China's foreign policy: challenges and prospects

Abstract

China's foreign policy is somewhat of a hot topic and much has been published on it in recent years. However, Joseph Yu-shek Cheng's 630-page anthology offers readers little new insight. The volume boasts 15 chapters and a rather unwieldy and ineffectual introduction. Of the 15 chapters, 13 have been published before in one form or another, including one that was originally published in 1989. The first part of the book follows the trajectory of China's foreign policy from the 1970s into the 1980s and the 1990s. The argument is uncontroversial. At some point the Chinese leadership decided to move away from Mao's revolutionary conceptions and embrace a pragmatic—and independent—foreign policy. My difficulty with the ‘historical’ part of the book is that it fails to take advantage of the enormous literature, much of it based on declassified documents, memoirs and other primary sources, which emerged since the articles first appeared. Cheng's insights are still valuable, but primarily as an example of how political scientists thought about China many years ago, rather than for what they tell or fail to tell us about Beijing's foreign policy calculus.