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Evaluates the various factors that influence the relationship between mainland China and Taiwan. Details on international factors; Factors originating in mainland China; Factors arising from developments within Taiwan.

Examines issues surrounding the national unity and territorial integrity of Taiwan. Significance of national reunification of China and Taiwan; Discussion on the civil war started by the Kuomintang; Position of the Chinese government regarding the settlement of the Taiwan question.

As China's aid has increased, so has scrutiny by the international development and foreign policy community. Despite recognition that foreign aid policy is a result of domestic political contests, the existing literature tends to overlook Chinese debates about the purpose of aid, and how that purpose should be achieved. This paper argues that examining these debates shows that Chinese aid is not a well-considered element of an overarching strategy. Rather, where foreign aid is considered relevant vis-à-vis China's goals, its use is hotly contested. Competing actors' varying agendas, rather than any coherent strategy, underpin inchoate aid projects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

China's engagement with global capitalism is driven by the emergence of a statist and private transnational capitalist class. Nevertheless, aspects of China's foreign policy from the Maoist period still echo today. Consequently, elements of third world solidarity and opposition to Western domination continue to exist as China's past is redefined to further its transnational strategies in Latin America and the US. The main Chinese investments in South America have been in energy and infrastructure among the left lead countries of the Pink Tide. In the US, Chinese capital has grown despite heated political rhetoric. This paper will examine how economic ties in South and North America reflect past and present conditions, and if China has initiated a non-Western globalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to explore the interrelationship between a country's sanction experience, perception, and behavior. The analysis focuses on the case of China, which is one of very few countries that have not only undergone a number of significant economic sanctions but also have experience of imposing economic sanctions upon others. All historical cases of major economic sanctions against China, as well as cases of Chinese economic sanctions against other countries, are examined. A comparison between China's sanction experience and sanction behavior points to a connection between the two: all strategic sanctions in history against China failed, and correspondingly, China rarely employed strategic sanctions against others. In parallel, most tactical sanctions against China were successful, and coincidentally, China has been much more open to using or threatening to use tactical sanctions in its own practice. The findings of this analysis offer an opportunity for Western policy practitioners to reconsider their approach of engaging China in order to improve future coordination and cooperation in multilateral economic sanctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to analyse the evolution of Sino-Italian relations from the foundation of the PRC to the end of the Cold War, with a special focus on the construction of the official relationship from 1970 to 1992. The article has been divided into three parts: a critical reflection on the historical context that set the ground for the evolution of Sino-Italian relations between the 1950s and the 1970s; an assessment of the historical impact of normalisation; and a reconstruction of the main dynamics in bilateral relations between 1970 and 1992. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The rise of China has aroused much concern and anxiety around the world. This has complicated China's foreign policy objective of securing a peaceful international environment for domestic reforms and development. Accordingly, reassuring the world of the benign nature of China's rise has become a central feature of China's foreign policy. This paper describes and analyses China's efforts in this regard. First, it outlines the central features of such efforts which constitute a policy of reassurance. Then it explores the major factors shaping the policy. Finally it tries to assess the result of the policy and speculate about its future development. It is hoped that this will help gain a better understanding of China's foreign policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rise of China, the importance of understanding Chinese nationalism increases. Assessing Chinese nationalism, many people claim that it has grown stronger and more intense in recent years. Some believe that this is the case because the Chinese Government deliberately promotes nationalism to serve its own purposes. This paper argues that the reality with Chinese nationalism is much more complicated than many assume. It has grown stronger in some respects but weaker in others. The role of the Chinese Government is at best mixed. In explaining the development of Chinese nationalism, one needs to look at external as well as internal and historical causes. Only by doing so can one gain a fuller and more balanced understanding of this intriguing phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With China's reintegration into the international system its involvement in multilateral initiatives, interactions with international institutions, and participation in global governance have become integral parts of Chinese foreign policy. Chinese scholars have conducted a great deal of research on these topics. The first stage of Chinese scholars' research centered on China's multilateral diplomacy and the interaction between China and international institutions, while the second stage focused on China's participation in global governance. Although some scholars have made substantial achievements, in general, most of the research only interprets the ideas and policies related to global governance proposed by the Chinese government, and has not explained China's strategies and actions in global governance. Furthermore, Chinese scholars provide little analysis on the dynamics of China's participation in different issue areas. Many scholars have articulated a series of policy recommendations, but no specific measures have been suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role of subnational actors in China's foreign aid. It applies the terms of 'decentralized cooperation' and 'twinning' into the analysis of China's aid architecture, drawing a connection between aid and domestic politics. With evidence from East Africa, it argues that it is the endogenous twinning mechanism and the deep involvement of subnational actors that make Chinese aid structurally distinct from those of other donors, particularly in the area of health, agriculture and education. It finds that the involvement of subnational actors brings in more resources for the sustainability of China's aid programs, while the multiple faces and institutional capacity of subnational Chinese actors giving aid may require further examination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discerns the shifts in China's engagement with its Western neighbour, Afghanistan. Beijing's approach has gradually shifted from dis-interest to a careful re-calibration of strategy indicating Afghanistan's growing eminence in its strategic calculus. This transposition – dating back to the 1980's – it is argued has been accentuated as the 'West' weans itself away from the Afghan theatre. This article demonstrates that Beijing's chequered history of engagement with Kabul has been historically underpinned by its engagement with a plethora of actors identified with 'political Islam' who in turn are patronized by its allies in Rawalpindi. Its deepening footprint in contemporary Afghanistan while continuing to be coloured by the prism of Rawalpindi, is informed by a growing sense of unease regarding the perceived adverse imprint that developments across China's Western borders are likely to leave on its domestic security and growing economic interests in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

