Chinese Perspectives on International Security

Abstract

Since communist liberation in 1949, the international relations of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have fluctuated between introspection and interaction, reflecting variations in the priority assigned to the more revolutionary dimensions of its ‘great experiment’. This study will assess the fundamental factors that condition Chinese foreign policy and security perspectives, often in subtle (but always complex) ways.1 It will be argued that Chinese policy-makers currently view their polity as an unfulfilled (and long humiliated and frustrated) emerging nation-state in search of its own territorial, political, and socioeconomic form and pursuing its national development and interests as a socialist entity in a world of dynamically interacting states. While the concept of national interest fuels this basically balance-of-power perspective, ideology helps to shape and colour, as well as legitimise, it. For the immediate future, and during a time of crucial leadership-generation and ‘techonomic’ transition, Beijing’s leaders believe that national security is to be found in a domestic prosperity and stability based upon a developmental rather than purely revolutionary approach to modernisation. This requires an active, but balanced, foreign policy emphasising the maintenance of national independence and sovereignty and the promotion of a stable global and regional environment.