Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

China's “Major Country Diplomacy”: Legitimation and Foreign Policy Change

China's “Major Country Diplomacy”: Legitimation and Foreign Policy Change This paper probes China's official political concept of “Major Country Diplomacy with Chinese Characteristics” to argue that the boundaries of legitimate state action have been dramatically expanded since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012. Building on Patrick Jackson's transactional social constructivism, I place the causal mechanism in China's new assertiveness in seminal changes to how Chinese elites legitimize their country's role in global politics. Drawing upon elite speeches, Party documents, and Chinese-language scholarship between 2013 and 2019, I show how new legitimation strategies are used to justify China's effort to proactively reform international order, engage in ideological competition with the West, and assume greater responsibility for global affairs in accordance with its elevated power and status. The boundaries of action sanctioned by this new discourse are likely to persist in the short to medium term, with implications for regional order in Asia and beyond. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Foreign Policy Analysis Oxford University Press

China's “Major Country Diplomacy”: Legitimation and Foreign Policy Change

Foreign Policy Analysis , Volume 17 (2): 1 – Feb 16, 2021

Loading next page...
 
/lp/oxford-university-press/china-s-major-country-diplomacy-legitimation-and-foreign-policy-change-faRw8TpWzU

References (92)

Publisher
Oxford University Press
Copyright
© The Author(s) (2021). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Studies Association.
ISSN
1743-8586
eISSN
1743-8594
DOI
10.1093/fpa/orab002
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

This paper probes China's official political concept of “Major Country Diplomacy with Chinese Characteristics” to argue that the boundaries of legitimate state action have been dramatically expanded since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012. Building on Patrick Jackson's transactional social constructivism, I place the causal mechanism in China's new assertiveness in seminal changes to how Chinese elites legitimize their country's role in global politics. Drawing upon elite speeches, Party documents, and Chinese-language scholarship between 2013 and 2019, I show how new legitimation strategies are used to justify China's effort to proactively reform international order, engage in ideological competition with the West, and assume greater responsibility for global affairs in accordance with its elevated power and status. The boundaries of action sanctioned by this new discourse are likely to persist in the short to medium term, with implications for regional order in Asia and beyond.

Journal

Foreign Policy AnalysisOxford University Press

Published: Feb 16, 2021

There are no references for this article.