Xiance Thesis-China’s Foreign Policy under Xi Jinping

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CHINA’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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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 Researchand ResearchEmphasis
Diagram 2. Research Design and Research Emphasis

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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,

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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.

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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

25
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

26
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

27
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

28
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.

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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

30
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

31
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

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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.

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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

34
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

35
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.

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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.

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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

38
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

39
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.

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1. Historical Backgrounds: 1945-2013
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.

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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

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“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.

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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

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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. Current situations since Xi: 2013-2015
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

45
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

46
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,

47
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

48
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

49
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 calculationand 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.

50
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

51
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,

52
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.

Xiance Thesis-China’s Foreign Policy under Xi Jinping

Xiance Thesis-China’s Foreign Policy under Xi Jinping

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