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The Chinese leadership found the Warring States period a useful model to help explain the basic pluralist nature of the modern international system and the alleged predatory onslaught of aspiring non-Chinese hegemons such as the former Soviet Union and the US. The explanatory and justificatory framework that pitted foreign hegemonism against Chinese antihegemonic virtue became a powerful undercurrent in Chinese policymaking. Traditional East Asian and specifically Confucian ideals grounding the legitimacy of political authority in moral virtue virtually require Beijing to distinguish itself from the “selfish” pursuit of power that characterizes other countries. In dealing with its more powerful neighbors, scholars say China chooses to adopt a “calculative” strategy learned from the Warring States period to keep a relatively low and nonprovocative profile as a means to buy time until it is strong enough and fully prepared to make its own move. Since the end of the Cold War, China has focused on maintaining its rapid export-driven economic growth as the key to the restoration of its status and significance in the world stage but, at the same time, convincing the rest of the world that there is nothing threatening in these developments. However, as its strength grows, China may become more assertive in insisting on the sort of Sinocentric system hierarchy that its history teaches it to expect and its traditional notions of power and legitimacy impel it to demand. For now, China seems to regard the Westphalian conception of world order as being useful enough to justify continued adherence. Yet traditional statecraft teaches the importance of strategic misdirection and the utility of “mixing truths and falsehood” in pursuit of state goals. Thus, it is very difficult to discern where China's heart truly lies today or to predict its future intentions.

This chapter examines the perceptions of China's international relations experts primarily based in research institutes and universities, as well as some foreign policy officials. While the Chinese internet, blogosphere, and newspapers are rife with opinion concerning world affairs, very little systematic evidence is available concerning public perceptions of international affairs. The only recent published public opinion survey known at the time of writing appeared in December 2009, by the China Academy of Social Sciences. Generally speaking this survey finds that the Chinese public's attitude toward the United States is mixed to poor, positive toward Russia, mixed but essentially optimistic about Europe, and mixed to poor about Japan.

Summarizes the main points of China: The Pessoptimist Nation, and draws conclusions about what China's identity – security dynamic means for the United States and the EU, before looking at how China's public intellectuals are thinking about the future. It argues that rather than finding the core of “Chinese nationalism,” the book shows how Chinese identity emerges through the interplay of positive and negative feelings that intertwine China's domestic and international politics, and national security with nationalist insecurities. The book concludes that Chinese identity grows out of a dynamic of reciprocal influence that integrates official policy and popular culture. This interactive view of China's pessoptimist identity means that we need to rethink the role of the state and public opinion in Beijing's foreign policy‐making. The party‐state's pessoptimist structure of feeling actually narrows the possibilities for what it means to be Chinese by promoting a contentious paradigm of international politics. The book ends with a brief consideration of how China's opinion‐makers are thinking about their country's future – and the world's future.

This concluding chapter explains the value of relationalism for examining motivational, strategic, and institutional formations in historical East Asian politics. It also highlights the key empirical finding of expressive rationality in regional relations. A more important purpose of the chapter is to outline ethical relationalism as a distinct critical and normative International Relations theory and apply its perspectives to evaluate contemporary Chinese strategy. The theory provides the link between the past and present and suggests policy implications of this study. Chinese foreign policy already contains a rarely noted element of ethical relationalism. But it is in competition with other intellectual currents for policy influence and must be expanded and deepened if Chinese foreign policy is to realize its relational potential more fully.

How did the issue of sending the armed forces abroad and the defence of interests overseas enter and evolve in the Chinese foreign policy debate? The analysis in Chapter 1 of the speeches and documents released by the Chinese leaders and government institutions reveals three interconnected and important changes that have happened since the late 1980s. First, from Jiang Zemin’s New Security Concept to Xi Jinping’s Comprehensive National Security, the management of non-traditional security issues has consistently been the main driver behind the expansion of Chinese military activities overseas. Second, non-traditional security issues abroad changed from being seen as diplomatic opportunities to be considered, especially after the evacuation from Libya of almost 36,000 Chinese nationals, as threats to the regime’s legitimacy and China’s national security. Third, as overseas non-traditional security crises started to be perceived as threats, the orders from the civilian leadership to the foreign policy bureaucracy and, especially, the armed forces to prepare to play a larger role in peacetime foreign policy became increasingly urgent and clear.

This Introduction presents China’s nascent strategy to protect its overseas interests, eventually via military means, as a major change in the country’s international orientation. As is the case for other great powers in history, it is a fundamental test for the sustainability of China’s rise. In order to shed light on this issue, this chapter brings securitization theory in, introducing its origin and latest developments, in order to avoid some of the problems that the plague the literature on China’s foreign and security policy. In particular, it is explains why it is important to focus on the role of non-traditional security threats to Chinese interests in North Africa and the Middle East. Against this background, the Introduction concludes with an outline of each chapter, providing an overview of their main content and findings.

