China’s evolving role in global governance: The AIIB and the limits of an alternative international order (original) (raw)

China's Place in Regional and Global Governance: A New World Comes Into View

Global Policy, 2016

The 'rise of China' means that – once again – China plays a pivotal role in international affairs. China's economic weight and growing political influence means that its foreign policies and the ideas that shape them have major consequences for established ideas about 'global governance'. Rather than accepting the institutional and ideational status quo, however, Chinese policy makers are actively trying to develop a new international order through the creation of new institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and the 'One Belt, One Road' blueprint for international trade and investment centered on China. The paper explains how this process is developing and assesses its implications for the extant international order.

INCREASING ROLE OF CHINA IN GLOBAL GOVERNANCE: VIVIAN, KAIMENYI

china and global governance, 2019

This paper examines China’s evolving role in global governance with explicit examples. China’s development has massive consequences for how the world is administrated. The sheer size of the country means the effect of its activities inevitably spills over its borders. Beyond that, it’s evident that the Chinese government has been actively involved in a number of policy areas to defend china’s expanding national interest and intensify its status in the world. With all these in mind, china’s rapid growth into a super power means that it has some international, legal and additional responsibilities.

China challenges global governance? Chinese international development finance and the AIIB

International Affairs, 2018

Scholars and policy-makers have been increasingly debating the potential impact of rising powers on the architecture and outputs of global governance, with particular reference to China-the most important emerging power. 1 This discussion overlaps with a broader debate over whether China is a 'status quo' power that will maintain the post-Second World War 'international liberal order', or a 'revisionist' state seeking to overturn this order. 2 Much of this debate has focused on existing multilateral institutions, where 'gridlock' is frequently blamed on rising powers' obsession with state sovereignty and/or demands for greater status and respect for their interests and agendas. 3 Many perceive a growing challenge to US domination of these institutions, and a tendency to establish new ones that 'perform a similar function' but are more responsive to emerging powers' demands. 4 This is taken by some to denote a growing challenge to the international liberal order, particularly from China. 5

Will the Rise of China Transform the International System

In this article, the rise of China is discussed in the light of economic and military data, and what the challenge from China means for the global leadership of the U.S. is analyzed. Changes in the indicators of the U.S. and China's economic and military power over the last 30-40 years are examined and an answer is sought for the following question: What will the consequences of China's rise be in terms of the international political system? To answer this question, similar 'rise and challenge' precedents are discussed to contextualize and analyze and the present challenge China poses. This article concludes that while improving its global status, China has been taking the previous cases' failed challenges into consideration. China, which does not want to repeat the mistakes made by Germany and the Soviet Union, is hesitant to pursue an aggressive military policy and tries to limit its rivalry with the U.S. in the economic area. While Chinese policy of avoiding direct conflict and focusing on economic development has made it the biggest economic rival of the U.S, the rise of China initiates the discussions about the end of the U.S. and West-led international system.

The Great Rejuvenation? China’s Search for a New ‘Global Order’

This Asia Paper explores how China, a ‘partial’ global power, can set the agenda and determine the rules in a global order dominated by a declining yet unyielding global power. In exploring this question, we present the argument that building ‘alternative’ regional and global institutions might be a safer strategy for China. Further, it examines how China is through institutions, such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) incrementally delimiting its sphere of influence and shaping other states’ actions in Asia.

China’s Institutional Challenges to the International Order

2017

This article examines one critical but understudied question: how does China challenge the international order through multilateral institutions? By integrating institutional balancing theory in international relations (IR) and prospect theory in behavioral psychology, this article introduces a “prospect-institutional balancing” model to explain how China has utilized two types of institutional balancing strategies to challenge the US-led international order. We argue that China is more likely to use inclusive institutional balancing to challenge the United States in an area where it has a relatively advantageous status, such as the economic and trade arena. When China faces a security challenge with disadvantageous prospects, it is more likely to take risks to conduct exclusive institutional balancing against the United States. Using China’s policy choices in the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CI...

