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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Drawing on distinguished relational traditions in both China and the West, this chapter develops a relational theory to explain a distinct set of grand strategies that imperial China and its neighbors may adopt in their interactions. The theory provides a new framework for understanding the strategic dynamics of regional politics under the condition of Chinese hegemony. It also affords a new perspective on the role of Confucianism in Chinese foreign policy: constraining in the grand strategy of instrumental hierarchy but causal and constitutive in the grand strategy of expressive hierarchy. Equally important, it uncovers an expressive dimension of regional politics that is almost universally ignored in the existing literature. The theory also posits a major facilitating condition of rationality and strategy: They are both relational outcomes conditioned by the degree of the conflict of interest in particular relationships.

The introduction outlines the puzzle and research question for the book: what explains China’s response to intervention at the UN Security Council? China is increasingly forthright about the specter of regime change, viewing the UN Security Council as directly or indirectly executing regime change—the forcible or coerced removal of the political leadership of a state by outside actors—via non-consensual intervention. Broad changes in the international system, like the norms of protection of civilians, accountability, and the responsibility to protect are invoked to secure populations under threat of mass abuse by their governments. However, China’s response to UN Security Council intervention in the trinity of post-9/11 cases where heads of state were marked for dispatch by public discourse is varied: China condoned, acquiesced or prevented action. China’s record cannot be robustly explained by existing theory. This book argues that status is an overlooked determinant in understanding China’s varying position regarding intervention at the UN Security Council. Under certain conditions, China’s status peer groups can modify China’s intervention-resistant preferences in these most difficult cases. China’s pursuit of status is partly driven by consequentialist calculation, but it is also inherently social, to conform to an intersubjective standard of good behavior as a member of the peer group guided by a logic of appropriateness. China faces a status dilemma in that China seeks status from two sometimes competing peer groups: the great powers and the Global South.

This chapter reviews Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and People’s Republic of China (PRC) interactions with the United States since the 1940s, and it reveals a general pattern of the United States at the very top of China’s foreign priorities. Among those few instances where China seemed to give less attention to the United States was the post-2010 period, which saw an ever more powerful China advancing at US expense. However, China’s rapid advance in economic, military, and diplomatic power has progressively alarmed the US government, which now sees China as its main international danger. Looking forward into the future, deteriorating US-China relations have enormous consequences for both countries, the Asia-Pacific region, and the world.