China’s recent rapid economic growth has drawn global attention to its foreign policy, which increasingly has had an impact on world politics. In contrast with China’s long-standing preference for bilateralism or unilateralism in foreign policy, recent decades have seen changes in the PRC’s attitude and in its declaratory and operational policies, with a trend toward the accepting and advocating of multilateralism in international affairs. Whilst China’s involvement has been primarily in the economic arena, for example, participation in the World Trade Organization and ASEAN Plus Three, it has more recently expanded into international security institutions, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. This book records, analyzes, and attempts to conceptualize, this phenomenal development in Chinese foreign policy and its impact on international relations, with the emphasis on China’s active participation in multilaterally-oriented regional security regimes. Written by an impressive team of international scholars, this book is the first collective effort in the field of China studies and international relations to look at China’s recent turn to multilateralism in foreign affairs. It will appeal to students and scholars of Chinese politics and foreign policy, security studies and international relations.

In the 1990s there was a wave of multilateralism in the Asia Pacific, led primarily by ASEAN. Since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, however, many non-ASEAN states have attempted to seize the initiative, including the USA, Japan, China, South Korea, and Australia. Kai He and his contributors debate the reasons for this contested multilateralism and the impacts it will have on the region’s security and political challenges. Will the "Indo-Pacific turn" be a blessing or a curse for regional stability and prosperity? Using a diverse range of theoretical and empirical perspectives, these leading scholars contribute views on this question and on the diverse strategies of the great and middle powers in the region. This collection will be of great interest to scholars and students of international relations in the Asia Pacific and of great value to policy makers in the region and beyond.

This book provides a comparative assessment of the material and ideational contributions of five countries to the regional architecture of post-Cold War Asia. In contrast to the usual emphasis placed on the role and centrality of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Asia’s multilateral architecture and its component institutions, this book argues that the four non-ASEAN countries of interest here 3⁄4 Australia, Japan, China and the United States 3⁄4 and Indonesia have played and continue to play an influential part in determining the shape and substance of Asian multilateralism from its pre-inception to the present. The work does not contend that existing scholarship overstates ASEAN’s significance to the successes and failures of Asia’s multilateral enterprise. Rather, it claims that the impact of non-ASEAN stakeholders in innovating multilateral architecture in Asia has been understated. Whether ASEAN has fared well or poorly as a custodian of Asia’s regional architecture, the fact remains that the countries considered here, notwithstanding their present discontent over the state of that architecture, are key to understanding the evolution of Asian multilateralism. This book will be of much interest to students of Asian politics, international organisations, security studies and IR more generally.

This book offers an assessment of China’s assertive foreign policy behavior with a special focus on Chinese policies in the South China Sea (SCS). By providing a detailed account of the events in the SCS and by analyzing power dynamics in the region, it identifies the driving forces behind China’s assertive foreign policy. Considering China’s power on a domestic as well as an international level, it examines a number of different sources of hard and soft power, including military, economics, geopolitics, and domestic legitimacy. The author demonstrates that Chinese assertiveness in the SCS can be explained not only by increases in China’s power, but also by effective reactions to other actors’ foreign policy changes. The book will appeal to scholars in international relations, especially those interested in a better understanding of South China Sea developments, China’s political power and foreign policy, and East Asian international affairs.

This book thoroughly analyzes China’s political ideas regarding the international order and their reflection in China’s engagement in multilateralism. It introduces the debates and discussions that take place among Chinese intellectuals in the study of international relations as an important part of non-western international relation theories, generating reflections on the convergences and divergences between China’s political ideas and Europe-centric perspectives. With a focus specifically on China’s main bilateral and multilateral relations in its principal regions of interest – East Asia and Central Asia – the book also examines China’s relationship with the United States, Russia, and the European Union, and the One Belt One Road initiative drawing on a mixture of primary and secondary Chinese language sources, extensive interviews with Chinese officials, academics, and think tanks. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of Chinese politics/studies, foreign policy analysis, Asian studies, and international relations.

The world seems divided to either applaud or fear the rise of China, but this book probes deeper by investigating three aspects of the phenomenon in detail: 1) the institutional dilemmas of the prosperity as it integrates Asian authoritarianism with globalizing capitalism to create economic accomplishments; 2) the political struggles alongside the prosperity as Chinese citizens begin to demand equality, rights, and justice that might be viewed to disturb the continuity of stability and development; and 3) the global implications entailed by the prosperity — not only in power politics, war and peace, or competitions among nations, but especially on global public goods termed “human security”. Articles included here combine political economic analyses, lens with historical depth, and global concerns to add a perspective that highlights the “paradoxes” of prosperity surrounding the ongoing debate on the rise of China and its global ramifications.Readers will find an analysis that goes beyond the dichotomy viewing the rise of China either in positive or negative perspectives. Investigations on the internal dilemmas and the global implications of the rise of China are well-situated in the historical context of China's own search for modernization since the late 19th century. This is one of the few books in which China's rise is examined from a global perspective, rather than from a national perspective (of China, the United States or any other specific nation) — a global perspective that addresses the challenges facing all human societies with the rise of China.

The United Nations, Indo-Pacific and Korean Peninsula focuses on the United Nations (UN) and its frameworks to examine the power politics on the two of the world’s more politically sensitive and geo-strategically crucial regions of the Korean Peninsula and the Indo-Pacific. This book provides answers to broader questions that are relevant to the global emerging peace architecture. The book is divided into three parts: global, Indo-Pacific and the Korean Peninsula. The first part analyses the competing world views of the U.S, China, Japan, and Korea and the evolvement of UN debates on global and regional security, with special emphasis on the Indo-Pacific and the Korean Peninsula. The second part concerns major bilateral or multilateral security issues facing Indo-Pacific countries and their UN debates in this regard. In particular, with new developments in the Indo-Pacific, such as the Quad process involving the Australia-India-Japan-United States and an anticipation expansion of the Group of Seven (G-7), chapters analyse how these mechanisms expand their focus within the scope of Indo-Pacific power politics. Part three focuses on the UN centered debates on two Koreas and their strategic fallouts at regional and global levels. Examining the security order evolving around the politics of the Indo-Pacific regions and Korean Peninsula and analysing the relevance of the UN and its mechanisms, this book will be of interest to researchers studying International Relations, Security Studies, Asian Studies, in particular Korean Studies and the Indo-Pacific.

The contributors attempt to look into how China and Europe differently interpret political concepts such as: sovereignty, soft power, human rights, democracy, stability, strategic partnership, multilateralism/multipolarization, and global governance, to examine what implications of their conceptual gaps may have on China-EU relations.

Rising as a global power and regarding the existing world order unjust and unreasonable enough to meet the interests of both itself and other emerging powers, China has demanded reform to global governance, and taken new initiatives using its new quotient of wealth and influence to draw countries into its orbit. This comprehensive volume focuses on the two most important of these initiatives: the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), launched in 2013 to strengthen China’s connectivity with a large part of the world through infrastructure and economic development; and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), created in 2015, which represented China’s effort in the reconstruction of the international development rules. This book explores how these two initiatives are central to China’s emerging global strategy. The authors examine China’s geopolitical and geo-economic motivations and domestic political dynamics in launching these two initiatives. They also investigate the responses from the major foreign partners involved in both initiatives. This book will be of great interest to students, academics and researchers of China’s emerging global strategy. It comprises articles originally published in the Journal of Contemporary China.

The US, China, and Japan form a 'troubled triangle,' with each country negotiating its foreign policy toward the other two in response to economic and security pressures that operate as an interrelated duality. Written by international relations experts, this book examines how the three countries respond to this set of pressures and to each other.