xiance thesis-china’s foreign policy under xi jinping

1CHINA’S FOREIGN POLICY UNDER XI JINPING

CHINA’S FOREIGN POLICY UNDER XI JINPING: THE INNER TENDENCY OF COMPREHENSIVE MODERNIZATION AND ITS IMPACTS

ON CHINA’S FOREIGN POLICY PREFERENCES

A Thesis presented by

Xiance Wang

To

College of Professional Studies

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Science

In the field of

Global Studies and International Relations

Thesis Instructor: Dr. Edward U. Murphy

Northeastern University Boston, Massachusetts

December 2015


Abstract

This paper tries to use neoclassical realism framework to analyze China’s distinguishing

foreign policies since Xi Jinping became the president of China and explain what roles the

domestic factors structurally play in forming China’s foreign policy preferences. For the reason

that China domestically is facing the demand of development, the modernization of governance,

the acceleration of social transition, the maturing of political leadership and their resultant

impacts, China as a whole is in a transition to become a more modernized country than before.

This inner tendency of comprehensive modernization shapes China’s foreign policy preferences

to be more bottom line guarded, pragmatic, self-adjusting and outward-looking than before. How

would these changes affect the interactions between China and its counterparts depends on

China’s specific layout for its further modernization and to what extent the world would accept

it.

Key words: neoclassical realism, China’s foreign policy, modernization


Table of Contents

Introduction................................................................................................................................7

Section I. Contextual background and literature reviews..........................................................8

Section II. Research Methods..................................................................................................11

Theoretical Frameworks......................................................................................................11

The Conduct of Research and Research Emphasis..............................................................14

Section III. Research Contents.................................................................................................15

Part 1: Developmental Factors--The Demand of Development...........................................15

1. Historical backgrounds: 1945-2013.............................................................................16

1.1 International background of development.............................................................16

Systemic background world faces............................................................................16

International background China faces......................................................................17

1.2 Domestic background of development..................................................................18

Systemic background domestically..........................................................................18

Significant factors domestically...............................................................................19

2. Current situation since Xi: 2013-2015.........................................................................20

2.1 International aspect................................................................................................20

2.2 Domestic aspect.....................................................................................................21

3. Case study: the domestic logics of China’s “The Belt and Road initiative” (B&R). . .21

3.1 Buying time for changes........................................................................................24

3.2 Building a new economic ecosystem for the future...............................................25

3.3 Reducing the risks and for a stable system............................................................26


4. Findings........................................................................................................................28

Part 2: Governmental Factors--The Modernization of Governance....................................28

1. Historical Backgrounds: 1945-2013............................................................................29

1.1 International backgrounds of governance..............................................................29



1.2 Domestic background of governance.....................................................................31



2. Current situations since Xi: 2013-2015.......................................................................33

2.1 International aspect................................................................................................33

2.2 Domestic aspect.....................................................................................................34

3. Case study: the domestic source of China’s dilemma in facing TPP...........................35

3.1 Behind-the-border-issues sets the prerequisites.....................................................36

3.2 Domestic governance limits international choices.................................................37

3.3 “Heretical” governance pattern limits deep engagement with the world...............37

4. Findings........................................................................................................................38

Part 3: Social Factors—The Acceleration of Social Transitions.........................................39


1.1 International background of social transitions.......................................................40



1.2 Domestic background of social transitions............................................................42





2.1 International background.......................................................................................44

2.2 Domestic background............................................................................................45

3. Case study: the variations of both China’s social attitude and foreign policy towards

North Korea......................................................................................................................46

3.1 The expectation of being admitted by the world community................................47

3.2 The fade of ideological calculation and the rise of national interest consideration49

3.3 The combination of Internet factors and intergenerational factors........................50

4. Findings........................................................................................................................51

Part 4: Leadership Factors—The Maturing of Political Leadership....................................52


1.1 International backgrounds of political leadership..................................................53



1.2 Domestic backgrounds of political leadership.......................................................54




2.1 International background.......................................................................................57

2.2 Domestic background............................................................................................58


3. Case study: the domestic leadership foundations of Xi Jinping’s “striving for

achievement” foreign policy approach............................................................................60

3.1 From engineers-turned-leadership to diversified leadership..................................61

3.2 The motivation of converging with the world.......................................................62

3.3 Standing but also self-adjusting on the shoulders of the predecessors..................63

4. Findings........................................................................................................................64

Section IV. Findings and Analysis...........................................................................................65

Section V. Model Evaluation...................................................................................................66

Conclusion...............................................................................................................................67

References................................................................................................................................69


Introduction

Harvard professor John King Fairbank (1988), a leading scholar in modern and

contemporary China studies, once said that “China is not be understood by a mere transposition

of Western terminology. It is a different animal. Its politics must be understood from within,

genetically” (p. 722) In fact, relatively objective China studies with little presetting standpoint

and more open minds are still rare. This might because of the political bias and limitations of

methodology preferences of the scholars both inside and outside China. It might also because of

the thinking inertia of humans that we all prefer to analyze in the context we familiar with, but

that context we are talking within might not match the reality on ground. Following this logic, a

well-conducted study of China issues or any other social science research should be developed

within appropriate contextual backgrounds and theoretical frames.

Since Xi Jinping became the president of China in 2013, great changes in both domestic

politics and foreign policies have been generated. Domestically, China’s neo-authoritarian

political ecosystem is showing the sign of being rebuilt in the context of severe anti-corruption

campaigns. At the same time, the rapid growing economy is entering the officially claimed “new

normal” era that allows to lower the economic growth expectation and focus on upgrading of the

industrial structure (Jin, F, & Xiaohui, 2015). With respect to foreign policy, China is replacing

the foreign policy grand strategy “hide capabilities and keep a low profile” set by Deng Xiaoping

since the early 1990s and have articulated a new strategic direction known as “striving for

achievement” (Sørensen, 2015). Indeed, all these changes reflect an ongoing transformation of

China, and more importantly they have the potential of spearheading the age into a new historical

context. In fact, in the realm of China’s foreign affairs, all of the changes in China’s foreign


policy have their domestic logics going on beneath. In other words, China’s foreign policy

choices are deeply linked and structurally affected by its domestic factors.

Section I. Contextual background and literature reviews

However, studies of China’s foreign policy for a long time going on been subordinated to a

purely traditional international relations (IR) research perspective, and this research perspective

tends to explain the behaviors of nation-state in international affairs primarily through the

analyzing of international factors (Hongyi, 2010). In this background, the development of

mainstream international relation theories usually didn’t weigh much on domestic factors. For

instance, classical realism emphasizes the anarchy and self-helping international environment

states facing, so that states need always to be power seeking and self-benefiting; liberalism going

on highly of the functions of the international architectures and argues that peace could be

expected through the cooperation and interdependence between states; constructivism advocates

that human consciousness plays a key role in international relations and ideational factors are

actually determining states’ interactions in the system of international politics. Even though most

of the time scholars make cross applications of these theories along with their variants, the

corresponding analytical results still turned out to be developed within the scope of international

politics that regards foreign policy making states as “black boxes”, and elaborate the behaviors

of states from outside point of views. And how do domestic factors affect states’ foreign policy

choices still have not received enough attention from the mainstream international relation

theories as if they are “irrelevant or unimportant” (Hongyi, 2010).

Following these logics, most of the time, foreign policy of China was analyzed through

different theoretical spheres within international relations or international politics scopes, but

different analytical schools of thoughts mostly have been developed with similar logical


foundations. According to Wei Song, the mainstream analytical works of China’s foreign policy

could be divided into three aspects, and each of them focuses on behaviorism, systemic

restrictions and domestic features (Song, 2010). Following realism logics, studies of behaviorism

try to reveal the real foreign policy purposes behind China’s diplomatic languages through the

examining of the actual practices of China’s foreign policies. By combining realism and neo-

liberalism, studies focusing on systemic restrictions try to explain China’s foreign policy choices

through the factors of international systems and analyze how do they affect China’s foreign

policy externally. For the studies relying on domestic features, scholars take more constructivist

perspectives and emphasize the roles China’s special ideology, social tradition and beliefs of the

political elites play in China’s foreign policy choices. However, most of these studies lack an

intensive analysis of China’s domestic factors along with their structural effects on China’s

foreign policy choices. Even though there are studies specifically focused on domestic features,

lots of them either just look into the factors of China’s foreign policy making from single-

mechanism perspectives or just generally talked about the most concerned issues of each time

period but never systematize the domestic factors. Following these theories, not many of them

could jump out of the limitations of specific issues and structurally map out the domestic

pressures within China along with their effects on China’s foreign policy preferences. However,

the development of neoclassical realism in recent years seems to have the capability of bringing

the domestic factors back to the researching field of states’ foreign policies. Therefore, this paper

tries to use neoclassical realism framework to conduct the research and focuses on the

structurally effects domestic factors make on China’s foreign policy in Xi’s era.

Neoclassical realism firstly was named in an article by Gideon Rose in 1998 that reviews the

monographs of Fareed Zakaria, Randal L. Schweller, Thomas J. Christensen, William Wohlforth


along with a selection edited by Michael Brown (Rose, 1998). Arguments of these scholars have

been seen as the foundation of the further development of this theory and also generated the

further scholarly works about neoclassical realism in the following years. In 2009, Cambridge

University Press published a book named “Neoclassical Realism, the State, and Foreign Policy”

that collects the main studies in this field and systematically evaluated the development of this

theory (Lobell, Ripsman, & Taliaferro, 2009).

In fact, neoclassical realism comes from the introspection about both classical realism and

structural realism by improving their shortcomings of being inadequate in explanatory power.

Classical realism neglects the causal role of world system and technically doesn’t fit with the

methodology of modern social science; structural realism is good at explaining the outcomes of

the international politics but it’s incapable of explaining states’ specific behaviors because of its

macroscopic and abstract preferences (Liu, 2010). Therefore, neoclassical realists try to provide

a different research perspective and focus on structural pressures, domestic factors and state

behaviors. From this perspective, neoclassical realism sets states’ foreign policy as the research

object, which naturally needs to bring both domestic and international factors into consideration;

it accepts the basic assumptions of realism; it also agrees that international system plays a

prominent role in affecting domestic constraints; but it argues that both domestic factor and

international factors they all together determine state’s foreign policy choices (Liu, 2010). On the

whole, neoclassical realism mainly tries to analyze issues in two aspects. The first is why the

same country chooses different foreign policies in different periods of time. The other is why

different countries choose different foreign policies when facing similar international pressures

(Lobell, Ripsman, & Taliaferro, 2009). This paper tries to focus on the former aspect.


Section II. Research Methods

Theoretical Frameworks

For the reason that the development of neoclassical realism is still in the early stage.

