Looking at China's foreign policy, this book focuses on the Confucian-based need of Chinese leaders to present themselves as the supreme moral rectifiers of the world order.

An economic and military superpower with 20 percent of the world’s population, China has the wherewithal to transform the international system. Xi Jinping’s bold calls for China to “lead in the reform of the global governance system” suggest that he has just such an ambition. But how does he plan to realize it? And what does it mean for the rest of the world? In this compelling book, Elizabeth Economy reveals China’s ambitious new strategy to reclaim the country’s past glory and reshape the geostrategic landscape in dramatic new ways. Xi’s vision is one of Chinese centrality on the global stage, in which the mainland has realized its sovereignty claims over Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the South China Sea, deepened its global political, economic, and security reach through its grand-scale Belt and Road Initiative, and used its leadership in the United Nations and other institutions to align international norms and values, particularly around human rights, with those of China. It is a world radically different from that of today. The international community needs to understand and respond to the great risks, as well as the potential opportunities, of a world rebuilt by China.

A third edition of this book is now available. This comprehensive and thoroughly updated introduction to Chinese foreign relations discerns the opportunities and limits China faces as it seeks increased international influence. Tracing the record of twists and turns in Chinese foreign relations since the end of the Cold War, Robert G. Sutter provides a nuanced analysis that shows that despite popular perceptions of its growing power, Beijing is hampered by both domestic and international constraints. This text's balanced and meticulous assessment shows China's leaders exerting more influence in world affairs but remaining far from dominant. Facing numerous contradictions and tradeoffs, they move cautiously as they deal with a complex global environment.

Despite its increasingly secure place in the world, the People's Republic of China remains dissatisfied with its global status. Its growing material power has simultaneously led to both greater influence and unsettling questions about its international intentions. China also has found itself in a constant struggle to balance its aspirations abroad with a daunting domestic agenda. This authoritative book provides a unique exploration of the complex and dynamic motivations behind Beijing's foreign policy. The authors focus on China's choices and calculations on issues such as the ruling Communist party-regime's interests, international status and image, nationalism, Taiwan, human rights, globalization, U.S. hegemony, international institutions, and the war on terrorism. Taken together, the chapters offer a comprehensive diagnosis of the emerging paradigms in Chinese foreign policy, illuminating especially China's struggle to engineer and manage its rise in light of the opportunities and perils inherent in the post-cold war and post-9/11 world.

This discerning book examines China’s newly developed soft-intervention policy towards North Korea, Myanmar and the two Sudans by examining China’s diplomatic statements and behaviours. It also highlights the Chinese soft-intervention policy in economic manipulation and diplomatic persuasion in the recent generations of Chinese leadership under Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping.

The author of Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink delivers “a must-read for anyone interested in the world’s most rapidly changing society” (James L. Watson, editor of Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia). If Chairman Mao came back to life today, what would he think of Nanjing’s bookstore, the Librairie Avant-Garde, where it is easier to find primers on Michel Foucault’s philosophy than copies of the Little Red Book? What does it really mean to order a latte at Starbucks in Beijing? Is it possible that Aldous Huxley wrote a novel even more useful than Orwell’s 1984 for making sense of post-Tiananmen China—or post-9/11 America? In these often playful, always enlightening “tales,” Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom poses these and other questions as he journeys from 19th-century China into the future, and from Shanghai to Chicago, St. Louis, and Budapest. He argues that simplistic views of China and Americanization found in most soundbite-driven media reports serve us poorly as we try to understand China’s place in the current world order—or our own. “Rather effortlessly brilliant . . . It penetrates with a lightly knowing eye and ear into the interior mind, heart and soul of giant China and the innumerable Chinese.”—AsiaMedia “This book provides a powerful lens for outsiders to understand a globalizing China and a unique mirror for the Chinese to reflect on their own society in a global context.”—Yunxiang Yan, author of Private Life Under Socialism “Readers will find themselves far more observant and attentive to local distinctions when they take their first or next trip to China.”—Stanley Rosen, The China Journal No. 60