China's Quest, the result of over a decade of research, writing, and analysis, is both sweeping in breadth and encyclopedic in detail. Quite simply, it will be essential for any student or scholar with a strong interest in China's foreign policy. This new and revised edition includes an additional chapter and new analysis, which address China's strategies in the aftermath of the Western economic crisis, Xi Jinping's embrace of assertive nationalism, the "China Dream" and restoration of China's leading global status, and the "One Belt, One Road" and "communities of common destiny" initiatives.

Exploring China's foreign relations in terms of five broad interrelated dimensions, rather than chronologically, this volume surveys Chinese foreign policy from 1949 to the present. It covers the historical influence on China's foreign relations; its relations with the superpowers; revolutionary China; its economic relations; and national security. For historians and political scientists.

In The Cold War and the Origin of Diplomacy of People’s Republic of China, Niu Jun offers a new analytical framework for understanding the Cold War and PRC’s diplomacy from 1949 to 1955. He sees it as an interactive historical process between the Cold War, China’s domestic transition from revolution to nation-building, and the revolutionary ideology in the minds of Chinese leaders and Chinese people. Niu Jun’s analytical framework sheds fresh light on the widely studied events of PRC’s diplomacy such as China’s alliance with the Soviet Union and confrontation with the U.S., military actions on the Korean Peninsula and in Indochina, settlement of the first Taiwan Strait crisis, development of nuclear weapons, and so on.

This cogent but comprehensive book examines the international relations of the People’s Republic of China since its founding in 1949. Noted scholar Robert G. Sutter provides a balanced assessment of the country’s recent successes and advances as well as the important legacies and constraints that hamper it, especially in nearby Asia—long the focus of China’s foreign policy attention. Sutter demonstrates how Beijing has carefully created an image of a China that follows consistent policies based on morally correct principles, but its record shows repeated episodes of sometime surprising change and frequent use of violence, intimidation, and coercion. China’s leaders, he argues, still fail to manage the desire for productive foreign relations with their aspirations to build Chinese security and sovereignty interests. Image-building efforts condition Chinese public and elite opinion to be extraordinarily sensitive, self-righteous, and often alarmist in dealing with the many disputes China has with its Asian neighbors and the United States. Advances the PRC has made in other parts of the world focus mainly on commercial interests, limiting its actual impact on world affairs. Sutter shows readers how to use China’s rise in nearby Asia as a reliable barometer of how important and effective it actually will become internationally.

What role do nationalism and popular protest play in China's foreign relations? Chinese authorities permitted anti-American demonstrations in 1999 but repressed them in 2001 during two crises in U.S.-China relations. Anti-Japanese protests were tolerated in 1985, 2005, and 2012 but banned in 1990 and 1996. Protests over Taiwan, the issue of greatest concern to Chinese nationalists, have never been allowed. To explain this variation, Powerful Patriots identifies the diplomatic as well as domestic factors that drive protest management in authoritarian states. Because nationalist protests are costly to repress and may turn against the government, allowing protests demonstrates resolve and makes compromise more costly in diplomatic relations. Repressing protests, by contrast, sends a credible signal of reassurance, facilitating diplomatic flexibility. Powerful Patriots traces China's management of dozens of nationalist protests and their consequences between 1985 and 2012.

First published in 1998. In this study what is proposed here is first of all to examine the effect it had on the very functioning of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and how the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, of which the country had become a victim, spilled over to this highly elitist and prestigious Ministry. In summary, it focuses on the chaos that engulfed the institution.

This book provides the first detailed analysis of a crucial and distinctive element of Chinese foreign policy. Anne-Marie Brady follows the development of the Chinese Communist Party's 'foreign affairs' system since 1921, focusing on waishi, the external policies intended to influence and control both foreigners themselves as well as Chinese citizens' contact with and perception of outsiders. The term also comprises China's external relations—both official state-to-state and so-called unofficial or 'people-to-people' diplomacy. In effect, waishi activities encompass all matters related to foreigners and foreign things, not merely diplomacy. By managing the foreign presence in China and China's contacts with the outside world and by controlling the Chinese population, the author argues that waishi has proven to be one of the most effective tools in the CCP's repertoire for building and then sustaining its hold on power. Drawing for the first time on policy documents that underpin the phenomena they describe, Brady analyzes trends and developments in waishi during each chronological period. The book elucidates how the CCP's policies evolved: In the 1930s, the need for a broad united front in international relations warred with the desire to control the foreign presence in China; in the 1940s and 1950s, the Sino-Soviet alliance and ridding China of the traces of the 'semi-colonial' past took precedence; in the 1960s, the Sino-Soviet split led to China's claim as the center of world revolution; and in the past twenty years of reform, the focus has been the ongoing quest to create a modern nation-state as China opens up to the outside world. The author considers waishi's deeper meaning as an overriding approach to the 'foreign,' which links state-to-state diplomacy with the management of the foreign presence in China. Her groundbreaking research is based on a previously unexplored genre of waishi materials (almost all classified) in Chinese, extensive interviews with waishi officials and foreign participants of the system, as well as archival research inside and outside of China. The photograph used on the cover of the book was doctored by the Chinese government. The original photograph showed Edgar Snow standing on the Tiananmen podium with (reading from left to right) Snow, translator Ji Chaozhu, Mao Zedong, and Edgar Snow's wife, Lois Wheeler Snow. In the book's cover photograph, which was released internationally, Lois Wheeler Snow has been replaced by Lin Biao—at the time Mao's number two—shown prominently clutching Quotations from Mao Zedong, otherwise known as the Little Red Book. Lin Biao was no doubt inserted not only to show his ranking in the leadership but also to demonstrate that the shift towards rapprochement with the West which the Snow's visit to China in 1970 represented, was supported by the CCP's radical left as symbolized by Lin Biao.