Although it provides more comprehensive analytical perspectives on state behaviors, some of the

theoretical details are still not clear. For instance, what are the interiors of domestic factors and

international factors has still not reached a clear consensus; the relations between structural

factors and unit factors along with the mechanisms they work together are unidentified; although

neoclassical realism advocates to bring both domestic factors and international factors into

consideration, what roles they specifically play have not been clearly distinguished. This paper

would like to try to propose a more integrated frame of neoclassical realism theory that is

relatively clear with these theoretical details. And use this theoretical frame to analysis China’s

distinguishing foreign policies since Xi Jinping became the president of China in 2013 and

explain the specific case that what roles the domestic factors structurally play in forming China’s

foreign policy preferences.

Basing on the primary assumptions of neoclassical realism, theoretical details here can be

further developed on both domestic and international aspects. Meanwhile, factors from both

aspects could be divided into unit factors and systemic factors, and they jointly trigger the

outcomes of state’s foreign policy.


Diagram 1. Neoclassical Realism in A New Context

On international aspect, which is the emphasis of traditional international relations theories,

the unit triggers are the state-centered factors that relate to states’ specific concerns about foreign

policy making within the perspectives of countries—such as bilateral relations, cost and benefit

calculations about national interests in specific issues, national characteristics of individual

countries and so forth; the systemic triggers are the world system factors that are related to the

macro and structural environments states need to take into consideration in their foreign policy

making—such as the world order, the restrictions of international architectures and consensus,

geopolitical realities in global competitions, etc. Meanwhile, systemic triggers both on

international aspect and domestic aspect essentially are the resultant force of the unit triggers on

each aspect. In this way, the unit triggers of the international factors still could be analyzed under

the theoretical frames such as the neorealism of Kenneth Waltz, which admits the anarchic

fundamentals of the international political system and theoretically emphasizes on the

distribution of power in the system of international politics.


On the domestic side, the unit triggers that relate to states’ foreign policy here could be

divided into four levels. The first level is about development factors that related to the

development demand of a country along with the inherent tensions these development factors

created and the impacts they have on state’s foreign policy choices. The second level is about

governmental factors that related to the governance capacity of a political entity, and the

limitations of governance capacity would affect the formation of a state’s foreign policy. The

third level here is about social level factors that related to the domestic social environment and

public mindset upon foreign affairs, and these are the factors affect the state’s foreign policy

choices through the fashioning of the public opinion. The last level is about leadership factors

that related to the decision-making entities and micro-factors of the politicians’ personalities.

Also being jointly formed by these four level factors as four unit triggers, the systemic triggers of

the domestic side exist as the structural pressures of the entire domestic factors, and also these

structural pressures finally determine the inner tendencies of state’s foreign policies preferences

integrally.

Admitting the prominent functions of the structural (systemic) pressure in states’ foreign

policy making, the theory here is developed specifically within both domestic and international

sides. Meanwhile, neoclassical realism in this new context regards the effects of the simple-

factor elements only as random effects, and it stresses that it is the structural pressure, which is

inherently multifactorial, determines the scope of the unit triggers on both sides. At the same

time, from the domestic factors aspect of state’s foreign policy concerns, the systemic triggers

from the international aspect also limit the scope of state’s foreign policy choices on the whole.

But it is the systemic triggers from the domestic side really determining the inner tendencies of

states’ foreign policy choices. At the same time, each individual unit factors both domestically


and internationally have specific effects in different cases. In other words, international

environment determines the scope of a state’s foreign policy choices in the long run, and its

domestic factors are the real determining variables that shape the specific choices of a state’s

foreign policy. In this context, the domestic structural pressures as the most prominent variables,

which affect state’s foreign policy preferences in overall, is of great significance to the integral

analysis of a state’s foreign policy choices. Therefore, to analyze the structural effects of the

domestic factors in state’s foreign policy preferences within the backgrounds of international

factors is a logical path to explain the domestic sources of China’s current foreign policy

preferences in Xi’s era and what that means to both the world and China itself.

The Conduct of Research and Research Emphasis

Diagram 2. Research Design and Research Emphasis


Following the logic described above, this research develops with the structural analysis of the

unit triggers of the domestic side and sets the international factors as backgrounds of the

domestic tensions of China’s foreign policy choices.

Specifically, the domestic factors will be analyzed through four levels, which are the most

relevant and comprehensive domestic factors in the formation of China’s foreign policy in the

context of China and Xi’s ruling period. They are China’s demand of development, the

modernization of China’s governance, the social transition of China’s society and the maturing

of China’s political leadership. Each of them will be deeply explored through the combination of

the historical backgrounds of that level of factor and the current situations China faces since Xi’s

era. Next, a representative case will be studied to illustrate specifically how does each level of

factors affects China’s foreign policy choices as unit triggers. Further, the structural pressures of


the domestic factors as a systemic trigger will be concluded by analyzing the findings of all these

four levels of analysis, which are the unit triggers on the domestic side. In the end, qualitative

conclusions and conjectures will be made as a constructive attempt to the better understanding of

China along with its foreign policy preferences.

Section III. Research Contents

Part 1: Developmental Factors--The Demand of Development

By following different development models, a country could form certain economic, political

and social interacting structures with the outside world. The change of development demands as

a result could also generate impacts on the existing interactions between the country and the

world. And this change in turn manifested as the change of the state’s foreign policies.

Therefore, to observe the structural influences of China’s different domestic development

demands is a logical way to explore China’s foreign policy preferences in the new context.

1. Historical backgrounds: 1945-2013

1.1 International background of development

Systemic background world faces

Since the end of the World War II, the dust of large-scale war has gradually settled down

and the post-war reconstruction was developed through two separate systems divided by

different ideologies. Leading by the United States, the western allies got integrated by the

European Recovery Program represented post-war supporting projects, and thereafter, liberal

development models got established within the capitalism camp. The combination of market


economy and liberal social institutions was not only pursued as a rational path for economic

development but also deemed as cherished values of living and the guardians of freedom. On the

other side, strike by the communist belief and the short-term industrial achievements of the

Soviet model, countries with weak liberal traditions and great national sentiment of development

were integrated into the communist camp. Especially in the regions like Eastern Europe and East

Asia where the Soviet Union traditionally had great influence and geopolitically strategic

advantages, the Soviet development model got spread more widely and most of the communist

countries had copied the Soviet economic development model even also the social organizing

model. Almost throughout the whole Cold War age, globalization and economic interdependence

mainly happened within each camp of countries. All these Cold War legacies later became the

constraint conditions of development for most of the countries in worldwide. Especially for the

communism countries, their transitions of development models in the post-Cold War era would

always face the propositions of de-sovietization and westernization.

As the end of the Cold War marked the bankruptcy of the communist model, which was

characterized by highly regulated society and planed economy, the establishment of liberal

democracy along with the validated market economy has become the ultimate path selection for

almost every post-communism country. Supported by the booming of international trade in the

post-Cold War era, economic globalization got really energized and sped up. As a result,

international economic division of labor was expanded and the interdependence between

countries in worldwide was fastened. In this background, the development and prosperity of a

country to a great extent depends on its involvement degree to the global value chain. China’s

economic takeoff is a great evidence of this trend and its development experience, to this point,

shares the same logic with other emerging economics.


International background China faces

Since the foundation of the People’s Republic of China happened in the background of the

Cold War coming into being, the development model China chose was a typical ideological

result. It also means that China could only exclusively participate into the communist economic

cooperation platforms. As a result, the development of China in the early age of the Cold War,

same with other communist countries, was mainly relied on the internal economic circulation

within the international communism community, but could never really get involved into the

West’s economic division of labor. This situation lasted for a long time even after the internal

division of the communist camp represented by the Sino-Soviet Split in the late 1950s.

However, fundamental changes didn’t really come into being until the end of the Cold War.

Since the end of the Cold War, new geopolitical reality pushed China to get connected to the

West and institutional influences from the West was allowed to make later. Especially since the

World Trade Organization accepted China in 2001, world scale resources and market, along with

the institutional experiences from the West became accessible. This is the most prominent

international background of China’s economic achievement in the first decade of the 21th

century.

1.2 Domestic background of development

Systemic background domestically

China’s development model since the early age of its founding in 1949 to the eve of Xi

Jinping’s taking over in 2013 could be divided into two three-decade-phases, which separated by

the launching of reform and open policy in the late 1970s.


For the first three-decade-phase China’s development model has experienced a process of

sovietization and unbalanced economic development. With the help of the Soviet Union in the

1950s China had established the industrial base in a short time, and it was the first time in the

history that China really has got the foundation for industrialization. Represented by the Soviet-

aid industrial projects that inclined to the heavy industries such as steel industry, mechanical

manufacturing industry, military industry and chemical industry, the incipient establishment of

China’s national economic was deeply overshadowed by the Soviet characteristics. It laid out the

root of the economic development dilemmas China similarly faced with the Soviet Union

afterwards. These dilemmas include the unbalanced economic structure both in industrial and

geographical, the low efficiency of command economy, the ignorance of public discontent about

national living standard, the unsustainable models of economy development and resource

utilization, and etc.

In this condition, the second three-decade-phase actually was a process of de-sovietization

and economic liberalization to a certain extent. Through gradually unleashing the private sector

of economy and deregulating the price from the 1980s to the 1990s, China established the

rudiments of a market economy along with its development pattern of state capitalism. In this

way, China’s domestic enthusiasm for economic development got highly motivated and the rise

of “made in China” got came into being. This ebb of the Soviet development model was the main

domestic structural background of China’s economic booming in the past three decades.

Significant factors domestically

In the background of the two three-decade-phases China experienced, its economic

development model had gone through many decisive changes. Finally, and almost certainly, the


development of China has already merged into the track of market economy, but still in the sense

of “socialism market economy with Chinese characteristics”. This reality for a long time

generated several Chinese features of its economic development. The first is the unsustainable

economic development structure, which relies on huge investments and overseas export markets

but overdraws resources and environment both domestically and globally at the same time. The

second feature is the poor quality of China’s economic development. Represented by the large

proportion of cheap “made in China” products in China’s entire economic output, along with its

plight of sitting in the low-end of the global value chain, China’s economy suffers from its poor

quality. Thirdly, even though the living standard of Chinese people got rapidly raised with the

rising of China’s economy, there is still a great mismatch between China’s economic surplus and

its domestic public demand. And it discredits China’s growth in numbers. As a result, all these

features together became a constraint condition for China to make both domestic and foreign

policies in terms of economic development.

2. Current situation since Xi: 2013-2015

2.1 International aspect

Several years past since the 2008 financial crisis, the world economy today is still struggling

in a weak recovery. This historic financial crisis started in the United State but later has become

a comprehensive economic crisis, which has generated great influence globally from the

developed economies to the emerging economies. Along with the latter happened Europe debit

crisis, they jointly reflect that the world today is much more complicatedly interdependent in the

same system than ever before, and every regional economic plight has the potential to be a

trigger of the systemic risks globally. On the other hand, relatively changes of economic balance


of power have appeared between the slow growing developed countries and the emerging

economies. Although emerging economies’ growth rates are also slowed down, they are still

growing in relatively high rates. China as the most representative rising power among the

emerging economies is expected to grow by 7% approximately and it would contribute a third to

the global growth in 2015 (Zhang, 2015). Besides that, being the largest economy in terms of

purchasing power parity (PPPs), the largest exporter and the second largest importer in the

world, China’s economic connection with the world has never reached such deep degree since

the end of the World War II. It means that the existing economic development connections

between China and the world has become a strong constraint condition in the interactions for

both China and its counterparts.

