Geopolitical Analysis Of The Relations Of China And Western Europe

The post Cold War era was known as a period of restructuring and repositioning the world’s powers. Since then, China and Western Europe, located in the two ends of the Eurasia, have already become important forces in the multi-polarized world. The historical inevitability gave rise to the special geopolitical relationship between them. In a world whose pattern is undergoing the tremendous changes, this paper, based on Marx’basic standpoints of dialectical materialism and historical materialism, collected comprehensively the existing research achievements both at home and abroad. And it also analyzed the geopolitical relationship of China and Western Europe by historical comparative method from the perspective of history, law, and prediction of the future to find the scientific philosophy, theory, and regularity to better guide China to deal with international relations and to draw up its foreign policy.The first chapter is an introduction that summarized the related geopolitical concepts and defined the geopolitical discipline. Besides, it introduced classical representatives in the filed of geopolitics and their theories, and expounded the research background, content and significance of the research in this paper.The second chapter analyzed the differences between these two kinds of system in the context of the political geographical reality of China and Western Europe. While, Western Europe, located in western end of the Eurasia, is typically of the coastal regions of Europe and geographically marine environment by large, while China has the shared characteristics of geographical environment of ocean and continent. Those different geographic realities and circumstances affected the formation of their political system, economic development and civilization, playing a even more important role in the formulation of their geostrategic policy.The third chapter explored Western European understandings for China’s geopolitics from the history of tradition, national geographic psychology in a long term, and analyzed China’s special understandings of Western European geopolitics from China’s cultural tradition, history and its national psychology. As a result, we can obtain the process of development of their geopolitical views. After having analyzed comparatively the Chinese and Western civilization traditions, we found that the basic feature of their civilizations-the spirit of dialogue. They contained the mutual coordination and integration in the collisions and kept the national culture characteristics even though sometimes they contains the mutual collision or even have direct confrontations.The fourth chapter pointed out that there was more or less contacts between Chinese and Western European civilizations in different periods of time. They conflicted in the collisions, fused in the conflicts, and developed in the fusions. The relationship between China and Western Europe has undergone a series of evolutions in the collision of two different civilizations. And the paper described in great details the development of their relations and the characteristic of the four stages according to the time order, that is, prior to1500period,1500～1949, the cold war period and the one after the reform and opening up.The fifth chapter examined the status of the relations of China and Western Europe in the global geopolitical structure by analyzing the evolutions, development and trend of three groups’ relations, and details the importance and influence of the relations of China and Western Europe on the background of three important relations:China-Russia-Western Europe, China-USA-Western Europe, China-EU.The sixth chapter outlined the significance and implementation strategy of creating geopolitical strategy system with Chinese characteristics by self-examination, analysis, comparison, and summary, through which we can scientifically forecast the geopolitical relations of China and Western Europe in the global pattern via not only innovatively sketching out a blueprint of geopolitical strategy for China’s peaceful development but also looking to the future and focusing on the overall situation. We must take into account geographical factors influencing on the political economy to construct the developing strategies and politics based on the geopolitical theory for achieving the strategic goal that protecting our political and economic interests in the period of China’s reform and opening-up.This study attempted to understand the strategic position of China and provide some perspectives for strengthening the contacts and cooperation between China and European countries, and summarized theoretical reference and practical guidance for Chinese peaceful development.