China's Quest for Global Order
From Peaceful Rise to Harmonious World
By (author) Rosita Dellios, R. James Ferguson
Publication date:
13 December 2012Length of book:
180 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9780739168332
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.
Like Henry Kissinger's 2011 On China and Robert Luttwak's The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy, Dellios and Ferguson trace China's strategy to classical Chinese philosophies. Holding the Middle Kingdom together and keeping back the barbarians required complex and ever-changing mixtures of the passive yin, which used prestige and flattery, and the active yang, which used armed expeditions. The benevolence and stability of Confucianism was always paired with the hegemony and compulsion of the legalist school. Today, this corresponds to China's insistence, on the one hand that its "peaceful rise and peaceful development" aim at a "harmonious world but, on the other hand, engaging in a naval buildup to secure the "first island chain" aims at "area denial" to the US fleet. Dellios and Ferguson take old Chinese thought seriously--perhaps too seriously--as Beijing's underlying motivation. Possible modern explanations--angry nationalism due to the "century of humiliation," John Mearsheimer's realism, or protection of resource lifelines--play lesser roles. Beijing, the authors indicate, seems to aim for a reconstruction of its tianxia (all under heaven), its benevolent rule of a harmonious world. From this, readers cannot neatly distinguish a peaceful from an expansionist China. Recommended. Graduate, research, and professional collections