2.2 Domestic aspect

Beneath the great economic achievement China made from the two-decade-phases till 2013

when Xi Jinping came into power, China’s economic development model has already imbedded

with quite a lot of deep level problems and the domestic pressure of reforming was nearly intense

to the tipping point. For the reasons that the disappear of demographic dividend; the cost of

domestic factors increases; the pressure of falling into the Middle Income Trap goes up; the

peaking of industrial demand both domestically and externally is more and more prominent and

the fading of China’s traditional manufacturing industries’ golden age, China domestically is

getting a consensus about the urgency of industrial upgrading within both the macro

policymaking board and micro economic participating level. However, the 2008-2009 Chinese

economics stimulus program (US$ 586 billion) that promoted by the Chinese government to

hedge the influence of the world financial crisis indeed had postponed the economic recession,


but it has also accumulated greater systemic risks in China’s economic development model

(Huang & Bosler, 2014). Therefore, China’s growth model is currently stretched to its limit only

if China could upgrade its development model and repositions itself to the global value chain.

And this demand of long-term economic development has set a firm domestic premise for

China’s policy making both domestically and internationally.

3. Case study: the domestic logics of China’s “The Belt and Road initiative” (B&R)

“The Belt and Road initiative” is a development strategy and framework, which was

proposed by the president of China Xi Jinping in 2013, mainly to connect and cooperate Eurasia

countries for common development goals including trade, infrastructure construction, long-term

economic integrations and etc. This initiative consists of two main components, which are the

land-based “Silk Road Economic Belt” (SREB) and oceangoing “Maritime Silk Road” (MSR).

Inspired by the ancient histories of the Eurasia crossing “silk road” and the Ming Dynasty’s

“Southeast Asia—East coast of Africa” connecting maritime road, China now tries to build a

new trade and benefit sharing network in a modern context (Hornby, 2015). Along with the

financial supporting platforms also initiated by China, such as $100 billion scale Silk Road Fund

and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank with $100 billion initial capital, it shows the sign

that China is taking economic steps to build a “community of common destiny” as it claimed and

also trying to practice more proactively in international affairs by integrating itself with the

development of the world.

This grand international strategy is pushed by several international factors, and to some

extent, it reflects China’s perception of the international environment it’s facing. Systemically,

the relatively peace peripheral environment since the end of the Cold War is the premise that

China could have this assumption of building an economic network. Although military and


security are still the main fields of geopolitical competition, the race of economic development

along with the corresponding soft power has been weighed much more in the current world than

before. In this background, the deeper China get integrated with the peripheral countries

economically the better China could exert an influence on them politically. And that logically

would better support the accomplishment of the so called “China dream”, which underlined by

“national rejuvenation, improvement of people’s livelihoods, prosperity, construction of a better

society and a strengthened military” (Sonos, 2013).

On the other hand, as a fast growing big power who has heretical political and social systems

apart from the mainstream Western world, for both ideological and realistic considerations China

actually faces the pressure of being excluded and taken precautions in a number of issues,

especially when China tries to get involved into the integrations with the major ocean countries.

For this reason, China’s international development spaces to some extent is squeezed, and the

route of “The Belt and Road Initiative” in reality is a passive strategic choice to “the barren

world” rather than an active approach to “the fertile land”. The complicated geopolitical

dilemmas and weak economic foundations of the targeted countries in central Asia and the

Middle East are not positive elements in this grand plan. But it’s still predictable that if this

China led international economic network could be built, the economic integration with these

developing countries would bring great economic development potentials to China and it may

also imbed great strategic space for its future development in global range.

However, the domestic logics of China’s “The Belt and Road initiative” follow different

mechanisms. When these domestic logics are compared with the international factors in this

case, they could provide parallel weighing factors to the formation of China’s foreign policy

preferences. It means that, if the international factors could limit the macro-trend of the


economic foreign policies China “could take”, then the domestic factors at the same time would

have an impact on the priorities of the foreign policy choices. In other words, the domestic

factors are determining what economic foreign policies China “would like to take”. In this

specific case, for the reason that the foundation of China’s rising in the past three decades

undoubtedly was its economic development and also Chinese people have tasted the sweetness

of it, as a result, the demand of further economic development automatically ranks at the head of

China’s foreign policy priorities.

3.1 Buying time for changes

By operating a gigantic industrial system, China now is holding half of both the world’s

crude steel production and coal consumption, taking a third of global carbon emissions, but its

GDP per capital only equivalent to 31 percent of the world’s average (Gilroy, 2015) (Timmer,

2015). It means that the rise of China is based on an extensive model and its development

structure could overdraw the development potentials of both China and the world. Despite the

dilemmas this development model created to the associated economies in the upriver industrial

chain internationally who provide raw materials to China, domestically it’s causing even more

complicated challenges and most of the structural problems are impossible to be solved in short-

term.

Developing in this path, China is accumulating a number of problems on the domestic side,

such as the unbalanced and unsustainable economic structure, the weak agricultural base, the

risks in the financial sector, the increasing income disparities between urban and rural areas also

among individual regions, the corruptions imbedded in the achievement-chasing state capitalism

and the social-grievance-stimulating environmental and ecological destructions (Heberer, 2014).


All of these problems are the concomitants of “the Chinese model” and they can not be modified

by just suspending the rapid rolling Chinese economy to make a change. That’s because the tail

is too big to wag and China neither economically nor politically could take the pressure of a

hard-landing. The continuous and unstoppable haze pollution in the northern China is a typical

presentation of this dilemma between economic growth and environment improvement in the

short term (Hewitt, 2015).

However, the world is experiencing an economic downturn in the background of a weak

recovery in the post-financial crisis era, so that the declining traditional demand from the

international aspect has intensified the urgency of finding a substitute demand to forbid the

running economy from collapsing before the economic structure got modified. As the domestic

demand could not digest such a scale of overcapacity and also “the Belt and Road” related

countries happen to face a symmetrical supply gap, this (B&R) initiative could bring great

market and resources to keep China running. In this way it will buy China some time to make a

change to modify its economic development model. And also for this reason, China across the

country now is distributing resources both in public sectors and private sectors to support this

“national strategy” (Zhou, Hallding, & Han, 2015).

3.2 Building a new economic ecosystem for the future

Relaying on the cost advantage and cheap labor force China has become the “world factory”

in the past three decades. However, actually China has only become the main assembly point for

manufacturing of goods and this position in global supply chain at the same time means China

sits only at the low-end of the global value chain (Stasinopoulos, 2013). As the other emerging

markets are rising and the comparative cost advantages of China is declining, the low-end export


dependence market position could easily be substituted. This urges China to open up a new space

to continue the economic development in the long term. For achieving this purpose, China on the

one hand needs to consciously upgrading its economic structure domestically, on the other hand

China needs to reposition itself in the global value chain to built comparative advantages for the

future. Therefore, pursuing the B&R strategy in regional or even global context apparently has

become a logical choice for China.

Comparing with the targeted countries, China has much greater comparative advantages to

the developing countries in technology, manufacturing industries, financial services, intellectual

resources and even development experiences. By exporting all these to the countries in the B&R

strategic plan, China could make full use of the current comparative advantages it has and build a

new economic ecosystem that China sitting in the conjecture. Recent cases about China’s high

speed railway diplomacy are great representatives of its moves under this strategy (Chen, 2015).

Meanwhile, it indeed is the fundamental and long-term way out for China’s unsustainable

development model on the domestic side.

On the other hand, by further connecting with the world division of labor, it would provide a

chance for China to develop its own modern service industries in a general sense. And also it

would in return restructure the domestic economic development model and reduce the structural

pressures from China’s extensive traditional industries. This shares the same logic with China’s

recent moves of using “industrial 4.0” as the timetable for tomorrow’s industry (Wübbeke &

Conrad, 2015). Therefore, upgrading domestic industries and building a new economic

ecosystem for the future are the powers pushing China to launch the B&R plan.


3.3 Reducing the risks and for a stable system

Being a huge and sophisticated economic system, China is facing great operational risks and

any partial breakdown would cause disasters for the entire system. As the world’s second-largest

oil consumer behind the U.S. and the world’s largest net importer of petroleum and other liquids,

China’s energy consumption has become the soft spot of the stability of its economic system

(U.S. EIA, 2015). According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), China’s oil

import dependency has risen from 30% in 2000 to about 57% in 2014. Since the majority of the

oil import are transported by sea and only a small portion are imported through the pipeline, this

overdependence generates great risks for China’s energy safety. Therefore, this is a big economic

or even political concern for China and It can’t be neglected. And that’s why China becomes

more and more provocative in the South China Sea, and at the same time tries to make different

approaches through the Eurasian continent. Under the grand strategy of the B&R, China’s recent

$46bn investment in “China-Pakistan Economic Corridor” and the deal to acquire the usage

rights of Pakistan’s Gwadar Port situated in the Arabian Sea is a great example of China’s

concern of diversifying the risks of energy transportation and ensuring the stability of the

domestic economy (Shah, 2015).

Besides the risks for the entire domestic economic safety, China is also bearing the risks of

regional disparities on economic growth domestically (Sun, 2013). Economic disparities from

the east coastline regions to the west inland areas were enlarged since the reform and open policy

launched three decades ago. Because this policy favors the east coastline regions and they have

formed better economic comparative advantages than the west. Although the the national

strategy of China’s Western Development has made great progress for the western regions to

catch up with the better developed east, geopolitical disadvantage is still a big problem for the


western regions to develop beyond the shadow of just undertaking the industrial transfers from

the west. Economic disparities between the west and east of China not only generates economic

inequality problems between the western and eastern citizens, but also may intensify the other

social contradictions or the ethnic minority issues in the deep west of China. By approaching the

B&R strategy, the deep western part of China could become another frontline of the externally

economic intercourses like the east coastline regions. And the development of the western

regions would fundamentally break a new ground through the development of economic

internationalization with the Middle Asia and other inner continent countries who have great

economic development potentials. By keep creating economic increment through the economic

communications with the neighbor countries, China could really secure the stability of its

economic development. Therefore, if China’s B&R initiative develops as China expected, it

would reduce the risks of its regional disparities domestically and may also have a chance to

create a win-win economic ecosystem peripherally.

4. Findings

Basing on the domestic realities it’s not hard to discover that China has strong inner

impulsions of upgrading its development model and further participating into economic

globalization, so that its long-term development could be structurally sustained. The Belt and

Road initiative is a deliberate strategy to support its happening. Even more important, it’s a sign

of China’s foreign policy or grand strategy that China domestically has the tendency of

modernizing its development model integrally. And this sometimes is an undetectable but

divisive element imbedded in China’s foreign policies choices. Therefore, this development-

model-modernizing tendency should not be ignored in the analysis or anticipations of China’s

behaviors.


