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Chinese National Identity And Diplomatic Strategy Selection (1949-2004)

Posted on:2006-10-24Degree:DoctorType:Dissertation
Country:ChinaCandidate:Z Y LiuFull Text:PDF
GTID:1116360152988297Subject:International relations
Abstract/Summary:PDF Full Text Request
Starting from the doubt of "China Threat Theory", the author believes that in order to refute or prove the theory we have to analyze the cooperation and conflict of China's foreign strategy, but before that we should know the factors that determine the choices of China's foreign strategy because the degree of cooperation and conflict varies in different strategies. Therefore, the central question in this essay is: how China defines its foreign strategy?There are three kinds of answers to it. The historical-cultural model argues that Chinese history and culture have influenced its foreign strategy and policy formulation. While the ideological model thinks that Marxism-Leninism and Maoism decides that framework of China's strategic choices. Realist Model argues that China's foreign policy stem from calculation of loss-benefit.Because of the shortcomings in these models, the author tries to use a medium and more accurate variable to explain China's foreign strategy, which is national identity. Recently "identity" has raised great interest in social science and humanities. In the IR field, identity theory arose the attention as the rise of constructivism school. Identity is not only the core concept in constructivism, but also front line of IR research.Social identity of the state is the focus in the research, which is about how a state constructs its identity among the group categorization. Social identity comes from recognition needs of human beings. According to the social psychological process of individuals and groups, it takes four phrases of social comparison, social categorization, social distinctiveness and social definition to form a community of "we-ness". After decades of experiments, Social Identity Theory concludes: the identity of individuals or groups will lead to in-group favoritism and out-group hostility.According to SIT, we could make the following hypotheses on the social behavior of a state: the state will favor in-group countries, take win-win strategy with the group it identifies, and be prone to cooperation in bilateral relations; the state will take non-zero-sum strategy with out-group countries and choose partially participation and cooperation; for the out-group countries with high hostility, the state will take zero-sum strategy, and choose non-cooperation or conflict.The author divides the history of Chinese diplomacy (1949-2004) into four periods in terms of different identities, and tries to validate the above hypothesis through China's strategies in different periods. The process is as following: firstly, to define the identity of China in the period; secondly, to propose the specific hypothesis according to the identity; thirdly, to prove or falsify the hypothesis through positive or negative cases.From 1949 to 1956, China defined itself as a "socialist country". Therefore, China's foreign strategies will be as following: cooperative strategy with other socialist countries (in-group); rather cooperative strategy with nationalist countries (quasi in-group); and conflictive strategy with capitalist countries (out-group)."Leaning to One Side" strategy is the logical consequence of such identity definition. Meanwhile, China also advocated " Peaceful Coexistence" vigorously, which doesn't seem to fit with above hypothesis. However, the author thinks it is only a kind of tactic, which isn't contrary to the whole strategy.From 1957 to 1976, China redefined itself as a "revolutionary socialist country" because the Soviet Union was regarded as "the other" and classified to out-group during the process of Sino-Soviet polemics. So China's foreign strategies should also change correspondingly as following: cooperative strategy to so called revolutionary socialist countries (in-group); cooperative strategy to nationalist countries (quasi in-group); go on the conflictive strategy to capitalist countries (out-group); conflictive strategy to revisionist countries (out-group). As the redefinition of national identity, China turned Soviet Union from the closest ally into the most dangerous enemy...
Keywords/Search Tags:national identity, foreign strategy, in-group, out-group, cooperative, conflictive, China Threat Theory
PDF Full Text Request
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