After Unipolarity: China's Visions of International Order in an Era of US Decline

International Security, 2011

The post-Cold War era was a brief and uncertain period. As Condoleezza Rice observes, "We knew better where we had been than where we were going." 1 Whereas the sudden peace that broke out in the late 1980s had been unexpected, the exuberant idealism that followed was all too predictable. Realism was pronounced dead, and the future of international politics became legalized, cosmopolitanized, and network globalized. Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the world does not appear so easily transformed, or history so easily escaped. 3 Even unipolarity, which seemed strangely durable only a few years ago, appears today as a "passing moment"-one that most realists predicted. 4 Although the United States remains the lone superpower, it is no longer a hyperpower towering over poten-After Unipolarity govern the international system, the nature of that order (its social purpose), and how that order will be provided (whether by means of coercive or legitimate authority). 8 The main causal driver of Robert Gilpin's theory of hegemonic war and international change is the law of uneven rates of growth among states, which redistributes power in the international system. Hegemonic wars concentrate power in the hands of one victorious state, in whose interests a new international order is established. For a time, roughly twenty-ªve years, there is little disjuncture between actual power and prestige, and so the international order remains stable and legitimate. Over time, however, the law of uneven growth diffuses power throughout the system. As the hegemon's competitors grow more powerful, their dissatisfaction with the status quo, ambitions, and demands for prestige and inºuence grow as well. Prestige, however, tends to be sticky: reputations for power, divisions of territory, and the institutional architecture of the international order do not move in lockstep with changes in power. When a large enough disjuncture arises, the system enters a state of disequilibrium. 9 Eventually, serious international crises ensue, as spectacular growth in the economic and military capabilities of rising powers triggers "intense competition among countries for resources and markets, military power, political inºuence, and prestige." 10 Dramatic shifts in power also engender security dilemmas. Whatever their true intentions, rapidly growing states often appear as threats to their neighbors, as well as to the hegemon and its allies. 11

From Engagement to Contention: China in the Global Political Economy

Perceptions, 2013

China’s re-engagement with the global political economy and its unprecedented ascendance as a major economic powerhouse since the mid-1990s has shaken the global community and triggered a radical re-evaluation concerning China’s importance for the future of the world economy and global governance. There has emerged a large amount of optimistic literature portraying China as the principal engine of growth in the world economy in the wake of the global economic crisis, along with parallel and more pessimistic literature on the Chinese administration’s supposed sinister geostrategic “intensions” based on its anti-Western inclinations. This study argues that both these strands of writing in economics, development studies, political science and international relations literatures need to be treated with great caution as they tend to exaggerate the positive and negative aspects of China’s systemtransforming capacity. Although China has become a crucial actor in the areas of global trade, finance and production, its current growth capacity is based on deep interdependence with Western interests and multinational corporations. Also, widespread fears of China as a potential source of challenge against global governance structures are premature as China is dealing with deep-stated internal problems, such as rapid urbanization, socio-economic dislocation, income disparities, environmental degradation, etc., which at least in the medium term will impose system-conforming behavior on international platforms.

Rethinking the Rise of China and Its Implications on International Order

Chinese Journal of International Review, 2020

The rise of China has become a central debate in the academic field of international relations. In the Western world, the scholars within this debate can roughly be divided into the 'pessimists' and the 'optimists'. The pessimists see in the rise of China an inevitable hegemonic war, or at least prolonged and intense zero-sum competition, with the US as it will seek to replace the latter and overturn the existing liberal international order. The optimists, on the other hand, see an opportunity for sustained Western dominance through selective accommodation of China in exchange for Chi-na's acceptance of the existing norms and values of the liberal international order and continued US dominance. In this paper, we maintain that both perspectives in the debate are misleading. We argue that China seeks to push for a multipolarized world rather than replacing the US, and that Beijing prefers the relations between the great powers within a multipolar order to be based on the conception of a 'community of common destiny for human-kind'. We also argue that China is unlikely to accept the existing norms and values of the liberal international order as they reflect and reinforce Western dominance. Rather, China has become an 'order-shaper' seeking to reform the existing institutions to better reflect the interests of the 'Rest', and establish