China: the possibility of a "peaceful development"? The construction of a contingent realist argument.

Most analyses of the development in post-Cold War Chinese security policy presume or picture the Chinese security policy as reflecting a coherent security strategy being either revisionist or status quo oriented. In contrast, my departure point is that the development in the Chinese post-Cold War security policy shows both revisionist and status quo oriented characteristics, and that the development in the policy has a highly reactive character. I argue that it is possible to identify a pattern in what the Chinese post-Cold War security policy is reacting to, and how the policy develops as a reaction to these factors. Thus, my overall objective is to identify the most important factors that influence the development in post-Cold War Chinese security policy and in which way. For achieving this objective, I construct and apply a so-called contingent realist argument about the development in a rising power's security policy under unipolarity. In this paper, I present the theoretical argument and conduct a preliminary case study of the Taiwan Strait Crisis 1995-96. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]