On the Dual International Identity of Contemporary China

Abstract

Since the beginning of the 21st century, one of the central research questions for Chinese IR scholars has been the definition, justification and conceptualization of China’s international identity. This was due both to the discussions in the Chinese academic community about China’s peaceful rise, caused by the rapid growth of China’s material power, and to the “constructivist turn” in the development of IR as a discipline in China. Understanding China’s international identity is important not only for China itself as a way of understanding “itself” and “others”, but also for the world community, since the self-positioning of a state reveals its national interests, aspirations, foreign policy strategy and behavior. From the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 to the end of the 1990s, when analyzing its foreign policy self-positioning, it was always possible to identify a dominant international identity. In the 1950s it was a pronounced international identity of the PRC as a socialist country, in the 1960s–1980s as a third world country, since the 1990s as the largest developing country. However, since the second half of the 1990s, China has started to reveal its identity as a responsible great power while simultaneously maintaining its identity as a developing country. The use of two international identities by China for almost three decades and the intention repeatedly emphasized by the Chinese leadership to maintain self-positioning as a developing country for a long time allow us to conclude that China’s dual international identity is not a reflection of the transition period of China’s development, but represents a complex phenomenon that requires conceptualization. The purpose of this article is to reveal the phenomenon of contemporary China having a dual international identity or, in other words, simultaneously two dominant international identities that determine China’s actions on the global stage. The author intended to reveal, based on an analysis of Chinese academic publications, the Chinese vision of the phenomenon of dual international identity.