| I contend that the literature on China and multilateral institutions lacks a comprehensive understanding of why China has decided to join key multilateral institutions. Generally speaking, the literature on China tends to favor neo-realist analysis, focusing on the importance of relative gains to China's decisions. In addition, the literature on multilateral institutions focuses on China's impact on the institution or the institution's impact on China, after admission. Furthermore, works on China that take a multi-causal approach are dated, concentrate on factors at only two levels, or are not applied to Chinese multilateralism. Instead, I take a foreign policy approach, which focuses on the influences of international, state-societal, and leadership factors. I explore the relevance of these factors by looking at five different instances of China's choice to incorporate multilateralism into its foreign policy, specifically, China's decision to join the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the World Trade Organization, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. As China has modernized and liberalized, single factor explanations of its foreign policy no longer suffice. I hypothesize that Chinese foreign policy decisions are impacted by factors at all three levels of analysis. In addition, there are differences in the strength of influencing factors depending on the issue area. Based on the current literature, in the security area, I hypothesize that leadership influences dominate the decision to join multilateral institutions. In the economic realm, because of increasing liberalization, international and state-societal influences are most important. I use a three-step methodology, involving the English language literature, the Chinese language literature and interviews, and confirmation forms, to systematically determine which influences are considered to be important by Chinese experts and generalists. The results are mixed. Support exists for the first hypothesis. However, the evidence does not sustain the hypothesis that leadership influences dominate in the security realm. Furthermore, for economic decisions, state, societal and international influences prove important, but leadership factors are equally as influential. |