观察国际和外交问题的视角与观念变化，是中华人民共和国外交史研究中尚需探讨和梳理的课题。在新中国成立后的前30年，中国外交深受在革命过程中形成的外交观念的影响。其基本诉求是建立新型外交关系，核心观念是独立自主与和平，外交政策的基石是和平共处五项原则；此外，国际统一战线策略，对现实世界的战略划分，以及对战争、和平与革命的思考亦对这一时期的外交政策具有重大影响。自20世纪70年代末实行改革开放以来，中国外交转以发展为视角，配合国家经济建设这一中心任务，做出一系列战略和政策调整。中国对国际形势作出和平与发展的新判断，对独立自主的和平外交政策作了新诠释，致力于建立均衡的对外关系，主张以渐进方式推动国际秩序的改进，决心走和平发展道路。中国由此成为现存国际秩序的参与者和建设者。进入21世纪，中国成为令世界瞩目的新兴大国，外交观念也在继承以往的基础上与时俱进。中国强调当代世界是命运共同体，谋求与各国的合作、共赢 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China’s aggressive rise and strained relations with its Asia-Pacific neighbours—a region with immense economic and strategic potential—have forced the US to forge a strategy of Asian rebalance. Besides making China suspicious, this strategy has aroused the possibility of a new cold war. In contrast, though India’s relations with China have improved considerably since the 1962 War, the unresolved border issue and the threatening Chinese attitude do not allow India to trust China. To deal with the Chinese threat, India has devised a Look East, Act East engagement policy as well as developed close economic and strategic relations with the US and its Asia-Pacific allies. Although the concern of strategic autonomy deters India from being an active partner of US strategy, China’s all-weather friendship with Pakistan and encirclement through infrastructure in its neighbourhood as well as Xi Jinping’s Chinese dream have left limited options for India. Therefore, this article aims to analyse the implications of US re-involvement in the Asia-Pacific and India’s role therein—particularly its concerns regarding this strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Soft power has become China’s new diplomatic tool to spread its influence in today’s changing international landscape. The establishment of Confucius Institutes (CIs) since 2004 to promote the understanding of Chinese language and culture is a striking example of how the government promotes soft power through cultural means. Through the macro- and micro-level analysis of CIs, this study shows that CIs fail to increase the soft power of China because many countries regard CIs as a propaganda tool and a threat to academic freedom and the local community. It shows that China’s soft power is not so attractive in the eyes of receivers. In fact, China’s aggressive cultural initiatives through the establishment of CIs have triggered another version of the ‘China threat’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

China has been quite successful in developing its relations with Central Asian states and expanding its influence in the region since the 1990s. Most analysts contribute the success to the strategy and policy of China’s national central government. This observation certainly has a lot of truth, but at the same time we should not neglect or downplay the role that the local government in Xinjiang has played in cementing China–Central Asian ties. Xinjiang has functioned as an indispensable actor in China’s look-west and act-west policies towards Central Asia and beyond. With Chinese foreign policy elites increasingly interested in using the act-west policy as part of their counter-hedging strategy in Asia, Xinjiang appears to enjoy many more opportunities and play an even more significant role in China’s relations with countries in its western flank. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The extant literature on alignment behavior has focused primarily on the macro dimensions, i.e. the typology, manifestations and implications of states’ alignment choices vis-à-vis the great power(s). Relatively few studies have examined the micro aspects of alignment choices. This article attempts to fill in the gap by unpacking the constituent component of weaker states’ alignment decisions, with a focus on ASEAN states’ hedging behavior in the face of a rising China in the post-Cold War era. It contends that the enduring uncertainty at the systemic level has compelled the states to hedge by pursuing contradictory, mutually counteracting transactions of ‘returns-maximizing’ and ‘risk-contingency’ options, which seek to offset the potential drawbacks of one another, as a way to project a non-taking-sides stance while keeping their own fallback position at a time when the prospect of power structure is far from clear. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While most East Asian countries have opted for a hedge strategy to preserve a maximum range of strategic options in response to the rise of China, some countries have engaged in geostrategic balance through collective bargaining and strategic alignments with the US and with each other. The divergent threat perceptions and complicated historical animosities among East Asian countries, however, have set a limitation on the geostrategic balance. Therefore, to bandwagon with China could be a realistic choice for many countries. Historically, the most successful rising powers have been those which attracted the greatest number of bandwagoners. China cannot rise successfully without winning the support of its Asian neighbors. The long term peace and stability in the region, therefore, depends not only on whether China’s neighbors can work together to balance China but also whether China can balance its relationships in its own backyard so that its neighbors find bandwagoning a positive choice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

