China's Quest for Global Order
From Peaceful Rise to Harmonious World
By (author) Rosita Dellios, R. James Ferguson
Not available to order
Publication date:
13 December 2012Length of book:
180 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9780739168349
The “rise of China” has become a ubiquitous and often menacing term in global politics. China’s Quest for Global Order: From Peaceful Rise to Harmonious World, by Rosita Dellios, PhD, and R. James Ferguson, PhD, examines how China’s leadership has responded to this depiction and the strategic approaches that have been developed to ameliorate threat perceptions. Rather than simply reassuring others that its “rise” is peaceful, China has taken proactive steps to reduce possible conflicts. Beijing seeks to shape the emerging global governance order as both non-threatening to itself and productive in transnational problem-solving. Borrowing from its own Confucian heritage to promote a harmonious world policy, China’s contribution to world order is likely to be more robust than the “responsible stakeholder” epithet upon which the West has pinned its collective hopes. The book interprets China’s quest for global order from Chinese perspectives, old and new, and provides the relevant philosophical and historical background to engage the reader in the ensuing debates. The authors also contextualize Chinese concepts with those from contemporary international relations, strategic studies and systems thinking. Their resultant contributions to existing analyses include the notion of “Confucian geopolitics” and the interplay between strategic theatres of cooperation and protection.
This is a long overdue book, where two Western scholars begin to examine the evolving Asian century from a Chinese political and cultural perspective. They explain and explore the Confucian geopolitics that have already been remarkably successful in the face of daunting challenges and that must command much greater Western attention in the future.