With the theme “China Dreams: Opportunities and Challenges,” this book contributes to emerging debates on Chinese new leadership's adaptability to important political, economic, social, and global issues. Can China's political system sustain “China Dreams”, a slogan ushered by Chinese President Xi Jinpin? Does the fulfillment of “China Dreams” require political reform? Does the initiation of the agenda of “China Dreams” facilitate China's economic transition? To what extent does “China Dreams” pave the way for China's peaceful rise? By exploring the preceding questions, the essays by Lowell Dittmer, Thomas Gold, Victoria Tin-bor Hui, Chin-fu Hung, Scott L Kastner, Huey-Lin Lee & Scott Y Lin, Chih-shian Liou, Raviprasad Narayanan, Kellee S Tsai, and Chung-min Tsai provide a comprehensive analysis of the agenda of China's new leadership.

Singh analyses the influence of Xi’s 'Chinese Dream' on China’s foreign relations and security postures. Xi Jinping’s rise has led to a paradigm shift in many aspects of China’s domestic and international politics. A key element of this has been the ideological vision shorthanded as the 'Chinese Dream', combining elements of nationalism, Confucian ideology, and economic expansionism. Singh evaluates the various changes in China’s nominally communist ideology in the post-Mao era, with an emphasis on the implications for China’s economic and security relations with other countries. He particularly focusses on China’s approach to South Asia and the Indian Ocean Region, key elements of China’s strategy. An insightful guide to understanding the direction of China’s foreign and security policy, and especially its impact on India–China relations.

This book focuses on the rapidly changing sociology of music as manifested in Chinese society and Chinese education. It examines how social changes and cultural politics affect how music is currently being used in connection with the Chinese dream. While there is a growing trend toward incorporating the Chinese dream into school education and higher education, there has been no scholarly discussion to date. The combination of cultural politics, transformed authority relations, and officially approved songs can provide us with an understanding of the official content on the Chinese dream that is conveyed in today’s Chinese society, and how these factors have influenced the renewal of values-based education and practices in school music education in China.

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the Chinese-Russian bilateral relationship, grounded in a historical perspective, and discusses the implications of the burgeoning 'strategic partnership' between these two major powers for world order and global geopolitics. The volume compares the national worldviews, priorities, and strategic visions for the Chinese and Russian leadership, examining several aspects of the relationship in detail. The energy trade is the most important component of economic ties, although both sides desire to broaden trade and investments. In the military realm, Russia sells advanced arms to China, and the two countries engage in regular joint exercises. Diplomatically, these two Eurasian powers take similar approaches to conflicts in Ukraine and Syria, and also cooperate on non-traditional security issues including preventing coloured revolutions, cyber management, and terrorism. These issue areas illustrate four themes. Russia and China have common interests that cement their partnership, including security, protecting authoritarian institutions, and re-shaping aspects of the global order. They are key players not only influencing regional issues, but also international norms and institutions. The Sino-Russian partnership presents a potential counterbalance to the United States and democratic nations in shaping the contemporary and emerging geopolitical landscape. Nevertheless, the West is still an important partner for China and Russia. Both seek better relations with the West, but on the basis of 'mutual respect' and 'equality'. Lastly, Russia and China have frictions in their relationship, and not all of their interests overlap. The Sino-Russian relationship has gained considerable momentum, particularly since 2014 as Moscow turned to Beijing attempting to offset tensions with the West in the aftermath of Russia's annexation of Crimea and intervention in Ukraine. However, so far, China and Russia describe their relationship as a comprehensive 'strategic partnership', but they are not 'allies'.

This book identifies and assesses the grand strategy of Chinese foreign policy following a flurry of diplomatic and investment activities in recent years. Through its adept application of the concept of grand strategy, it examines a series of questions concerning China’s objectives, targets, theaters, operations, coordination, and purpose (teleology). By answering these questions, the book uncovers the deeper motivations behind China’s diplomatic policy, revealing the ‘pulse’ of China’s grand strategy and its implications more broadly to the structure of the international system. Additionally, it offers an evaluation of the external influence exerted by the United States as the incumbent hegemonic power, presenting both the probable policy attitudes of the United States and China’s possible reactions and responses. Through these discussions and evaluations, it ultimately reveals that China’s motivations are deeply rooted both in its political past and in the interests of its ruling communist party, whose determination is the main source of China’s current and future successes in ascending past any other nation. Offering an in-depth exploration of China's grand strategy this book will be of great value to students and scholars of Chinese politics, international relations, and diplomacy.

