Psychological Factor In Chinese Foreign Policy Making

This thesis tries to understand how misperceptions influence leaders' decision making of foreign policy.Traditional foreign policy analysis takes state as rational and unitary actor which can gain most with the least cost.At present,scholars have come to realize that the rational and unitary assumption of state is incomplete to explain the abundant events in the study of international politics and domestic politics is very much emphasized.The individual-level factors in influencing the decision making of foreign policy is an very important branch in foreign policy analysis.Bring individuals back into the study of foreign policy analysis stresses that the leaders are influenced by bounded rationality and misperception in their making of foreign policy and this thesis concentrates on the factors of misperception.Based on the research of social psychology,this thesis firstly puts foreword three assumptions of misperceptions in influencing leaders's decision making of foreign policy,namely Cognitive Consistency,the Unity of Cognition,Evoked Set.After that the author takes the the military cooperation between China and USSR of building long wave transmitter-receiver and establishing combined fleet in the middle and late 1950s as cases to examine the above-mentioned assumptions.Taking the conflicts between China and the USSR as cases,this thesis aims to point out the micro-level factors of misperceptions in influencing the leaders,namely Mao Zedong and khrushchev's foreign policy decision making.And the cultural factors which may result in misperceptions are also emphasized.Bring perception and misperception into the study of foreign policy making is of great importance for it may help to present the origins of states' conflicts and give us some hints to get rid of the misperceptions.Taken in this sense,the research of foreign policy making in the individual-level is quite necessary in contemporary international politics arena in which misperceptions often happen.