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Is China committed to peaceful rise? Debating how to secure core interests in China

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Abstract

With China’s rise, many argue that its foreign policy has been increasingly assertive. A principal aspect of this assertiveness is to secure China’s “core interests”—a term that suggests a non-negotiable bottom line of Chinese foreign policy and has been increasingly used by the Chinese government to legitimate its diplomatic claim. Built on a previous study on how China perceives core interests, this article analyses how China aims to secure its core interests by using content analysis to study 108 Chinese academic articles concerning “China’s core interests”. It identifies six major suggestions to secure China’s core interests: diplomacy, military cooperation, military modernization, economic cooperation, economic influence, and domestic reform. It finds that, when discussing how to secure China’s core interests, diplomacy is still the most popular solution followed by the suggestion to develop a stronger military power. This article argues that the diverse (and sometimes contrary) views on China’s national security strategy have made it difficult to predict and test the credibility of China’s peaceful rise commitment.

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Notes

  1. The original term is “peaceful rise”. As people tend to focus on “rise” instead of peace, the Chinese official discourses replaced “rise” with “development”.

  2. For example, cited from Zhou (2013), Zhu (2012). Similarly, some argue that the grand strategy of “keeping a low profile” is not conducive to protect China’s core interests. For example, see Guo (2013).

  3. https://sites.google.com/site/zengjinghan/data.

  4. The interviews were conducted in April 2015 and May 2016.

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Acknowledgement

The author is very grateful to the research support of Yuefan Xiao and Shaun Breslin. He would also like to thank Yinan He and the Editor of International Politics Michael Cox for their valuable comments on earlier versions of the article. All mistakes are the responsibility of the author.

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  1. Department of Politics and International Relations, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey, TW20 0EX, UK

    Jinghan Zeng

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Zeng, J. Is China committed to peaceful rise? Debating how to secure core interests in China. Int Polit 54, 618–636 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-017-0055-7

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