China's long insistence on non-interference in sovereign states' domestic affairs has contributed to a widely held impression that China also lends abroad without attaching policy conditions. In this article, we debunk the notion that China's bilateral lending is entirely devoid of conditionality, by showing that it involves elements of political conditionality, embedded conditionality and cross-conditionality, stemming from the varying concerns of Chinese foreign policy-makers and state-linked lenders. We then draw on the path-dependence literature to explore the possibility that there may also be more indirect forms of conditionality associated with Chinese lending practices. By ‘emergent conditionality’, we refer to structural lock-in effects that may cumulatively restrict or redirect recipient countries' policy-making choices similarly as more direct conditionality would do, even if the PRC government officially shuns conditionality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Chinese view of hard and soft power in foreign policy differs from the Western understanding of these terms. The authorities’ hard-power practice of mobilizing expatriates to back up Chinese diplomacy and suppress critics overseas undermines China’s soft-power efforts in the West. The street clash that occurred during President Hu Jintao’s visit to Slovakia in 2009 is a case in point. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Understanding the cultural environment of Chinese military strategists can help determine the best ways to either reassure Beijing or steer it away from disruptive policies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The relationship between area studies and political science is fraught with tradeoffs. In particular, a danger exists that the field of Chinese politics is being hollowed out because (a) there are many islands of highly specialized research with few bridges between them; and (b) more and more Chinese politics scholars are engaged in debates in which the 'other side' is no longer a China scholar but instead a colleague in the discipline. At a time when China's economic growth and prominence in world affairs have generated remarkable interest inside and outside the academy, few scholars are willing to take a stab at characterizing the polity or addressing other, equally large questions. Further thought is needed about the 'terms of enlistment' for China scholars in political science, in an era when ever more-focused studies and greater participation in disciplinary debates have become the norm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's position in the world economy during the past half-century provides vital information for investigating the relation between politics and trade. Although there is a substantial number of studies in this area, the current study extends the literature in at least three ways: (1) it is one of the first studies that investigates the problem of a potential sample selection bias-as a result of the fact that countries taken up in the analysis are not randomly sampled from all countries in the world; (2) it considers third-country effects that follow from the fact that China's relation with any two countries is affected by the relation between these countries themselves; and (3) it tests the impact of five political arrangements simultaneously, which is more comprehensive than any former study. By using data as to 78 of China's trade partners over the 1950-2002 period, this study provides empirical evidence for the hypotheses that the establishment of diplomatic relations, cooperation, visits of heads of states and political system similarity are associated with greater trade flows. The hypothesis that member countries of a Preferential Trading Agreement have had smaller trade flows with China, which is no member of any of these Preferential Trading Agreements, is not supported by the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last few years, China has promoted all kinds of regional and sub-regional cooperation in Asia. This research finds that the extent of China's drive for institutionalization of cooperative regional multilateral processes is affected by two primary considerations: (1) distribution of power among the forum participants, and whether the major players are well-disposed towards China or not so; and (2) the importance of the issues that the specific forum is set up to deal with to the political, economic or security interests of China as well as other participating states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study applies framing analysis to online news in China by examining how two mainstream websites in Mainland China, www.people.com.cn (hereafter People) and www.sina.com.cn (hereafter Sina), frame Taiwan's 2004 presidential election and how the presence of news frames varies within the same website as well as between these two websites. Factor analysis gauges four distinguished news frames: conflict, game, ideology and military consequences. Within websites, game and ideology frames are more perceptible than the other two frames. Between websites, the conflict frame is more salient in Sina than in People. The author suggests that generic frames and issue-specific frames can be detected simultaneously. In China, online news frames are identical with the frames underlying traditional mainstream media when it concerns coverage on Taiwan. This study also verifies the validity of the deductive approach in the identification and measurement of news frames. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China is commonly assumed to be seeking hegemony in its region. Yet China's region involves it in relationships with major states with their own hegemonic or leadership interests—the US, Russia, Japan and India. This article examines each of China's regional relationships in terms of the prime interests of China's foreign policy framework. It concludes that it is important to distinguish between hegemonic capabilities and intentions: that while China will want to extend its influence as a regional power, its capability to do that will continue to grow in each of its subregions, its ability to exercise that power and influence will be limited. In the past its efforts have been largely to seek secure borders and economic opportunities and that for some years those objectives, together with energy security, are likely to remain the priority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China and Taiwan, as well as the US, have failed to adapt new practices in response to the paradigmatic changes in the sources and nature of the China­Taiwan conflict. Reflecting the tremendous political and social changes in Taiwan, China, and the world that have occurred during the past 10–15 years, the most prominent source of the China­Taiwan conflict has shifted from power to identity. This article discusses the change of social identity in Taiwan and the re-emergence of nativistic nationalism in the PRC identity. The authors suggest that policymakers on all three sides could begin to re-think the Taiwan issue by taking advantage of the ideas and methods pioneered by experts in the rapidly growing field of conflict analysis and resolution. In this article, the authors apply concepts related to identity used by practitioners in the field of conflict resolution to look at the deeper cultural issues of identity and suggest some more appropriate methods for intervention and resolution of this deeply rooted conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1986 the concept of multipolarity has played a key role in China's analysis of the world order, evolving from a critique of bipolarity in the late Cold War period into a critique of American unipolarity. Although multipolarity is empirically correct in its questioning of the superpower's capacity for domination and it is ethically attractive in its insistence on international cooperation, it does not address the real problems created by the disparity of power in international affairs. Asymmetry theory is a new paradigm that addresses the effects of national disparities on international relations. It argues that asymmetry inevitably creates differences in risk perception, attention and interactive behavior between states, and that it can lead to a vicious circle of systemic misperception. Despite such tensions, however, the international order is quite stable, and even asymmetric relations can rarely be forced by the stronger side. Asymmetry confirms multipolarity's critique of unipolarity's exaggerated claim to absolute power, and suggests a theory of international leadership based on negotiated relationships that avoid the systemic misperceptions that asymmetry encourages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a case study on the relationship between domestic politics and international cooperation through an examination of the massacre in Tianamen, China in June 1989. It discusses the theories on the determinants of great power relations, which debate on whether international factors or domestic political interests play a more critical role in affecting international conflicts. The article examines the incident in Tiananmen wherein students rallying for reform were violently suppressed and changed the context of the relationship between U.S. and China. It describes the differences in ideologies between U.S. and China and the effects of the massacre in Tianamen on international relations.