Part 2: Governmental Factors--The Modernization of Governance

Both the form of a government and its style of governance creates the behavior patterns of a

country in international affairs. The same government in different domestic and international

situations could also operate in distinct manners. This is because even though the role of a

government varies all the time, its governance style and policy preferences are always reflections

of its basic domestic governing demands and conditions. For this reason, to know how China’s

domestic governance conditions affect its foreign policy choices is an unavoidable view angle to

observe China’s foreign policy preferences.

1. Historical Backgrounds: 1945-2013

1.1 International backgrounds of governance


The most prominent character of the Cold War age is the confrontation of social models

between two country groups and each of them was led by a superpower with a mutually

exclusive social ideology. Both of the so called capitalism camp and communism camp have

their own governance styles from economic operational system to every aspect of social

management. Based on different meta-logics, people from capitalist countries and communist

countries take different attitudes towards the role of the government should play. In this way, this

divergence has developed two government styles and one of them finally got nearly eliminated in

the practice of competitions. Throughout the whole process of this system competition, the inter-

infiltration between the two social models has faced great resistance and any intent of absorbing

experiences from the other ideological camp could be seen as betrayal. The inundation of


McCarthyism in the U.S. and the rise of anti-rightist movements in the Soviet Union or China

could be great examples of this trend of political extremism.

This situation didn’t face a fundamental change until the end of the Cold War, which marked

by the collapse of the communist camp. Since then, as Francis Fukuyama’s famous argument

claimed, it’s “the end of the history.” Correspondingly, the capitalism model has acquired

universal recognition and the governance style of the capitalistic West has spread much broader

in worldwide. In this way, countries in worldwide have achieved a certain kind of unification in

governing rules both on domestic governance and international rules. Especially sped up by the

emerging consensus of global governance since the 1990s, institutional integration in global

scale has created great interdependence between the countries in worldwide. World governance

from state level, international architecture level and non-government level all together have

pushed the world to a more regulated functioning track. Especially for the former communist

countries, the institutional changes of their governance style was heavily influenced by the

western experiences, and the relative prosperity of the world in the post Cold War era relayed on

it.


China as one of the most deeply involved countries in the Cold War history, the international

environment China faced was prominently characterized by ideological confrontations and

geopolitical issues. In the early age of the PRC’s founding, the recognitions of its legitimacy

mainly came from the Soviet camp and that determined China’s foreign policy of “leaning to one

side” in the 1950s. Since both China’s interpretation of communism and its interest demands

conflicted with the Soviet Union, the honeymoon between these two countries finally soured in


the 1960s. So that the principal line of China’s foreign policy in that period of time has became

both anti-Soviet and anti-US at the same time. As the threat of the Soviet Union became severe

in the 1970s, China had to seek the support from the West to against the Soviet’s pressure. In this

background, “One-line” policy has laid the foundation of the later political reconciliation with

the capitalism West and allowed the big step integration with the mainstream world beyond

ideology to happen in the 1980s. In the shadow of the bankruptcy of the communism practice

globally and its corresponding international pressures to China, which even stimulated domestic

unrests represented by the 1989 Ti’anmen Square Incident, Deng Xiaoping in the early 1990s

adjusted China’s foreign policy to the “hiding of our capacities, biding our time and doing

something worthwhile” (NewsChina Magazine, 2015). And this international environment

hardly pushed China’s domestic economic reform and that later allowed China to become a

member of the World Trade Organization in 2001. As a mater of fact, institutional influences of

the WTO has become the firmest element that forced China to establish economic governance

principles under the world standards. In this way, beyond the economic governance but besides

the political governance, China’s governance style started to be structurally reshaped by the

influence of the world architectures and states’ experiences, especially by the experiences of the

U.S and the Europe. To this point, China’s domestic governance for better or worse has tightly

connected to the governance of other countries in worldwide, and the corresponding interaction

between China and the world unavoidably has become an element of pushing China’s

governance style to make self-adjusting persistently.


1.2 Domestic background of governance


Throughout China’s two three-decade-phrases, not only the economic development model

but also the governance style of China has experienced the processes of sovietization and de-

sovietization. As a matter of fact, China’s governance style has transformed from the Soviet

similar totalitarianism model to the current neo-authoritarianism model. Within this process, the

Chinese government has experienced a transformation from an omnipotent government to a

relatively limited government to certain extent. Meanwhile, the de-sovietization of the entire

domestic environment also reflects a trend of de-politicization in China’s domestic governance.

Especially since China started to get deeper attached to the world economic system in the 1990s,

the domestic impulsion of updating economic governance to support the economic growth has

become the leading factor of pushing the transformation of the entire government model. It even

has influenced the political interactions between the authority and the public. In other words,

changes in political climate has generated changes in other aspects of the domestic environment

including the governance style. And the changes in governance style as a result conversely

reshaped the domestic political ecosystem of China.


Under the trend of de-sovietization, especially in the post Cold War age, the relations

between the government and the society, the government and the market, the government and the

Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are changing constantly to achieve a delicate balance. Firstly,

based on the gradual liberalization of the economy, the freedom of the Chinese society got


slowly but continuously expanded. As a result, China’s civil society has got a chance to

reemerge, although it in fact is still facing suspensions today. Secondly, for the reason that the

development of market economy advocates free competition and resists the intervention of the

government, represented by the reform of the state owned enterprises, the Chinese government

and market participants were lamely achieving a consensus of adjusting the role government

should play in the market, especially since the joining of WTO. Thirdly, shocked by the 1989

unrest, the CCP deliberately strengthened its control in political power but also redesigned the

role and functions it persists in the governance of China. By doing so, the CCP has become a

different political body than the Soviet style party or the political party in the sense of

representative democracies. In this unique party-state system, the CCP actually takes full

responsibility of the state’s political choice. At the same time, being imbedded into the state

governance inseparably, the party integrally shares the same destiny with the state of China.

However, being different from the western style “external pluralism” political structure, China

on the opposite gradually formed a “internal pluralism” political structure which creates certain

competition and unification in politics at the same time (Yongnian & Gore, 2014). This comes

from the evolution of political game in the history of modern China, but it also is related to the

Confucian political tradition of China, which prone to the combination of elite ruling and

benevolent governing. But it’s an element got always neglected.

2. Current situations since Xi: 2013-2015

2.1 International aspect

Since the world today is much deeper globalized than ever before, the problems countries

face today got correspondingly intertwined and interacting with each other. Issues like financial


crisis, terrorism, climate change, transnational crimes and even regional peace and stability are

all urging the cooperation of the sovereign states to develop in a higher level. For solving these

super-sovereign problems, certain inter-sovereign or even super-sovereign governance bodies are

needed to be strengthened. At the same time, the corresponding changes in traditional domestic

governance aspect are also required for better supporting the functioning of this entire system.

Therefore, the competitions between powers to this point are the competitions for the leadership

of the international entities, especially in the sense that who could set the rules of the

international entities and would these rules be self-benefiting but also being endorsed by the

international community at the same time. In this background, the development of rule-based

integrations has become an overwhelming trend, especially in the realms of trade and long-term

economic development. The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), the Transatlantic Trade and

Investment Partnership (TTIP), the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) or

even the Free Trade Agreement and Regional Trading Agreement (FTAAP) are all the

representatives of this new wave of deep integrations by rules in worldwide.

In this background, China faces the pressure of participating or even influencing the

international integrations for better support its national interest in global context. On the other

hand, with different integration pathways, China also faces the challenges of getting onto the

suitable board and accumulating comparativeness in this process. For achieving that, China’s

domestic governance style faces the pressure of all-around self adjustment to better serve the

realization of national interest in international competitions and cooperation.


2.2 Domestic aspect

When Xi Jinpin came into power in 2013, the structural pressure of the entire domestic

environment has almost achieved a bursting point. Economically, the harmful effects of the

2008-2009 Chinese economics stimulus program has appeared and the traditional governance

measures of keeping a dangerous balance in economic development were loosing their

efficiency. As a result, the urgency of governance reforms to better rationalize the relationship

between the government and the market could not be postponed any longer. On the other hand,

years of market economy running in the background of a high concentration of political power

has generated great corruptions in the political system. Since the legitimacy of the CCP relayed

much on its ruling efficiency in the context of a non-democratic political frame, the corruption

undermines its power position and creates political instability. Both of the government and the

public has reached the consensus of perusing institutional reforms and cleaning the politics. In

this structural background, Xi and his team started the severest-ever anti-corruption campaign

storms in PRC’s history and reactivated the institutional reforms launched since the late 1970s

led by Deng but interrupted in the 2000s. And this is the preset domestic background for China

as a whole to consider its integration with the world. It indeed also is an unavoidable element

China’s foreign policy making needs to take into consideration in facing the issues of connecting

with the world.

3. Case study: the domestic source of China’s dilemma in facing TPP

After 7 years of negotiations, 12 Pacific Rim countries has reached a trade agreement in 5

October 2015 named the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) to build a high level

multilateral cooperation network to better “promote economic growth; support the creation of


jobs; enhance innovation, productivity and competitiveness; raising living standards; reduce

poverty; and promote transparency, good governance, and enhanced labor and environment

protections” (United States Trade Representative, 2015). The scale of current TPP member

countries comprises 40 percentage of global GDP and one third of the world trade. Among all of

the participants, the U.S. accounts for approximately 60 percent of the entire GDP of the TPP

(Meltzer, 2013). For the reasons that the U.S is the leading power of the TPP and the second

largest economy China has been excluded from this framework, this agreement has been seen as

a method taken by the U.S. to balance against China’s economic influence and trade power.

Especially since the U.S. president Barack Obama stated, “when more than 95 percent of our

potential customers live outside our borders, we can’t let countries like China write the rules of

the global economy” (Hsu, 2015), China’s attitude towards TPP has become rather awkward and

it only stated fuzzily on its intention about whether would like to join this agreement or not. As a

matter of fact, China literally is not qualified to join this agreement according to the written rules

of TPP for different reasons, especially for the behind-the-border issues. And this has created a

dilemma for China in facing the TPP and it has special domestic-factor-driven characteristics.

3.1 Behind-the-border-issues sets the prerequisites

Technically there are two kind of problems keeping China away from the TPP, which are

on-the-border-issues and behind-the-border issues (Tang& Petri, 2014). On-the-border-issues

mainly include the market access issues of trade in service and the investment issues of national

treatment before market access. These are the most concerned issues in the negotiations of the

majority Free Trade Agreements (FTA). However, in the case of China and TPP, the strictest

conditions block China from being qualified to join TPP are the behind-border-issues. These


behind-the-border issues include the unification of standards, environmental protection, labor

standard, state-owned enterprises, government procurement, intellectual property protection, E-

commerce and Internet freedom (Tang& Petri, 2014). China in reality has a great gap in all these

aspects with the TPP requirement and they could not be solved through the negotiations. This in

fact determined that China is not qualified to be part of the TPP group.

