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The paper examines China's foreign relations from the perspective of national identity. It primarilly focuses on the deficiencies in concentrating solely on Chinese nationalism within such a dynamic, and, suggests that a broader approach to national identity will provide us with new insight into how this facet of Chinese politics is being constructed. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In April 2005, tens of thousands of anti-Japanese protesters took to the streets of China's largest cities, condemning Japan's textbook revisions, its U.N. Security Council bid, and its claim to resources in the waters between China and Japan. The anti-Japanese protests demonstrated the capacity for mass collective action among China's urban elite and potentially laid the groundwork for future challenges to the government itself. Given the risk to regime stability that these demonstrations posed, why did China's authoritarian leaders permit the anti-Japanese protests to go on for weeks before reining them in? The 2005 Chinese protests are just one illustration of a larger puzzle: when will authoritarian leaders allow and even encourage anti-foreign protests, and when will they seek to prevent or crack down upon anti-foreign demonstrations? In this paper, which presents the preliminary results of my dissertation fieldwork, I suggest that the government's decision to allow anti-foreign protests in April 2005 was a strategic choice--to use the specter of domestic instability and the escalating costs of domestic repression to gain leverage over Japan on the UN Security Council negotiations. Contrary to the standard literature on audience costs, I suggest that authoritarian governments can indeed generate credible signals vis-à-vis the decision to allow nationalistic protests. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The call for a Chinese school of international relations arises from the alleged inability of existing theories to explain the Chinese experience—China's Confucian culture has produced a fundamentally different experience from that of the West. The central question of this article is thus: To what extent does Confucian culture influence China's use of military force against external security threats? By examining Song China's relations with the Liao empire during the crucial years of 960-1005, I argue that, despite having a pacifist Confucian culture, China has been acting like a realist power in Asia, expanding its political and military interests as its power grew. By doing so, this article makes the case against Chinese exceptionalism. Chinese use of force was rooted in the structure of the system; culture played a supplementary role in China's military policy. Despite having different cultures, the Chinese experience was no less different from that of the West: both were driven by the anarchic structure of the system. I consult primary documents in the Chinese archives, supplemented by secondary literature, and examine the decision-making process leading up to the use or non-use of force. Contrary to what is widely believed, China had behaved according to the dictates of structural realism. It had preferred to use force to resolve external threats to Chinese security, adopted a more offensive posture as its power grew, and expanded war aims in the absence of systemic or military constraints. In the end, Western IR theory does a reasonably good job of explaining the Chinese experience. There is little need for a Chinese school of international relations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of China's international relations scholars, after a period of intensive study of Western international relations theory, have begun to call for the development of a distinctive Chinese theory of international relations. For many, the distinctive content of the Chinese School would be anchored in Confucian culture, Chinese history, and classical texts, as well as a substantive focus on contemporary China's "peaceful rise" to a position of benign regional leadership in East Asia. If developed in a rigorous and open-minded fashion, this project might spur fresh insights on important issues and enrich the corpus of international relations theory more generally. But there is also a risk that a monolithic Chinese School could produce a stultifying uniformity, intellectual cheerleading for government policies, and an ideological justification for a blinkered Chinese nationalism that hinders rather than expands understanding. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why does the Chinese government sometimes allow and sometimes suppress nationalist, anti-foreign demonstrations, and what are the consequences of this choice for China's international relations? I suggest that anti-foreign protests in authoritarian systems are like "audience costs," a source of bargaining leverage in diplomatic negotiations. The mechanism, however, is new. The risk that anti-foreign protests will turn against the government, combined with the escalating costs of making international concessions, enable authoritarian leaders to signal resolve and credibly claim that their hands are tied by domestic constraints. This finding has important implications for research on domestic politics and international relations, since it suggests a mechanism by which public opinion can influence the foreign policy of authoritarian regimes. I utilize a "natural experiment" to test the argument, comparing the occurrence of anti-Japanese protest over the period 1978-2005 in Hong Kong and mainland China, with Hong Kong serving as the control group. To further illustrate, I present a case study of the 2005 anti-Japanese protests in China and the negotiations over U.N. Security Council reform, drawing upon more than 100 interviews with nationalist activists, protest participants, and government officials in China, Japan and Hong Kong. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1980s, changing national identities have transformed the China-Taiwan and Korean conflicts. Democratization in Taiwan and South Korea, and liberalization in China, have forced leaders to compete for popular legitimacy by appealing to national identities. Along with the collapse of the Soviet Union, these contested national identities have been the main factors driving change in the conflicts—pushing China and Taiwan inexorably apart and toward a showdown, while helping to sustain what appeared to be a mortally wounded North Korea. This explains why one U.S. ally, Taiwan, has become more hawkish, while the other, South Korea, has turned more dovish. These foreign policy changes, in turn, have reinforced changes in underlying national identities. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the fundamental aspects of China's unification with Taiwan using survey data collected in Taiwan. The researcher considers the island residents' changing national identity and policy preferences regarding Taiwan's future relations with China. The survey revealed that less than 10% of the residents subscribe to the greater Chinese nationalism, while the majority of them sees the island as an independent and separate political entity from the Chinese mainland.