| Kommentar |
China has become a major player in international politics. A country with the largest population on the planet (about 1.45 billion – on par with India), the second largest share of world GDP, and the second largest military budget, the People’s Republic today influences virtually all aspects of global governance.
The first decades after the Cold War saw the rise and deepening of the so-called Liberal International Order which was decidedly shaped by the United States of America. The rise of China and its increasingly assertive involvement in questions of global order – ranging from human rights issues via sovereignty concerns to development policy – casts doubt on the longevity, or at least the unquestioned continuity, of this liberal order. Increasingly, China obstructs putatively Western political projects in global governance, claims positions of power in existing international organizations (IOs), and even creates its own IOs that sometimes sit uneasily with existing, US- or European-led, institutions. Some scholars wonder if we are headed to a new and arguably more illiberal Chinese-led international order.
Against this background, the seminar sets out to analyze China’s global governance efforts by asking what are the determinants, goals, and methods of China’s global politics. We start with a deep dive into China’s political system to understand the making of foreign policy in the People’s Republic and how it translates into Chinese global governance objectives. In a next step, we look at China’s efforts at gaining power within existing IOs, before surveying discrete Chinese global governance initiatives in various policy fields. The seminar ends with a look at the geopolitical dimension of China’s foreign policy, including with regard to Taiwan, the situation in the South China Sea, and the Russian aggression on Ukraine. |
| Literatur |
- Kim, Sung-han; Kim, Sanghoon (2022): China’s contestation of the liberal international order. In The Pacific Review. DOI: 10.1080/09512748.2022.2063367.
- Schweller, Randall W.; Pu, Xiaoyu (2011): After Unipolarity: China's Visions of International Order in an Era of U.S. Decline. In International Security 36 (1), pp. 41–72.
- Stephen, Matthew D. (2021): China's New Multilateral Institutions: A Framework and Research Agenda. In International Studies Review 23 (3), pp. 807–834.
- Zhao, Suisheng (2022): The US–China Rivalry in the Emerging Bipolar World: Hostility, Alignment, and Power Balance. In Journal of Contemporary China 31 (134), pp. 169–185.
|