Investor-state-dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism is a great example of this gap between

China and TPP. As an instrument of the public international law that grants an investor the right

to use dispute settlement proceedings against a foreign government, ISDS mechanism in

principle could not coexist with the current governance model of China (Yan Ing, 2015). The

domestic reality is that China currently even could not fully give this right to its domestic

investors, and there is still a long way to allow foreign investors to sue its own government,

especially when the judicial power is super-sovereignty. This is determined by the governance

condition of China, and with out the catching up of China’s domestic governance reforms it’s

impossible for China to get connected with the international governance in global scale. It

reflects the fact that China’s domestic governance standard limits its integration with the outside

world.

3.2 Domestic governance limits international choices

The gap of governance standards between China and the leading mainstream western

counties is severely limiting China’s strategic choices. The same as what WTO standard means

to China more than a decade ago, TPP standard is a promising guideline for China’s

development on domestic governance. Without upgrading domestic governance China could not


have the chance of participating into the high standard integrations, which determines China’s

long-term competitiveness and national interests.

China’s Shanghai Free Trade Zone is an attempt to test TPP level standard in China and it

reflects China’s consideration of improving its domestic governance, especially in governance of

economy and development. Although the Premier of China Li Keqiang in November 26, 2015

announced that the experience of the Free Trade Zone should be promoted to other regions, the

real functioning situation of Shanghai Free Trade Zone in fact is still not optimistic (Boey,

2015). This reflects that the upgrading of governance standard under China’s entire governance

frame could not be achieved within a short term. The domestic governance standard of China

will be a long term element limiting China’s choice of integrating with other countries,

especially with the West.

3.3 “Heretical” governance pattern limits deep engagement with the world

The reform and open policy started in the second three-decade-phrase of PRC’s history and

as a result China started to take a pragmatic point of view in institutional choices instead of the

ideology dominated one. The most representative argument is Deng Xiaoping’s reformist

politico-economic theory that “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it

catches mice it’s a good cat” (Gu, 2012). However, the incident of Ti’anmen Square in 1989 and

the relatively stable governance in the following two decades at the same time reflect that the

authority would not accept to totally transform China’s governance style to the Western liberal

democracies, and the public to some extent accept that. For this reason, China may achieve TPP

level standard in certain technical aspects. But for the reason that China’s basic political and

governance structures are different from the mainstream West, as long as the neo-authoritarian


political structure doesn’t change fundamentally, the upgrading of China’s governance could

only focus on absorbing certain experiences of the mainstream western governance models but

could never have deep-level integration with the democratic West.

On the other hand, as the rising of the overall strength especially in economy has brought

more confidence to China itself about its governance model, but this governance pattern will be

seen as illegitimate by the mainstream West for long. At the same time, the government style as

a result will be a long-term element keeping China away from deeply integrating with the

mainstream West on governance issues. Most likely, this problem could not be solved in short-

term, because the spontaneous order of this Chinese model has its deep rooted sources both

geopolitically and domestically. Historically, the formation of the new order could only be

achieved through new and repeated game playing.

4. Findings

This is not a simple case of the U.S. trying to contain China nor a single logical conspiracy

theory that China is plotting some economic warfare. Beneath the back-and-forth geopolitical

competitions, the domestic governance realities China faces has reflected a dilemma it can not

avoid in the integrations with the Western dominated world. It’s about the current governance

conditions of China and their corresponding structural limitations to the integration between

China and the world. However, China has the incentive of modernizing its governance style to

get integrated with the liberal world order to a certain degree. And this incentive mainly comes

from instrumental considerations and it lacks of common political and institutional foundations

for deep integration. For this reason, China’s foreign policies of integration will always be

limited by the modernized degrees of its domestic governance, and the deep integrations could

be achieved only after the modernization of China’s domestic political system. By this token, the


contrast of political systems between China and the collective West will always create structural

divergence, unless compromise could really be made basing on the gradual convergence of

governance styles.

Part 3: Social Factors—The Acceleration of Social Transitions

Social expectation is a key factor in the formation of a state’s foreign policy. In democratic

countries it reflects as the voter-pleasing-pressures; in undemocratic countries it reflects as the

concern of the rulers to preserve their legitimacy. They all mean that the body of a society has a

profound influence on states’ foreign policy choices as they should be. In this way, to better

understand China’s foreign policy preferences, it necessary to examine its domestic social

conditions. Particularly when China is experiencing unprecedented social transitions, which will

generate special structurally effects on China’s foreign policy preferences, that never had

happened to this degree ever before.


1.1 International background of social transitions


The Cold War defined the contour of the world’s second half history of the 20th century.

Meanwhile, the rise and fall of different ideologies shaped the boundaries between people both

geographically and cognitively. Beneath the decay of communism together with the triumph of

capitalism, the world has experienced waves of democratization in a row successively and the

end of the Cold War indeed released the world out of the highly politicalized confrontations. As

a result, the risks of large-scale war in worldwide goes down and the trends of both peace and


development has become the mainstream recognition of the people in worldwide. Endorsed by

the development of world trade and economic interdependence, modern societies have been

established and connected globally. As being commented, although “democracy is not yet

universally practiced, nor indeed uniformly accepted, in the general climate of world opinion,

democratic governance has now achieved the status of being taken as generally right” (Diamond,

& Plattner, 2001). Along with the elaborations of the universal values represented by Human

Rights, the world has got a consensus of embarrassing liberal international order. And even the

most notorious dictators are clear that they have to rule in the claims of these universal values.

This undoubtedly is the victory of liberalism in world wide. More important than all of that,

these values have rooted in the majority people’s mind of the world and they are brewing

energies to the transformation of the world consistently. This is the basic background of the

world in the 21th century and people from every society of the world are living under this

historical background. Fortunately, China isn’t really an exception.


The international environment China faced in the second half of the 20th century is a great

example of the world’s transition. From being strongly pushed by the international communist

movement in ideology to the turning of being pushed by western liberal standards and values,

China’s trajectory of rising up indeed is a process of entering into the liberal international order

and also taking advantage of it. But this involvement only happened to a certain degree and

being controlled within certain aspects. So to say, it is the incomplete engagement with the

liberal international order upheld the success of China in the past three decades. It is because that

from the international liberal market economy to the liberal-order-imbedded world institutional


systems, China as a whole benefited a lot from the liberal international order, but at the same

time refused some of its “side effects” in China’s own context.

However, even though China can free-ride on the liberal international order, it still needs to

pay the costs of doing so (Ikenberry, 2011). Maybe the rising of China in the global balance of

power could challenge the traditional world ruling orders, China will still not be able to entirely

impose its illiberal vision on the world, because that is the system it benefited from in the past

and will benefit from in future. This is endorsed by the spread of liberal internationalism in

world wide and also it’s assured by the engagement of the interdependent common interests. On

the other hand, China in fact also tries to engage itself with the international liberal order to

reassure its neighbors as it grows more and more powerful. This is pushed by the pressures not

only from the international community but also from the domestic social fermentations, which

are stimulated by the influences of the international liberalism values. And this will also generate

geopolitical reconstructions and changes of international politics. By this token, China’s fighting

off the “peaceful evolution” toward capitalism and democracy since the 1980s to some extent has

“fortunately” failed. As results or causes, the context of China and its international environment

both have changed to new historical pages.

1.2 Domestic background of social transitions


Since the founding of the Peoples’ Republic of China in 1949, what the Chinese society had

experienced could also be divided into two three-decade-phases. In the first three-decade-phase,

Chinese society experienced the rise of extreme pan-political interpretation, ideologicalization,

centralization, social closure and anti-intellectualism. During this time, the social mindset of the


Chinese people towards the outside world was extreme and irrational or even lacked of basic

“common sense”. “The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” in the 1960s-1970s was the peak

of the craziness of the public. Since 1978 the second three-decade-phase started, Chinese society

has experienced an opposite transformation. Tortuously but persistently, the society started to

transform through the process of diversification, rationalization and increasing openness to

certain levels. As a result, the basic principles of modern societies started to be built gradually in

China. Meanwhile, the public mindset and the cognition of Chinese society towards the outside

world have experienced great changes. This is the basic trend of the transformation of Chinese

society but it still faces risks of being interrupted by other factors, such as populism, ultra-

nationalism, and even the possibilities of overreacting to the international threats. But

systemically, China’s interdependence with the world is strengthening and this is a long-term

firm foundation of Chinese society’s rational understanding of the outside world.


In the systemic background of historical ups and downs, Chinese society has experienced

different transitions in the modern time and each period of time has its own prominent

characteristics. The first three-decade-phase of the PRC history started in the context that China

had just experienced a half century history for the ending of the two-thousand-year lasting

monarchy, tragic anti invasion war, drastic national secession, large-scale civil war and rough

reconstructions of national identity or imagination. In this context, what China experienced in the

first three decades of the PRC history was a process of continuous national integration. Within

this time period, the evolution of Chinese society was imbedded with uncertainty, blindness and

even chaos. Following this logic, the domestic social transitions since the late 1970s could be


seen as a sign of a staged achievement or suspension of China’s national integration in social

level, and this was achieved in the background of the deep engagement with the Cold War on

international aspect.

However, since the reform and open transition of China from 1978, Chinese society in the

second three-decade-phase has reoriented the social focus to wealth creation. Correspondingly,

the previous national imagination and world views got shacked by the material pursuing flood

and the diverse influences from the external world, so that Chinese society has entered a new

cycle of social cognition rebuilding. Within this cycle, several trend emerged and they jointly

shaped the context of China’s social transition. Firstly, China’s industrialization got sped up and

the achievement was fruitful. This has helped the society reconstruct the “common sense” of the

ordinary people and it’s the foundation of the rationality of the Chinese people to face the

external world. On the other hand, the capital-driven rapid urbanization has produced a large

number of citizens along with the urban culture. Represented by the relaxing of the land control

since the 1980s, this is the real first time China in general started getting rid of the incompact

agrarian culture and embracing the rule based modern culture. Although China is still far away

from the rule of law, this training of behaving under the rules domestically is a foundation of

Chinese people’s understanding to follow modern rules and orders on the international aspect.

Thirdly, since the industrialization and urbanization jointly have stimulated the formation of the

middle class in China, this unavoidably determined the new characteristics of the social mindset.

Although the specific definition of “the middle class” still faces disputes, even the correlations

between the middle class in authoritarian/late-developing countries and democratization are still

not clear, (Chen & Lu, 2011) the middle class at least is a group of people having the common

characteristic of risk aversion. As a result, the enlargement of this community will at least reduce


the initiatives of the society to set the state into a risky international situation only for pursing an

extreme idea. And that was what a highly politicalized society would really do in the Cold War

age.


