June 2012
As the world continues to experience the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis, it is increasingly turning towards China. The outsourced ‘workshop of the world’ has become the world’s great hope for growth, and the source of the capital the West’s indebted economies so desperately need. Simultaneously, and in the United States in particular, commentators and policymakers have increasingly voiced concerns that the economic clout of a communist superpower might pose a threat to the liberal world order. These contradictory impulses – China as opportunity and China as threat – demonstrate one clear truth, exhibited in the Obama administration’s much-trailed ‘Asian pivot’: that China is important.
It is in this context that this report attempts to provide a systematic assessment of the economic bases of China’s foreign policy and the challenges the country faces as it makes the transition from rising power to superpower. In doing so, it is informed by a central question, of to what extent China’s remarkable growth has given rise to a geoeconomic strategy for China’s future.
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Contents
Executive Summary
|Nicholas Kitchen, Editor, IDEAS Reports
China’s International Future
|Odd Arne Westad
Does China have a Foreign Policy? Domestic Pressures and China’s Strategy
|Jonathan Fenby
Access: China’s Resource Foreign Policy
|Shaun Breslin
China as a Trading Superpower
|Xiaojun Li
Firms with Chinese Characteristics: The Role of Companies in Chinese Foreign Policy
|Jie (Cherry) Yu
China’s Strategy towards the Financial Crisis and Economic Reform
|Linda Yueh
China’s Approach to US debt and the Eurozone crisis
|Nicola Casarini
What Power Shift to China?
|Guy de Jonquières