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As China continues to develop economically, scholars have speculated on the likelihood that China will emerge as a revisionist power and a serious challenger to US hegemony. The expectation is that an economically more powerful China will succumb to the structural realities of the system and seek to change the balance of power in its favor. However, these arguments underestimate the importance China has placed on becoming an international stakeholder as it joins more international organizations. Furthermore, it also ignores China’s foreign policy behavior and rhetoric â€" all of which suggest that in fact China is more of a status quo rather than a revisionist power. To understand its choice of alliances and to illustrate how certain norms and values shape its actions, this paper will adopt a constructivist analysis to explain China’s foreign policy behavior. More specifically we focus on China’s changing relationship with the Middle East, and argue that structural realism and mercantilism are not adequate for assessing China’s relations with selective states such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar. In each of these cases, China has a clear interest in furthering relations on the basis of its energy needs, but their ties are also complicated by the US’s current interests and exploits in the region. Despite these factors, China has not adopted policies where it pursues energy at a cost to its international reputation or where it will find itself in direct confrontation with the US. Instead, China has adapted its foreign policy behavior with the different Middle Eastern states in conformity with its abiding interests: to remain faithful to international norms while pursuing its geostrategic and economic interests. Thus, rather than overestimating the structure of the system and power politics as structural realists and mercantilists do, scholars must pay greater attention to the relationship between the second and third levels of analysis and build more bridges among these literatures to provide a new outlook on Chinese behavior in the Middle East. Constructivism not only offers that connection across levels of analysis, but is also less static in its approach and accounts for the changes in international norms, reflecting the social realities of the system. In our paper we examine the role of these geoeconomic interests and how norms, tied to China’s increasing role in international organizations, have encouraged Chinese foreign policy to be more flexible in the Middle East and avoid serious entanglements or conflicts with other global powers. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will examine the growing activism of the Chinese government and industry in international economic organizations as a window into how newly emerging powers interface with established regimes over which they originally had little role in forming. During the 1980s and 1990s, Chinese officialdom focused primarily on being admitted to organizations and then learning the basic rules and procedures of these institutions. More recently, the Chinese government has become more proactive in these regimes and for the first time Chinese industry has become involved. Using the cases of the World Trade Organization (WTO), International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the paper examines various factors that may shape their behavior, including Chinese power relative to that of other members, the institutions' rules and procedures, Chinese ability to learn and adapt to these institutions, and the relative congruity or incongruity of preferences between the Chinese government and Chinese industry. Data for this paper will come primarily from indepth structured interviews carried out in Beijing and Geneva in the Fall 2006 with officials and business executives from China and other countries, combined with primary written documents from government agencies and the Chinese media. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent events in Tibet, which started in the aftermath of Tibetan Uprising Day, i.e. March 10, 2008, dragging on for more than a month, seem to have taken the whole world by surprise. But how much of a surprise has it really been? Or, more exactly, sh ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After 9/11, the United States initiated a policy of enhancing national and global security in the maritime domain by strengthening international relationships in order to build a global maritime security framework to advance common security interests. Th ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The people in Hong Kong had been seen as a special branch of Chinese diasporas before 1997. After the handover of Hong Kong’s sovereignty, Beijing still wishes to highlight the unique status of the Hong Kong people as Chinese diasporas in the internationa ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As populations have grown and nations industrialized, the demand on a fix supply of water has grown exponentially, leading world leaders and international organizations to warn of increasing potential for conflict over shared water. Yet, our understandin ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When do international regimes achieve their desired goals? Existing explanations to this question can be divided among three general approaches: power-based, interest-based, and cognitive-based. While all three offer compelling explanations, each can only partially explain regime effectiveness because they fail to fully appreciate the distinction between the strategies of exit and defection. Importantly, these two strategies can have widely varying consequences for the functioning and effectiveness of regimes. When states crucial to the regime?s functioning prefer exit, external coercion or engagement becomes very difficult and the regime?s effectiveness suffers. Often, such cases are cited as instances of institutional failure when, in fact, the problem lies in factors beyond the reach of institutions. It is only after governments abandon exit that traditional institutional theory emphasizing repeated positive interactions, lower transaction costs, and incentives associated with coordinated behavior, etc., can be marshaled in order to encourage cooperation and bolster the strength of the regime. To illustrate our argument, we build a general model of exit, and then trace the evolution of China?s behavior in the nuclear nonproliferation regime, particularly the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). We demonstrate that the initial ?failure? of the regime with respect to China was, in fact, not a failure of weak institutions but an instance of state exit. We then trace how Beijing?s preferences shifted from exit to defection, and ultimately to cooperation, and how this shift had important consequences concerning the effectiveness of the regime. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]