2.1 International background

When Xi came into power in 2013, the world was facing the expanding of democratization,

especially in the Middle East. Some of them were liberalism proceeded democratizations, but a

lot of them were not (Hamid, 2014). Although the enlargement of Arab Spring seems is not

triggering “the fourth wave of democratization” in a virtuous circle, it at least signaled the spread

of liberal democratic ideas in a greater scale and proved the potentials of the ideas rooting in

people’s mind. As being seen in the Arab Spring cases, information technologies have provided a

new space for societies in world wide to get unified by values. And peoples’ mindsets from

different societies, especially for the people from the developing countries, are experiencing an

integration with the world community still mainly under the U.S. supported liberal

internationalism. On the other hand, although nation-state is still the basic form of states and

specific geopolitical issues still could generate conflicts between countries, the world conditions

most of the time could also still be assured by the value-upholding global governance

architectures and world consensus.

And at the same time, the values people holding are giving meanings to the generally stable

world and also guiding the directions of the world’s further steps both in macro and micro levels.

In this systemic context, the influence of democratic notions, civil rights concepts and even

liberal values are having a great impact on China’s domestic society. Through social


communications and business interactions among the people all over the world, Chinese people

have got much deeper understanding of the external world than ever before. This is the premise

for them to get integrated with the world community in ideas. These imported changes in social

mindset are generating meaningful results for China both internally and also in facing the outside

world.

2.2 Domestic background

Since the time Xi came into power in 2013, China’s social structure is experiencing a rapid

restructuring in the background of being deeply connected with the world and profoundly

impacted by the universal values. In this context, the rebuilding of China’s civil society is

entering a time period of transformation, which is generating qualitative changes on social level.

It means that Chinese society is adjusting its cognition and expectation of the state both

domestically and internationally to get them matched with the transformation of the country in

wealth creating level.

On the other hand, the emergence of China’s “petite bourgeoisies” class along with their

preferences in politics are creating different social changes. Among all these social changes, the

most meaningful one is the gradually but persistently growing of the independent thinking

capability of every social participant. And this is an irreversible trend, which guards the society

from falling back into the mud of ignorance and blindly following to the degree that happened

once before. What’s more, these are all happening right in the age of the of popularization of

social media and the booming of information technology in China. It unprecedentedly is

establishing “the fourth Estate” for the public, more importantly, this estate or power actually is

decentralized into the “accounts” and “posts” of every ordinary Chinese people. Although


censorship still forbids China from being a free society that with totally independent expression,

or even the social mindset still could be manipulated by the authority in certain issues, the

overlap between official discourse and social mindset has already got certain divergence,

especially when being observed historically. And these changes in social expectations and

expressions are affecting China’s foreign policy quite differently than ever before but easy to be

neglected when just assuming China as a coordinated and unitary entity.

3. Case study: the variations of both China’s social attitude and foreign policy

towards North Korea

China-North Korea relations is a representative outcome of the Cold War history, and the

subtle variation of this relationship at the same time is an excellent example of how the domestic

transformation could trigger the adjustment of China’s foreign policy. In the early 1950s when

the confrontation of the two country groups just came into being, endorsed by the Soviet Union,

China supported North Korea in the Korea War by sending Chinese People’s Volunteers to

Korea peninsula to fight against the U.S. led United Nations force. Since then, the close

relationship between them was built both based on ideology and geopolitical concerns. By

signing the Sino-North Korean Mutual Aid and Cooperation Friendship Treaty and its two

prolonged versions since 1961, this close China-North Korea relationship generally has kept

stable in the following nearly half century and North Korea has become heavily relied on China

in many aspects from economy to military.

However, since the major countries in the Northeast Asia except North Korea have caught

the express train of economic development in the past half century, especially since the end of

the cold war and the rise of globalization, geopolitical crisis in the Northeast Asia has been eased

so that North Korea’s strategic barrier functions for China has almost oppositely turned into


strategic burdens. In this context, North Korea’s 3rd Nuclear Test in 2013 became a blasting fuse

for China to change its traditional foreign policy to North Korea. That’s why President Xi

Jinping snubbed North Korea--the traditional first destination of Korean Peninsula, visited South

Korea instead in the July of 2013 when he just became the new leader of China (Perlez, 2014).

However, China’s domestic social transition and the corresponding changes in social mindset

could on the other hand provide different explanations for this issue that apart from the

geopolitical calculations. These domestic logics are significant and could reflect new trends of

China’s foreign policy, but also always got unnoticed.

3.1 The expectation of being admitted by the world community

China is getting closer to the mainstream world in terms of the achievement of wealth

creation, to some extent it even surpasses the world average. However, China still faces a

problem of not really being admitted by the world community in political and ideological level,

especially by the leading Western countries. Although China on social level is in transitions to

generally accept the basic universal values in terms of freedom, democracy and basic human

rights in China’s own context, for the reasons of both path dependence and social reality, the

mainstream public mindset still takes conservative point of views on radically political

transitions or to practice idealist style changes for achieving. In other words, the mainstream

Chinese society to some extent is accepting liberal values but there’s no strong evident that they

are embracing the West-style democracy as the absolutely right way of governance. Because the

mainstream political elites don’t believe that China in the current conditions could acquire the

West-style democracy with high qualities in practical operations. Rather than that, they believe

democracy means “suffering from political instability, which impedes economic development”


(Wang& O'Mahoney, 2014). As a result, in short-term China could not get admitted by the world

community through the convergence of domestic political and social styles with the mainstream

world, but China could still try to bridge the gap with the the leading West through practicing

some of the universal values internationally. And this is the real logic behind the change of

public expectation on the CCP dominating government’s foreign policy and the social

momentum of rebuilding China’s national image in the world.

According to a 2014 BBC world Service Poll, only 20 percent of Chinese people view North

Korea’s influence positively, but 46 percent are expressing negative point of views, which is

close to the global average data (BBC World Service Poll, 2014). This is a great example of

China’s social mindset to rebuilt its national imagination in which Chinese people believe that

China stands with the world community together. Especially in Chinese “face” or “Mian Zi” (面子) oriented cultural background that both individual people and collective groups weigh much

on their reputation and feelings of prestige (both real and imagined) within certain communities,

(Upton-McLaughlin, 2013) always “cleaning up the mess” for North Korea could be a Mian Zi-

loosing behaver for China as being a member of the world community. Therefore, Chinese

public mindset is becoming more and more impatient to accept it.

3.2 The fade of ideological calculation and the rise of national interest consideration

Recent years, China’s traditional foreign policy of blindly supporting North Korea is being

seriously criticized domestically (Perlez, 2014). It’s a sign that communism ideology is fading in

social level and it could no longer absolutely determine Chinese social attitude towards China’s

foreign policies. Instead, the notions of national interest in modern sense is building in social

level and it’s a force can’t be ignored in the formation of China’s foreign policy preferences. It


means that in the pressure of Chinese social opinion, its policy will be more cautious and more

national interest achieving oriented rather than just being kidnaped by the ideological concerns.

At the same time, since there is a distinct difference between China’s communication with North

Korea and South Korea, Chinese people today is much more familiar and welcome South Korean

economic and cultural products than the rarely seen North Korean ones. This to a great extent

has shaped Chinese people’s opposite national impressions on these two countries in public

level, and that would further shape the public understandings of China’s national interests in

Korean Peninsula issues. It means that China’s national interest is becoming more and more

related to the domestic economic and cultural connections with the outside world. To this point,

unofficial contacts between China and the foreign countries now have a significant influence

upon Chinese social opinion on their foreign policies. In this way, public economic interests and

cultural preferences are weighing more and more in the composition of China’s national interest.

In the mean time, they are decisive factors in the integral foreign policy considerations of China,

which is experiencing the pressures from great social transitions domestically and perception

rebuilding towards the outside world.

3.3 The combination of Internet factors and intergenerational factors

The development of Internet in China is dramatically changing the formation mechanism of

public opinion and also delicately reshaping the domestic political climate. When it is combined

with the restructuring of population and intergenerational changes, meaningful transition of the

society would happen. According to the 36th statistical report of China Internet Network

Information Center (CNNIC), by the June of 2015, there are 668million Internet users in China

and the penetration rate is 48.8 percent. Among all of them, the most majority group of people


are from 10 to 39 years old and almost all of this group of people were born after the start of

China’s reform and open policy age. Internet users born after 1985 totally occupies 57 percent of

the entire number (CNNIC, 2015). It means that the majority of Chinese Internet users are the

young generations who were born in the economic booming age of China and they are better

educated, wealthier raised and deeper influenced by the outside world. Now, they are holding the

discourse power of Chinese social opinion on the Internet and they are speaking out to shape the

social opinion with their different views of the world.

These all together has changed the traditional public propensities and now the new

generations are taking power from the elder generations to shape social opinions upon foreign

affairs. In this background, the formation of the new North Korea’s media image in China has a

major relation with the emerging of Chinese new generations. A representative example is that,

the majority of Chinese people didn’t and even don’t know it was the Kim II-sung led North

Korea started the civil war in Korean peninsula, rather than the official history said that it was

the U.S. trying to use Korean peninsula as a springboard to invade China and started the Korea

War. This basic historical fact has been forbidden from the ordinary Chinese people for about a

half century and was not widespread. Since the booming of the Chinese Internet industry in the

past ten years has reestablished facts and “common senses” among the public of China, this kind

of basic historical facts have got a chance to spread. And it’s the foundation that Chinese social

opinion could got restructured and it would further impact on the formation of China’s foreign

policy. In this process, the new generation was the major power of letting it happen and still

influentially contributing to the rationality, openness and progress of Chinese society today. The

rising of the new generation and the booming of information technology have jointly created new


dynamics, which make China’s foreign policy come into a new context of concerning both the

young and the public opinion at the same time.

4. Findings

China is experiencing a social transition from a pre-modern society to a modern one.

Essentially, it is about the evolution of the society and the changes of the people. This transition

creates structural pressures on China’s foreign policy making and to some extent modernizes it.

However, these pressures will always be limited by both China’s national interests and the

historical context of its foreign policies. It means that although it’s possible to see the increase of

liberal element in China’s foreign policy along with its better interaction with the world, it’s still

unrealistic to expect radical and throughout transformations of the social foundation of these

policies. But at least on social level, it’s clear that Chinese people are on the way to systemically

rebuild its national self-imaginations through the interactions with the outside world. As a result,

this trend makes China’s social expectation more predictable and it will reshape China’s foreign

policy in the same way.

Part 4: Leadership Factors—The Maturing of Political Leadership

Represented by the collapse of Adolf Hitler, the end of the World War II was a dividing line

that the overwhelming rise of war-prone leaderships in the major countries has come to an end in

world history, or at least temporarily. Even though the background of the Cold War has still

created spaces for strong political leaders, the bottom-line of not driving the world back to the

world scale chaos generally had guarded well. Historically, the came into being of this history

undoubtedly was based on many factors. They are the balance of terror in many senses, the

functions of the relatively inclusive international architectures, the increasing of interdependence


between countries, the spread of pacifism ideas in global and even the material prosperity

brought by the scientific and technical revolutions. However, standing on all of these, it was the

individuals in political leadership finally facilitated the happening of history. Although political

leadership is the most uncertain element in the world politics and the anecdotal description can’t

really help to understand the entire picture of the realities, it’s still meaningful to summarize the

characteristics of the world political leadership. Because this at least helps to reduce certain

unnecessary misjudgments and provide specific contexts of political decisions.