Zhang’s book focuses on the analysis of the sociohistorical context, linguistic patterns of discursive construction, and media representations of the “Chinese Dream” in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and the United States. Analyzing data from the Chinese leader’s speeches and articles from China Daily, the South China Morning Post, and the New York Times, the author provides insights into the understanding of contemporary Chinese society through a critical discourse analysis of the “Chinese Dream” and its mediatized construction. Focusing on the discursive construction, the book examines the Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s narratives on the “Chinese Dream” from multidimensional perspectives, such as thematic representations, discursive strategies, and narrative frames, which emphasize the overall structure of the “Chinese Dream” as a political discourse. Methodologically, Zhang combines a discourse-historical approach, corpus linguistics, and framing analysis into a complementary framework, which draws merits from the three approaches. This innovative research volume will be of interest to academics, researchers, and students in the fields of discourse analysis, political research, Chinese politics, and East Asian studies.

As scholars and publics look for alternatives to what is understood as a violent Western world order, many claim that China can provide such an alternative through the Chinese dream of a harmonious world. This book takes this claim seriously and examines its effects by tracing the notion across several contexts: the policy documents and speeches that launched harmony as an official term under previous president Hu Jintao; the academic literatures that asked what a harmonious world might look like; the propaganda and mega events that aimed to illustrate it; the online spoofing culture that is used to criticise and avoid "harmonization"; and the incorporation of harmony into current president Xi Jinping’s "Chinese dream". This book finds contemporary Chinese society and international relations saturated with harmony. Yet, rather than offering an alternative to problems in "Western" thought, it counter-intuitively argues that harmony has not taken place, is not taking place, and will not take place. The argument unfolds as a contribution to wider debates on time, space and multiplicity in world politics. Offering analysis of the important but understudied concept of harmony, Nordin provides new and creative insights into wider contemporary issues in Chinese politics, society and scholarship. The book also suggests a creative and novel methodology for studying foreign policy concepts more broadly, drawing on critical thinkers in innovative ways and in a new empirical context. It will be of interest to students and scholars of IR, Chinese foreign and security policy and IR theory.

The success of China’s post-1978 reforms has provided it with significant resources to reshape its external environment. This book shows how China has leveraged this power from a neorealist perspective, projecting military and economic power to advance Chinese interests.

The essential resource on military and political strategy and the making of the modern world The New Makers of Modern Strategy is the next generation of the definitive work on strategy and the key figures who have shaped the theory and practice of war and statecraft throughout the centuries. Featuring entirely new entries by a who’s who of world-class scholars, this new edition provides global, comparative perspectives on strategic thought from antiquity to today, surveying both classical and current themes of strategy while devoting greater attention to the Cold War and post-9/11 eras. The contributors evaluate the timeless requirements of effective strategy while tracing the revolutionary changes that challenge the makers of strategy in the contemporary world. Amid intensifying global disorder, the study of strategy and its history has never been more relevant. The New Makers of Modern Strategy draws vital lessons from history’s most influential strategists, from Thucydides and Sun Zi to Clausewitz, Napoleon, Churchill, Mao, Ben-Gurion, Andrew Marshall, Xi Jinping, and Qassem Soleimani. With contributions by Dmitry Adamsky, John Bew, Tami Davis Biddle, Hal Brands, Antulio J. Echevarria II, Elizabeth Economy, Charles Edel, Eric S. Edelman, Andrew Ehrhardt, Lawrence Freedman, John Lewis Gaddis, Francis J. Gavin, Christopher J. Griffin, Ahmed S. Hashim, Eric Helleiner, Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh, Seth G. Jones, Robert Kagan, Jonathan Kirshner, Matthew Kroenig, James Lacey, Guy Laron, Michael V. Leggiere, Margaret MacMillan, Tanvi Madan, Thomas G. Mahnken, Carter Malkasian, Daniel Marston, John H. Maurer, Walter Russell Mead, Michael Cotey Morgan, Mark Moyar, Williamson Murray, S.C.M. Paine, Sergey Radchenko, Iskander Rehman, Thomas Rid, Joshua Rovner, Priya Satia, Kori Schake, Matt J. Schumann, Brendan Simms, Jason K. Stearns, Hew Strachan, Sue Mi Terry, and Toshi Yoshihara.

This book takes a fresh look at Chinese political economy at a key inflection point. Facing a more competitive international environment, Chinese reform has shifted from its earlier focus on economic liberalization and political decentralization to a more tightly organized, centralized form of state socialism. The Party-state's vigorous fiscal reaction to the Global Financial Crisis (2008-2009) left the country with a much improved infrastructure and greater sense of national self-assurance. The more monocratic central leadership has redoubled efforts to fight poverty and pollution, push technological innovation, and at the same time rigorously enforce ideological consensus, political loyalty and anticorruption.This has been occurring in an international context of slowing trade and nationalist pushback against 'globalization', prominently including bilateral Chinese-American polarization. While China has been among the staunchest advocates and beneficiaries of globalization, incipient trade war 'decoupling' has spurred movement toward economic and technological self-reliance. Turning inward however vies with a rival impulse toward more vigorous engagement in the world. This is most consequentially represented by the Belt and Road Initiative, driving massive infrastructure construction through Central Asia and the South and Southeast Asian maritime periphery. Despite slowing growth and a large debt overhang, swift recovery from the Covid-19 epidemic leaves China in a relatively strong economic position.