K.
Organski and Jacek Kugler, The War Ledger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980);
China's Ascent: Power, Security, and the Future of International Politics
- Jack S Levy
and Jack S.
Levy, "Power Transition Theory and the Rise of China," in Robert S. Ross and Zhu Feng, eds.,
China's Ascent: Power, Security, and the Future of International Politics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008), pp. 11-33.
Review of Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap
- Lawrence Freedman
On "the trap," see Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's
Trap? (Boston: Houghton Mifºin Harcourt, 2017). For contrasting perspectives, see Kori Schake,
"The Summer of Misreading Thucydides," Atlantic, July 18, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/
amp/article/533859/; Arthur Waldron, "There Is No Thucydides Trap," SupChina, June 12, 2017,
https://supchina.com/2017/06/12/no-thucydides-trap/; and Lawrence Freedman, "Review of
Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?" PRISM, Vol. 7, No. 1 (September
2017), pp. 175-178, www.jstor.org/stable/26470508.
Xi Jinping: Let the Sense of Community of Common Destiny Take Deep Root in Neighbouring Countries" (Beijing: People's Republic of China
- Carl Thayer
Carl Thayer, "China's New Regional Security Treaty with ASEAN," Diplomat, October 16,
2013, https://thediplomat.com/2013/10/chinas-new-regional-security-treaty-with-asean/; and
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, "Xi Jinping: Let the Sense of Community of Common Destiny Take
Deep Root in Neighbouring Countries" (Beijing: People's Republic of China, October 25, 2013),
http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjb_663304/wjbz_663308/activities_663312/t1093870.shtml.
economic partnership grows ever wider: Vice-Premier Wang Yang's keynote speech at the forum on China-U.S. business relations] (Beijing: Ministry of Commerce, People's Republic of China
- Wang Yang
Wang Yang, "Zhong mei jingji huoban zhilu yuezou yuekuanguang-Wang Yang Fuzongli zai
zhong mei shangye guanxi luntanshang de zhuzhi yanjiang" [The path of China-U.S. economic
partnership grows ever wider: Vice-Premier Wang Yang's keynote speech at the forum on China-U.S. business relations] (Beijing: Ministry of Commerce, People's Republic of China, December 22,
2014), http://www.mofcom.gov.cn/article/ae/ai/201412/20141200840915.shtml; "Xi Seeks New
Outlook on Foreign Affairs," China.org.cn, November 30, 2014, http://www.china.org.cn/china/
2014-11/30/content_34188844.htm; and Dingding Chen, "Relax, China Won't Challenge U.S.
Hegemony," Diplomat, January 14, 2015, https://thediplomat.com/2015/01/relax-china-wontchallenge-us-hegemony/. See also Ellen L. Frost, "In Asia, U.S. Economic Leadership Is Under Attack," National Interest, January 8, 2015, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/asia-us-economicleadership-under-attack-11994.
The China Challenge: Shaping the Choices of a Rising Power
- Carol E Lee
- William Mauldin
- Thomas J Christensen
Carol E. Lee and William Mauldin, "U.S., China Agree on Implementing Paris Climate-Change Pact," Wall Street Journal, September 3, 2016, https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-chinaagree-on-implementing-paris-climate-change-pact-1472896645; and Thomas J. Christensen, The
China Challenge: Shaping the Choices of a Rising Power (New York: W.W. Norton, 2015), pp. 138-150,
279-287.
pliance and Challenge in Beijing's International Relations
pliance and Challenge in Beijing's International Relations," International Security, Vol. 44, No. 2
(Fall 2019), pp. 9-60, doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00360.