1.1 International backgrounds of political leadership


From the Cold War age to the Post-Cold War age, the world has experienced the expending

of democratization and the spread of elective governments. Within these basic political leading

frames, the absolute authority of political leaderships in majority democratic countries generally

were declining. Phasing out of the extreme state of war, political leadership in the most

democratic countries started to lead under the accountability and work for the segmented voters.

Represented by the case of Europe, political leaderships were turning from the all-around

leaderships or even heroes into functional politicians. This on one hand has been seen as a

progress in politics, because it signals the development of political division of labor, which

consists with the philosophy of “checks and balances” that forbids the emergence of political

madmen. But it on the other hand creates the reality that new generations of political leaders

could only get less charisma than their predecessor in terms of political support in the contexts of


diversified social backgrounds. That’s because in the context of a generally peaceful and

development oriented world, people behind the states most of the time lack of common external

enemies but encounter much more polarizing domestic governance issues. Francis Fukuyama’s

theory of “political decay” essentially shares the same logic with this increasingly visible

phenomenon of democracies (Fukuyama, 2014). This is the common situation in most of the

democratic countries, but in the countries with less democratic political frames the political

leaderships may subsist in different political ecosystems.


Since the original political system of the PRC was almost entirely transplanted from the

Soviet Union, the leadership of China was genetically influenced by the Soviet leadership along

with its communist leading styles. However, in the age of the Cold War ups and downs,

geopolitical changes pushed Chinese political leadership to try to get rid of the impact of the

Soviet influence since the end of the 1950s. This triggered Chinese leadership’s leading-style-

groping in a no-guidance international environment. And it might be a reason for China to have

formed its own neo-authoritarian political system in the late Cold War age. Besides that, the

achievement of Singapore model has become attractive to the Chinese leadership. It’s mainly

because China happens to share some similar national conditions with this city-country both

culturally and politically, so that by crediting the Singapore model it to some extent could be a

ratification of names for Chinese political system and leading style. However, the rapid growth

of China in the last two decades has given the Chinese political leadership much more

confidence in China’s political system. Even though Chinese political leaders still face pressure

on their ruling legitimacy from the West, now they are becoming more and more leisurely in


dealing with it. Because the generally positive domestic environment has given them plenty of

room to be obstinate.

1.2 Domestic backgrounds of political leadership


The most prominent systemic transition of China’s political leadership from Mao’s era to the

time period right before Xi came into power was that Chinese politics has transformed from

“strongman politics” to “monitored politics”. And this transition had created certain “checks and

balances” within the circle of the political leadership.

The first three-decade-phase of the PRC was the strongman politics age. Represented by the

absolute authority and nearly mythical leader image of Mao, the power of the political leader

during this age was barely restricted. On the one hand, this leadership status came from the state

founder’s glory; on the other hand, it was the joint outcome of the political environments in that

period of time both domestically and internationally. Since Mao died with uncertain predecessors

in the September of 1976 and Deng Xiaoping then was the most venerable and capable man

among the state founders, political situations indeed pushed Deng to lead the chaotic country in

the following two decades. As the last strongman leader among the four generations of Chinese

leadership, which were characterized by the leading of Mao Zedong in 1949-1976, Deng

Xiaoping in 1976-1997, Jiang Zemin in 1989-2002 and Hu Jintao in 2002-2012, Deng in fact

created and normalized the monitored politics of China’s political leadership by standing behind

the throne of Jiang from 1989 until he died in 1997 and also unofficially handpicked Hu in

advance as Jiang’s predecessor at the same time. Following this pattern, Jiang monitored the

fourth leadership generation of Hu and unofficially handpicked Xi as Hu’s predecessor after his


two five-year office terms from 2012. And accordingly but uncertainly, Hu in principle was

supposed to monitor Xi’s fifth leadership generation since 2012 and handpick Xi’s predecessor

for the sixth generation of leadership from 2022. In this way, Deng’s monitored politics in fact

has set the foundations for the latter most meaningful transitions in the top leadership, which are

the transformations from irregularly power shift to the formation of new power shift consensus.

This new power shift consensus specifically includes assured office terms, leadership collective

and the cross-generational designation of successors. And these are the foundations of Chinese

political leaderships’ relatively long-term, coherent and renewable policies both in domestic and

foreign affairs.


From the “pan-political interpretation, ideologicalization and centralization” of China in the

first three-decade-phase to the “diversification, rationalization and openization” in the second,

Chinese leaderships’ mentality in fact simultaneously experienced a similar evolution. From the

rigid conservative “red” ideology to the relatively open-minded changes in the mindset of

political leadership, this is a process the political leaderships have experienced to gain more and

more comprehensive perceptions of the outside world. Started since the late 1970s and sped up

by the end of the Cold War, pragmatism philosophy has gradually been taken by the CCP leaders

and it indeed created positive outcomes both domestically and internationally. China’s pragmatic

economic integration with the world and its relatively peace peripheral environments indirectly

reflect the political leadership’s strategic rationality. It could only be achieved through the

accumulation of the successive and individual decisions of the leadership in micro levels. On the

other hand, the continuity and centralism of the CCP to some extent have helped the empirical


transfers of the experiences that acquired from the long-term trial and error practices. Most likely

these are the main reasons for the CCP’s survival in the global collapse of communism

leaderships.


2.1 International background

As the most spotlighted element of the world politics, political leadership or even the

political leaders’ individual characters has been endowed with many attentions. On the surface of

the deep geopolitical basics, political leadership most of the time is the amplifier or

manifestation of the political entities’ foreign policy. Although international perceptions of them

can’t structurally determine the interactions between the nations, they actually are still

influencing the judgments of each others’ foreign policy preferences. Especially for domestic

publics within the countries, their understandings towards a foreign leader or the contexts of his

or her leadership could decisively shape the country’s final foreign policy choice. In this

background, the majority of states’ political leaders are more and more cautious about their

international images and try to use it as an asset to better fulfill the national interest. U.S.

President Richard Nixon’s “madman theory” case in the early 1970s and the ongoing case of

Vladimir Putin’s tough guy image are different examples of this trend among world leaderships.

(Carroll, 2005) Especially when information technology and social media have become the

irreplaceable tubes for political leaderships to achieve their political interests both domestically

and internationally, new leading cultures are being formed through the interactions and mutual

reference among the world leaders. And this is why cases like “Chinese Internet surfers flood

Barack Obama’s Google Plus page for green cards or just for fun” could happen in 2012.


(“Chinese Internet,” 2012) In this background, states’ political leaders are entering an era that

they have to keep delicate balances between their roles as nation-state leaders at home and their

world leader’s images internationally at the same time. And this has become a new systemic

restriction for the leaderships of countries globally. Cases like Bashar al-Assad—the President of

Syria and Kim Jong-un—the North Korea dictator are negative examples.

Within this systemic background, doubts about China’s power transition and leading style

from the external world were extremely popular when Xi accessed power in the late 2012.

Accompanying with the popularity of “China threat” theories in recent years, Xi and his team on

foreign affairs aspect face the pressure of improving China’s international image and creating a

better international environment for the rise of China. Under the premise that China could not

turnaround the economic, political, military and even cultural relations with the world especially

with the West in short-term, the practical choice for Xi and his team is to utilize the available

resources to revise China’s global strategic layout and relax the anxiety of the world through the

practice of new diplomatic policies at the same time. And this is the unit international

background both China and Xi are facing since the officially domestic power transition in 2013.

2.2 Domestic background

As a matter of fact, Xi indeed became both the General Secretary of the Central Committee

of the Communist Party and the Chairman of the Central Military Commission of China at the

same time in November 2012. After that, he officially assumed office and became the President

of the People’s Republic of China in March 2013. This kind of smooth and almost synchronously

concentrating of “party power”, “military power” and “state power” to the top leader of China is

unusual since the start of Deng’s monitored politics. Especially for the military power, it’s the


symbol of the leader’s real grasping of the leadership. Although Jiang nominally got the military

power in 1989, he actually didn’t have complete control of the military power until Deng died in

1997. Similarly, but improved, Hu nominally got the military power from Jiang two years later

than he took both the party power and state power in 2004. However, actually he didn’t really get

the military under relatively complete control even until the late of his terms. Comparing with

the predecessors, Xi’s power is much more concentrated than the others’ since the era of Deng.

The massive military anti-corruption campaigns since 2014 and the military reform started in

2015 in fact have confirmed Xi’s absolute control of the military power, and it signals that he has

become the most “paramount leader” of China since the age of Deng. (Wang, 2013) On a side-

note, Xi’s efficiently accomplished high concentration of power might be a sign that a consensus

has been achieved inside the CCP, and the majority of Chinese political elites have tacitly

approved to support a new strongman to tackle the structural problems China historically

accumulated in the past three decades.

Deng’s model of monitored politics in the past three decades indeed has created certain kind

of checks and balances between the generational leaderships and helped China to avoid stepping

back to the age of Mao, or even generated efficiently leading with the outcomes of economic

rise. But the codependent systemic by-products such as leadership collective and the cross-

generational designation of successors, which used to be suitable in the transition period, had

also generated some troublesome side-effects at the same time. One of the most serious side-

effects is the formation of the oligarchs and their corruptions imbedded in the crony capitalism.

This problem indeed has prevented China from unleashing profound structural reforms

domestically and building reliable, rule based and healthy relations with the external world.

Since the mainstream Chinese society has been anxious about this problem for years, the re-rise


of Xi’s strongman leadership along with his overwhelmingly public support actually is a

reasonable result of the self-adjustment of China’s political ecosystem. But unfortunately, these

domestic complicities often can’t be really understood by China’s outsiders, especially when it’s

externally observed within the prism of purely western liberal values or through the deterministic

“offensive realism” theory frames. Ironically, for the Chinese insiders, they face similar

limitations when observing the West’s domestic problems.

3. Case study: the domestic leadership foundations of Xi Jinping’s “striving for

achievement” foreign policy approach.

