Reviewed by: China Orders the World: Normative Soft Power and Foreign Policy ed. by William A. Callahan and Elena Barabantseva, and: Past and Present in China’s Foreign Policy: From “Tribute System” to “Peaceful Rise.” ed. by John E. Wills Jr. Rosita Dellios (bio) William A. Callahan and Elena Barabantseva, editors. China Orders the World: Normative Soft Power and Foreign Policy. Washington, DC: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. xiv + 280 pp. Hardcover $55.00, isbn 978-1-4214-0383-0. John E. Wills Jr., editor. Past and Present in China’s Foreign Policy: From “Tribute System” to “Peaceful Rise.” Portland, ME: Merwin Asia, 2010. 133 pp. Paperback $35.00, isbn 978-0-9836599-8-3. The world’s preoccupation with the rise of China appears to have gone through at least three phases in the past thirty years. First was the thrill of China the economy, with its 1.3 billion potential consumers. This period was in the heyday of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms. Second, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s rise, was the spectacle of China as America’s significant other. This was accompanied by the so-called China threat theory to which China responded with its peaceful rise slogan in 2003 and the even less provocative peaceful development in 2004. [End Page 219] A more proactive turn of events occurred the following year when President Hu Jintao gave a speech at the sixtieth anniversary of the United Nations in which he urged the building of a harmonious world. Like U.S. president Barack Obama’s Prague speech calling for a world free of nuclear weapons, President Hu’s harmonious world dream may not have mattered a great deal in the greater scheme of global politics—at least not until the global financial crisis, the dollar and euro debt crises, and the ongoing global economic slowdown. China emerged far more resilient than either the United States or the European Union. This observation ushered in the third phase of external interest in China’s rise: its contribution to world order. With China routinely predicted to overtake the United States as the largest economy within a decade, the time has come to consider in greater depth how Beijing will exercise its power on the global stage. This is the question raised by China Orders the World: Normative Soft Power and Foreign Policy, published in 2011: “What will China do with this new global power? How would China run the world?” (Callahan and Barabantseva, p. 3). The question, though timely, is not a new one. Writing in the 1960s, world historian Arnold Toynbee could well have been discussing China’s role today when he said: “If a ‘Middle Empire’ was now needed as a nucleus for political unification on a global scale, China was the country that was designed by history for playing this part of world-unifier once again, this time on a literally world-wide stage.”1 For the 2010 publication, Past and Present in China’s Foreign Policy: From “Tribute System” to “Peaceful Rise,” history may not be such a useful guide because China’s current position is “without historical parallel” (Wills, p. 125). Harry Harding explains in the last chapter that two of China’s previous identities—that of the powerful Middle Kingdom with a tribute system followed by its decline as a weak state in the European treaty system—simply “no longer fit” present circumstances (Wills, p. 125). This slender volume of 133 pages is not prepared to be so bold as to speak of China running the world, as does the more detailed 280-page China Orders the World; but what it does suggest, the role of “responsible stakeholder in a globalized and increasingly institutionalized international order” (Wills, p. 125), may be only a transitional stage away from the message in China Orders the World. The latter shows the logic of an institutionalized world as being compatible with China’s own long-held philosophical concern for public order under conditions of unity. Exciting as this phase of interest in China’s rise may be, the findings in both books add nothing substantially new to the literature. This is because they are both...
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Apr 19, 2016
Open Access