Although it is not as decisive a factor as it is in Western democracies, the space for Chinese public opinion to influence foreign policy has grown over the years thanks to the population’s greater access to the Internet, the diversification of the media, and the simple fact that today’s Chinese leaders are not revolutionary heroes. While domestic public opinion cannot shape the country’s foreign policy on issues related to China’s “core interests”—the commanding role of the Chinese Communist Party and the country’s territorial integrity and sovereignty—the situation is different when the discussion is less sensitive. The Chinese approach to North Africa and the Middle East is one of those topics. Hence, this chapter looks at how online Chinese public opinion influenced the domestic narrative on protecting the country’s overseas interests. It exposes a contested environment where the actions and the narrative put forward by policymakers were often under pressure as Chinese citizens favored a more muscular approach to defending the country’s overseas interests.

This chapter examines the China Investment Corporation's (CIC) potential as an instrument of Chinese economic statecraft. The CIC is a sovereign wealth fund whose empirics indicate that it lies somewhere between the two extremes of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) and the National Social Security Fund (NSSF). In the early days of the CIC, there was little state control over it and its predecessors. As the 2008 fiancial crisis unfolded, the State Council (and the Ministry of Finance in particular) consolidated its control of the CIC. This consolidation marked the second phase of the CIC case. This chapter first provides an overview of the origins, structure, and leadership of the CIC before discussing the sources and uses of the CIC's financing as well as its direct investments. It then applies the theory to better understand the CIC case as an instrument of Chinese economic statecraft. It suggests that the CIC will not be an effective tool for achieving China's foreign policy interests.

This chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book draws on social identity theory (SIT) for insights into how status concerns and social identity shape Chinese and Russian foreign policy. SIT argues that social groups strive to achieve a positively distinctive identity. When a group's identity is threatened, it may pursue one of several identity management strategies: social mobility, social competition, or social creativity. Using SIT as a framework, the book addresses several questions. First, how important were status considerations in shaping Chinese and Russian foreign policy? Second, why did China and Russia choose a particular strategy in a given context for improving their state's international standing? Third, how effective were their chosen strategies as measured by the perceptions and beliefs of the leading states.

This chapter analyzes the border clashes between the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union in March 1969. It details the development of Chinese leader Mao Zedong's perception of the Soviet Union as a challenge to China's autonomy and the (cultural) revolution, underscoring Mao's failure to understand how the Soviet Union interpreted his actions as a credible threat. Employing his own frame of reference, Mao failed to grasp that the Soviet Union did not see the border conflict as a catalyst for internal mobilization and political control at home and in its satellite states, but as yet another manifestation of the seeming irrationality of Chinese foreign policy. Mao's surprise and feeling of hostile encirclement, as well as the deepening of Soviet distrust, paved the way in turn for China's famous rapprochement with the United States under President Richard Nixon.

The Libyan Civil War and NATO-led military intervention present a case study of China’s evolving perception of the international order, its deliberations on foreign policy strategy, and its calculations of growing national interest overseas, particularly in the Middle East. While not happy to see the NATO-led military intervention, China’s responses and involvement were kept deliberately limited throughout the Libyan Civil War. This can be explained by Beijing’s political calculations as well as its lack of strategic means and diplomatic tactics to deal with regional conflicts in the post-Cold War world. In the aftermath of the war, with many advocating that Chinese foreign policy needs to be more flexible and proactive to protect the country’s national interests abroad, China has adopted new foreign policy initiatives and deliberated the ‘creative involvement’ approach.

Chapter 2 examines what the Viet Minh needed from China and Mao’s determination to support Ho’s war effort. It discusses Mao’s concerns about national security since Josef Stalin was not ready to send Soviet forces to defend Chinese borders against a foreign invasion. Mao therefore decided on a self-reliant, proactive defense to stop the Western powers outside the Chinese borders in neighboring countries like Vietnam and break the US military encirclement of China in East and Southeast Asia. Although external Cold War factors may appear to be one of the motives behind Mao’s decision, his strategy also was driven by significant internal factors. China’s power status depended more on its political stability and military strength than on its foreign relations. In this sense, Mao may have perceived China’s involvement in the French Indochina War as a chance to continue the Communist movement at home and to project New China’s power image abroad. The PLA’s victory in the civil war gave Mao and his generals confidence in their ability to help the Viet Minh drive the French Army out of Indochina and later to help Kim Il-sung to drive the UN force out of the Korean peninsula.