Analysis Of The "vertical And Horizontal" Impact Strategy For China's Diplomacy

Although power is the intrinsic essence of international relations, there arealways divergences over the definition of “power”. In addition to power’s components,analyzing the construction process of power from dynamic perspective has become amore effective way to understand power. The process consists of twoelements—constructing path and constructing model. Through different paths ofinternal reforms, contracting alliances and waging wars, nations construct variouspower model.Traditional Chinese political thoughts contain rich power contents and theStrategy of “Making Vertical and Horizontal Alliances” in the Warring States Period isproved to be the most classic supporter of power theory in China. In order to preventQin from developing into a uni-polar hegemony and maintain multi-polar system, theother six states adopted the Strategy of “Making Vertical Alliances”, whose core idealies in contracting alliances, so as to reconstruct the power model. To resist pressurefrom the whole system, Qin worked out the Strategy of “Making HorizontalAlliances”, being aimed at eradicating power balance completely and becomingdominator of the world through “Divide-and-Conquer” path, whose main method isalso establishing alliances with other nations respectively.Although represents with different forms in different times, power construction isplaying a significant role all along. Nowadays, peace and development has becomethe theme of international interaction. China needs to continue learning the powerthoughts contained in the Strategy of “Making Vertical and Horizontal Alliances” anduse it for reference so that we can develop equal friendship with different nations bytaking more active actions and push the international system further towards thedirection of strengthening global win-win cooperation and collaborative governance...