China's Foreign Relations Involved In The Research Of The Place

With the background of globalization and Peaceful Development, China local departmentshave reached a new level of participating in the international linkages. However, theacademic gap between domestic and international political studies makes the research oflocal participation a new IR research direction. Meanwhile, the mutual transformation ofthe domestic and international systems calls for theoretical contribution. A large number ofthe foreign affairs archives, official documents, statistics and related works of localparticipation in the international affairs make this study possible and feasible. This studyproposed that Central-Local relations, Internal and External relations and Local to Localrelations are the critical factors in local participation. In order to make a comprehensiveunderstanding of China’s local participation in foreign relations, this dissertation wasmainly divided into three parts. The first part is theoretical review, in which Multi-levelGovernance theory and Functionalism both are covered as their advocating the competitivecooperation between central and local, and theories from Political Sociology are alsomentioned though they cannot provide final solutions to the target problems of this study.Based on this review, we brought forth a new concept-"limited participation actor"-and itsexplanation in IR. At the same time, we made the comparative studies between China andWestern Countries and case studies to defense the theoretical study and clarify thecharacteristics of local participation in the organization of China’s international linkages.The second part is comparative studies between Chinese and western models of localparticipation in foreign relations, especially with Germany which represents the federalstates. This study aims to verify: the Central-local cooperation policy bias in organizinginternational linkages; In the practice of the internal and external relations the coordinateddevelopment of China realize the optimization of domestic and international systemconstruction; Local diversity of China contains the Local-local cooperation, through theinternationalization of the coastal economic sub-region, the international cooperation of theborder provinces and autonomous regions, the non-central government representativeoffices abroad and the activities of international organization in China.