Since Xi Jinping became the President of the PRC in 2013, China’s foreign policies in

general have indeed experienced a distinct transformation from “hide capabilities and keep a low

profile” to “striving for achievement”. According to the director of International Strategy Studies

of the Institute of World Economics and Politics in Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the

characters of the in-forming Xi’s foreign policy style are shown in the following aspects:

strengthening big power mindset, more proactive practices, peripheral focused preferences,

bottom-line thinking and the increasing of public diplomacy (Xue, 2014). On the other hand, the

newly launched narratives and practices since the start of his term are supporting this—new

narratives such as “implementing the Chinese dream”, “building a new model of major-country

relationship”, “promoting a community of common destiny”; new practices such as the cases of

the AIIB and The Belt and Road initiative, high-frequency summit diplomacy represented by the

U.S. trip and the tough stance in the South China Sea (Sørensen, 2015). At the same time,

according to a report from the Shorenstein Center of Harvard Kennedy School, Xi was scored as

the world’s most popular leader both at home and abroad by citizens from 30 countries across the

globe (Saich, 2015). Based on all of these, to say the least, China’s global influence indeed got


rapidly increased and it is creating advantages for China internationally. By this token, Xi

Jinping’s “striving for achievement” approach in China’s foreign policies is “so far so good”. In

fact, this quick foreign policy “achievement” to some extent is upheld by the changes of

domestic foundations, especially in terms of the maturity of China’s political leadership.

3.1 From engineers-turned-leadership to diversified leadership

Since the post-Mao age, China has almost formed a technocratic method in the politics. Led

by “the engineers-turned-politicians”, China indeed has experienced a booming manufacturing-

based economic growth in the past three decades (Yoon, 2007). Actually, it was the political-

economic evolutions of modern China and its meritocracy ruling tradition since the ancient time

jointly formed this political leadership reality of technocracy. However, since the 15th party

congress to the 18th party congress (1997-2012), science & engineering technocrat representation

among full members of the CCP Central Committee declined from 51% to 21.5 percent.

Simultaneously, the percentage of members trained in social science and law each had increased

from 5.6 percent to 38.2 percent and 1.7 percent to 14.1 percent (Li, 2013). In the group of born-

after-1960 ministers, provincial party secretaries and governors who would be the future top

leaders of China, this trend is even much more remarkable. By September 2012, 61.39 percent of

the political elites in this group are humanities and social science background, and also 45.28

percent of this entire group have doctoral degrees (Zhang& Chen, 2012). It means that the

political leadership is abandoning their simple version of science & engineering technocracy and

their capabilities of governing a modern country is increasing. It’s a sign that the political elites

inside China are experiencing a trend of professionalization. The implementation of Xi’s

“striving for achievement” on foreign polices are based on this. At the same time, these political


elites have better understandings of both the domestic governance and international politics than

their predecessors. It means that, new premises of their policies are generating.

3.2 The motivation of converging with the world

Chinese tradition and political reality collectively determine that the political leadership of

China could get more domestic support than most of the western counterparts. However, Chinese

political leadership today is also being compared with the western counterparts by the domestic

public at the same time. Since Mao’s era, the images of China’s political leaders are usually dull,

robotic and not intimate with people. Therefore, western leaders’ voter-pleasing images

domestically and personal magnetism charisma internationally are attracting and newfangled to

the Chinese public. For this reason, the leadership of China has the motivation of converging

their domestic images and diplomatic behaviors to the western style to some degree. It on the one

hand would please the domestic public, on the other hand it’s a good way to reduce the

superficial disparities between them and their western counterparts.

In this context, the new images of Xi’s wife Peng Liyuan, who used to be a folk singer and

now as the prestigious First Lady of China, are helping the leadership of Xi to gain positive

public reputations both domestically and internationally. The images of her have been tightly

focused and regarded as a lens to observe Xi’s leadership. That’s because when the last time

China had such a high-profile First Lady that was Mao’s spouse Jiang Qing, and she was a

member of the “Gang of Four” whom have been blamed as the chief culprits in the notorious

Cultural Revolution during 1967-1976. On the contrary, the role Peng plays looks similar with

the world’s most typical First Ladies. What she did were accompanying Xi Jinping on trips

abroad, participating in advocacy activities and even unexpectedly delivered a speech about


women and education at the United Nation in fluent English (Page, 2015). And Peng even

invited Michelle Obama in her own name to visit China, which is a precedent in China’s First

Ladies’ records. More importantly, “it makes China look like a representative government

system” and to a certain extent it’s a successful attempt to converge with the West (Baik, 2014).

In this sense, Peng has been called the “first” First Lady of China. Although the happening of

these cases could only be based on the transitions of China’s macro political environment. It still

signals that both the public and the leadership of China are learning from the West and trying to

gain acceptance through the imitations of western behaviors to certain extent. Logically, this

helps the leadership of China better fulfill their goals in foreign affairs.

3.3 Standing but also self-adjusting on the shoulders of the predecessors

Another domestic logic of Chinese style party-state leadership is the combination of the

coherence between leadership generations and its internal unity towards the outside world. The

rapidly rising global influence of China in recent years in fact is a legacy of all the previous

Chinese leadership together. In other words, without the predecessors’ “hide capabilities and

keep a low profile” there would be no Xi’s “striving for achievement” today. To this point, the

strategic and foreign policy coherence between leadership generations is a consequence of

China’s special centralized power system. Although it has advantages in pursuing long-term

benefits, it may also create some negative policy inertia, which is hard and could only allow to

be revised through the risky internal self-adjustment. That’s because, in the context of China’s

political reality, radical and absolute self-adjustment would harm the leadership’s internal unity

towards the outside world, or at least create the image of that. And that’s deeply related with the

solidity of the CCP’s power and would be a sensitive sign of its weakness.


On the other hand, standing on the shoulders of the predecessors, CCP leaders will be

cautious to change the basic principles their predecessors set and not to deny their legacies

without a hitch. That’s why even though Xi’s severe anti-corruption campaign to some extent

has the characters of purging the political opponents, who sit under the cover of his predecessors

and obstacle the launching of his policies both domestically and also on foreign affairs, he as the

current leader still needs to concern the coherence and unity of his leading body. This is the

background of the uncommon “No House of Cards” joke he made in the speech when he was

visiting the U.S. in September 2015 (Stevens, 2015). In that joke, he was trying to ease the

external suspicions of his leadership and showing a confident and strong international image to

his foreign policy counter-party. It reflects that the top leadership is more and more combining

their domestic considerations with the practices of China’s foreign affairs. By delicately utilizing

diplomatic resources and duly stressing the domestic issues at the same time, the leadership of

China is learning how to integrate their domestic governance with their foreign behaviors to

better achieve the desired integral effects. However, this could only happen within the bottom

line of keeping certain coherence with his predecessors and not harming the leaderships’ internal

unity towards the outside world. And it will be a long-term domestic flavor for China’s foreign

policy moves.

4. Findings

Chinese political leadership is both initiatively and being pushed to pursue new leadership

styles. As a result, the capacities of both Chinese foreign policy makers and practitioners are

improving. Meanwhile, the measures they take to realize national interest along with their world

views today are becoming delicately different from their predecessors. It means that China’s

political leadership is in a trend of maturing both in specific individual levels and also as a


whole. This is a profound change of China’s foreign policy foundations. Because anyway, it is

the policy makers and their mindset finally determine the specific on ground actions of China in

this rapidly power rebalancing world.

Section IV. Findings and Analysis

Based on the review of historical background and cases above, the domestic structural

pressures on China’s foreign policy could be found. They are: the long-term demand of

upgrading its development model to further participating into economic globalization; the

incentive of modernizing its governance to get integrated with the international principles and

norms to a certain degree; the acceleration of Chinese social transition to systemically rebuild its

national imagination in the interactions with the world; the maturing of political leadership to

better fit the reality of leading China in the current global context. By examining all these

structural pressures, it’s not hard to discover a common logic of these four domestic

structural(systemic) pressures. It is that domestically China is in a trend of comprehensive

modernization in all these four levels.

By embracing modernity in economic level, governance level, social level and leadership

level, China as a whole is in transitions to become a more “modernized” country than before.

This inner trend is determining the areas China as a whole focuses and restricting its policy space

in foreign affairs. It means that China is functioning with certain relatively stable basic

principles, so that the general preferences of its foreign behaviors are predictable:

1. As a development focused major economy, China now has the inner impulsions of

securing and expanding its international ties with the world. This is a basic standard and

bottom line for its policy makers and practitioners.


2. Aa an neo-authoritarian state tries to modernize its governance style, China has the

preferences of continuously taking pragmatic point of views in the integrations with the

similar-foundation-lacked West.

3. As a national self-imagination rebuilding society attempts to seek acceptation from the

world and pursues national interests at the same time, China would like to take

international responsibilities in a limited degree and self-adjust its world view with the

basic standards of modern states.

4. As a community who is expecting stronger leadership to tackle both domestic and

international problems and also to compete with the West at the same time, China would

allow its leading bodies to keep pursuing better foreign achievements for satisfying the

domestic expectations and also authorize them more power of initiative for doing so.

As a result, this inner tendency of comprehensive modernization shapes China’s foreign

policy preferences to be more bottom line-guarded, pragmatic, self-adjusting and outward-

looking than before. How these changes would affect the interactions between China and its

counterparts depends on both China’s specific layout and to what extent the world would accept

it. Most importantly, it’s about the tensions between China’s standards on its modernization and

the expectations from the rest of the world.

Section V. Model Evaluation

As preset in the beginning, for the reason that the neoclassical model this paper conducted

focuses on the proposition “why the same country chooses different foreign policies in different

periods of time” rather than the other “why different countries choose different foreign policies

when facing similar international pressures”, the analytical results of this research inevitably

have more fore-and-aft than transverse significances. This is determined by the trilemma of


theory constructions, which is the unavailability of explanatory power, explanation scope and the

simplification degree of the theory at the same time.

On the other hand, none of the general preferences mentioned above as analytical results

would solely determine China’s specific foreign policies. And every foreign policy decision

could only be made under its specific domestic and international constraint conditions. This

analytical framework also could only make sense in specific contextual backgrounds and develop

with the emphasis on both domestic and international factors’ structural effects. Meanwhile, in

different situations, the priorities of a country might be totally different. That’s because the

reality never functions to follow human’s logical deduction, on the contrary, it’s always about

the joint effects of the multifactorial facts. It’s particularly apparent in politics and policy

making. Therefore, the conclusions here could only be new ways to better understand both China

and its foreign policy. Or else, they could only help us get closer to the truth which could never

be simplified.

Conclusion

As Samuel Huntington argues, modernity itself may generates stability, but the process of

modernization is often imbedded with disorder. (Huntington, 2006) In this sense, the current

contradictions between China and the world could be a result of the historically uneven

distribution of modernity in global scale. China’s inner tendency of modernizing itself along with

its frictional interactions with the world are the manifestations of this structural contradiction.

Put aside the dualistic judgment of whether the rise of China is a danger or not, the practical and

unavoidable proposition for the world actually is how to coexist with this rapid expanding big

power. Since China is overwhelmingly on the track of modernizing itself, an important question

now turns to be, what kind of modernization standard China is according to? There are signs


showing that liberal principles are promising references, but China still has its own hesitations

and faces its own realistic dilemmas. If so, how could the rest of the world be better aware of it

and react just rightly? Maybe as Thomas Sowell thinks, “there are no solutions; there are only

trade-offs” (Hawkins, 2012).


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