Research On The Party Diplomacy Of The Communist Party Of China From The Perspective Of Social Identity Theory

With the trend of globalization, various new forms of diplomacy are on the rise, and diplomacy is characterized by multiple forms and all-dimensional development. The rise of political party diplomacy is a reflection of important changes taking place in the field of diplomacy. From state-to-state relations to contacts between ordinary peoples, from topics of "high politics" such as war and peace to economic, social and cultural topics of "low politics", from bilateral relations between two states to global issues, political party diplomacy assumes an increasingly important and irreplaceable role, and shakes the traditional diplomacy model in which the governments of sovereign states play a central role. Actually, ever since its establishment, the Communist Party of China (hereby referred to as the CPC) has already started the international contacts. However, speaking of its meaningful political party diplomacy, which is focus on the state relations, its can only be dated back to the founding of People's Republic of China when the CPC started the diplomatic relationship with foreign political parties of all types as the ruling party. And especially after the reform and opening up, the diplomacy of the CPC has achieved considerable progress in scope, content and forms and a comprehensive, multi-channel, wide-ranging and deep-seated political party diplomacy with Chinese characteristics has developed into maturity as new pattern. This development also reveals the procedure for CPC to update the self-awareness and re-understanding of the world as the ruling party with different historical conditions. With the enhancement of China's national strength, the most important sigh for China's rising international status is the increasing recognition of the Chinese Communist Party's identity in the international community. The different options of its identity made by the CPC in different historical periods determine the ideology and methodology of the Party on how to observe and understand the world as well as how to act and deal with the relationship with the existing world.In recent years, in the social sciences and humanities fields, "identity" has aroused growing interest of researchers. Ever since the 90s of the 20th century, constructivism introduced the concepts of culture, identity, ideas and other factors as a whole into the research on international relations so as to provide a new approach in analyzing and interpreting the changes in international relations. Theory of social identity follows this approach to expand the study from psychology to international relations. According to Social Identity Theory (SIT). how the individuals and groups constructs its identity among the group categorization. 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, SIT concludes:the identity of individuals or groups will lead to in-group favoritism and out-group hostility. We could make the following hypotheses on the social behavior of the individuals and groups:the individuals and groups will favor in-group parties, take win-win strategy with the group it identifies, and be prone to cooperation in bilateral relations; the individuals and groups will favor quasi-in-group parties and choose partially participation and cooperation, the bilateral relations will be in low possibility of conflict; the individuals and groups will take non-zero-sum strategy with out-group parties and choose partially participation and cooperation; for the out-group parties with high hostility, the individuals and groups will take zero-sum strategy, and choose non-cooperation or conflict.Modern international relations are accompanied by the recognition of identity of the nation-state and the related theories generally use the state as the basic unit of analysis. Speaking of the current scenario of China, the CPC takes the leadership of the national and social life in the political system with Chinese characteristics and the Party also plays different role compared with the ruling parties of Western countries. Since the founding of New China, principles of "Foreign Affairs is no small matter," "Foreign affairs is of limited authority " has been running China's diplomatic system and been reflected in practice by the principle of "party control diplomacy". The leadership of the CPC in foreign affairs is often represented by the principle of "diplomatic power in the central," which means the CPC Central Committee has the highest decision-making authority in formulating the major foreign policy. Therefore, the basic ideas of social identity theory can be applied to the analysis in the study of political party diplomacy centered with the CPC diplomacy. Since the founding of the PRC in 1949, the practice of the political party diplomacy in China has experienced several transformations with the changes of the identity of the CPC. It is therefore this paper would like to introduce social identity theory to study the evolution of the identity-based CPC diplomacy.As a proletarian political party, the CPC's external contacts are guided by Marxist classical writers' basic theory of inter-party relations. Before the establishment of new China, the CPC has already begun to learn how to deal with the outside world. From the perspective of the revolutionary party, the CPC started to contact the Comintern, the Soviet Communist Party and the Communist Party of the Asian neighboring countries directly to seek international sympathy and wide support for the Chinese revolution. The reform and opening up in China has divided into two major historical periods for the CPC diplomacy. And the identity choices by the CPC in the two periods also reflect different characteristics. To be specific, the CPC identity choice before 1978 had obvious export-oriented features under the guidance of the "world revolution", which was defined in the interaction of the international community (Under the influence of various factors at home and abroad, this interaction is presented in a passive, non-benign manner), and the positioning of identity is clearly experienced the transformation from the "socialist family members "to" proletarian internationalism party ". After 1978. however, the CPC spared more attention to domestic construction, which also experienced a procedure from backward to catching up the trend of modernization by concentrating on economic construction to enhance the economic strength and finally assumed self-confidence as the ruling party in China. Derived from the internal pursuit for development, the CPC steadily broke the ideological limit in external contacts, the CPC pay more attention to the national interests in dealings with foreign affairs, especially economic interests.This leads to the CPC's identity happened new changes. Correctly speaking is after the adjustment of the dilution of challenger's consciousness and the improvement of participator's consciousness the CPC establish the new identity, which is from the identity keen on national interests to the ruling party of the great state in the peaceful rise.This paper sorted the CPC diplomacy from the perspective of history, starting from the pre-founding of the new China when the identity of CPC was still a revolutionary party, and then divided the history of the CPC diplomacy into the following four period from the identity dimension and different diplomatic strategies: the CPC's political party diplomatic of membership of the socialist family (1949-1956), the CPC's political party diplomatic of identity of party of proletarian internationalism (1957-1976), the CPC's political party diplomatic of the identity keen on national interests (1977-2002) and the CPC's political party diplomatic of the ruling party of the great state in the peaceful rise (2003-present). At the same time, this paper elaborates on the identity selection process, setting of the strategies in foreign affairs and the practice of the CPC diplomacy by analyzing detailed historical data for different historic periods, trying to represent the developments the CPC diplomacy in the past more than 60 years after the new China was founded in an all-round way.