Analyzes the political and economic condition of China after the death of Deng Xiaoping. Jiang Zemin as Deng's personal choice; Lawmaking in China; Political tensions happening in China; Brief information on how Taiwan became a part of China; Taiwan and the international community.

Public order in the People's Republic of China (PRC) deteriorated so sharply in 1993 and early 1994 that the leadership felt obliged to revert to harsh authoritarian measures in an effort to restore stability. The pressure of the conservative response to the public order crisis will cause China to look for international scapegoats and to increase its propaganda attacks on Hong Kong, Taiwan and the United States. Such rhetoric, however, will be empty because the new sense of vulnerability provoked by this public order crisis constrains the PRC's ability to wield influence on the international stage. Internal security - not external expansion -- will become a more important priority for the People's Liberation Army (PLA). The belligerent rhetoric coming out of Beijing betrays the government's underlying weakness, not its widely feared strength. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is no more weighty uncertainty for East Asia than the future of China. If China staggers on amid leadership struggles and perhaps even disintegrates as a state, the region will fear mass migration and spreading chaos. If China forges ahead with double-digit growth, East Asia will fear the implications of Chinese power. Whether China is weak or strong, it is in the interests of the outside world to tie China into the international system. The current (post-Tiananmen) fashion is for optimism about the future of China. Some optimists regard it as the next economic superpower, while some Cassandras fear the risks of regionalism and see a China that has 'flunked the fundamentals'. With such differing assessments of the China challenge, an intricate strategy for tying China into the international system has become necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the attitude of the British Foreign Office towards the course of the Chinese Civil War. It is a revisionist interpretation of cold war history, drawn from a study of Anglo-American relations with regard to Chinese politics during this period. Traditional interpretations have emphasised the unchallenged nature of American involvement in China after the war. The article argues that during this period Britain actively sought to compete for such a predominant position and, specifically, that the Foreign Office sought to replace the United States with Britain as the predominant Western influence in post-war Chinese politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]