Xi Jinping: Ba woguo cong wangluo daguo jianshe chengwei wangluo qiangguo
- See Adam Segal
- Adam Segal
See Adam Segal, "Chinese Cyber Diplomacy in a New Era of Uncertainty," Aegis Paper Series
No. 1703 (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution, June 2017); and Adam Segal, "When China Rules
the Web: Technology in Service of the State," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 97, No. 5 (September-October
2018), pp. 10-18. On the political importance for the CCP, see "Xi Jinping: Ba woguo cong wangluo
daguo jianshe chengwei wangluo qiangguo" [Xi Jinping: Let's build our big internet country into a
strong internet country], Xinhuanet, February 27, 2014 http://news.xinhuanet.com/politics/2014-02/27/c_119538788.htm; and Rogier Creemers, "Central Leading Group for Internet Security
and Informatization Established," China Copyright and Media blog, March 1, 2014, http://
chinacopyrightandmedia.wordpress.com/2014/03/01/central-leading-group-for-internet-securityand-informatization-established/.
This speech announced the Silk Road Economic Belt. Later, the Maritime Silk Road was added, giving the project its original English-language moniker
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, "President Xi Jinping Delivers Important Speech and Proposes to
Build a Silk Road Economic Belt with Central Asian Countries" (Beijing: People's Republic of
China, September 7, 2013), https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/topics_665678/xjpfwzysiesgjtfh
shzzfh_665686/t1076334.shtml. This speech announced the Silk Road Economic Belt. Later, the
Maritime Silk Road was added, giving the project its original English-language moniker, "One
Belt, One Road." Subsequently, it would be rebranded in English as the Belt and Road Initiative.
See National Development and Reform Commission, "Vision and Actions on Jointly Building Silk
Road Economic Belt and 21st Century Maritime Silk Road" (Beijing: People's Republic of
China, March 28, 2015), http://en.ndrc.gov.cn/newsrelease/201503/t20150330_669367.html; and
An Baijie, "'Belt and Road' Incorporated into CPC Constitution," Belt and Road Portal, October 25,
2017, https://eng.yidaiyilu.gov.cn/qwyw/rdxw/31395.htm.
The Creation of the PLA Strategic Support Force and Its Implications for Chinese Military Space Operations
- Kevin L Pollpeter
- Michael S Chase
- Eric Heginbotham
Kevin L. Pollpeter, Michael S. Chase, and Eric Heginbotham, The Creation of the PLA Strategic
Support Force and Its Implications for Chinese Military Space Operations (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND
Corporation, 2017).
Secure a Decisive Victory in Building a Moderately Prosperous Society in All Respects and Strive for the Great Success of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era
- Xi
Xi, "Secure a Decisive Victory in Building a Moderately Prosperous Society in All Respects and
Strive for the Great Success of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era." See also Li
Jiayao, "PLA's 91st Anniversary: Xi Jinping's Call for a Strong Army," CGTN, July 31, 2018, http://
eng.chinamil.com.cn/view/2018-07/31/content_9237734.htm.
Air Defense Identiªcation Zone Intended to Provide China Greater Flexibility to Enforce East China Sea Claims
- See Kimberly Hsu
See Kimberly Hsu, "Air Defense Identiªcation Zone Intended to Provide China Greater Flexibility to Enforce East China Sea Claims" (Washington, D.C.: U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, January 14, 2014), https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/ªles/Research/
China%20ADIZ%20Staff%20Report.pdf;
China's ADIZ in the East China Sea
- Eric Heginbotham
Eric Heginbotham, "China's ADIZ in the East China
Sea," Lawfare blog, August 24, 2014, https://www.lawfareblog.com/foreign-policy-essay-chinasadiz-east-china-sea;
building-south-china-sea. The roots of this recent effort reach back at least to Hu Jintao's second term. See Andrew Chubb
- Jun Mai
- Sarah Zheng
Jun Mai and Sarah Zheng, "Xi Personally Behind Island-Building in the South China Sea,"
South China Morning Post, July 29, 2017, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/
article/2104547/xi-personally-behind-island-building-south-china-sea. The roots of this recent effort reach back at least to Hu Jintao's second term. See Andrew Chubb, "Chinese Popular Nationalism and PRC Policy in the South China Sea," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Western Australia,
2016, especially pp. 235, 289-290, https://api.research-repository.uwa.edu.au/portalªles/portal/
15600509/THESIS_DOCTOR_OF_PHILOSOPHY_CHUBB_Andrew_2016.PDF.