China's Place in Regional and Global Governance: A New World Comes Into View
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12348 |
| Author | Mark Beeson,Fujian Li |
| Date | 01 November 2016 |
| Published date | 01 November 2016 |
China’s Place in Regional and Global
Governance: A New World Comes Into View
Mark Beeson
University of Western Australia
Fujian Li
China Foreign Affairs University
Abstract
The ‘rise of China’means that –once again –China plays a pivotal role in international affairs. China’s economic weight and
growing political influence means that its foreign policies and the ideas that shape them have major consequences for estab-
lished ideas about ‘global governance’. Rather than accepting the institutional and ideational status quo, however, Chinese
policy makers are actively trying to develop a new international order through the creation of new institutions such as the
Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and the ‘One Belt, One Road’blueprint for international trade and investment centered
on China. The paper explains how this process is developing and assesses its implications for the extant international order.
Policy Implications
•Policy makers need to recognize that ideas about ‘global governance’are far from universal or simply ‘technical’considera-
tions.
•China’s rise means it will exert a greater influence in, and on multilateral institutions, a reality that needs to be recognized
and accommodated in the West.
•Recognizing the different elements of, and influences on, the construction of China’s policies is an essential part of this
process.
•Policy makers in China need to understand the negative impact the country’s geopolitical ambitions can have on narrower
foreign policy goals.
•China’s offer to build much-needed infrastructure should be embraced.
While there is a continuing debate about the nature –even
the possibility –of ‘global governance’, one thing has
become increasingly clear: nothing approximating global or
even regional governance is no longer possible without the
participation and cooperation of China. This is a remarkable
development and one that is not always acknowledged by
either the policy making or even the scholarly communities
in the United States and elsewhere. American hegemony
has, after all, been the taken-for-granted, seemingly unchal-
lengeable, bedrock of the international order for more than
half a century. Contemplating something different is plainly
intellectually and ideologically challenging. And yet China’s
political and diplomatic ascent should come as no surprise:
even the more hawkish realist scholars in the US recognize
that China’s growing material importance is a manifestation
of a long-term redistribution of power in the international
system that is likely to have ideational and policy making
consequences (Mersheimer, 2010). In short, the rise of China
poses the greatest challenge to the extant order since the
US became the dominant force in international affairs at the
end of the Second World War (Schweller and Pu, 2011).
For many observers in the West this is a deeply unsettling
prospect (Friedberg, 2011). And yet, a preoccupation with
China’s material transformation and its possible strategic
implications misses a potentially important, but compara-
tively neglected aspect of its rise to prominence: its growing
role as an actor in multilateral institutions. Not only is China
seeking to play a larger part in extant organizations, but it
has also begun to sponsor its own multilateral initiatives. In
part this shift in policy reflects its dissatisfaction with the
existing order, but in part it is because such projects may
play an important part in China’s increasingly ambitious for-
eign policy agenda. The creation of the Asian Infrastructure
Investment Bank (AIIB) is perhaps the most important mani-
festation of this possibility. Of even greater potential signifi-
cance, however, and closely connected with the AIIB project,
is Xi Jinping’s One Belt, One Road scheme, which is
designed to consolidate China’s place as a pivotal actor in a
regional political-economy.
Such initiatives are central parts of China’s evolving for-
eign policy. Rather than trying to directly unpack the notori-
ously and deliberately opaque policy making process
Global Policy (2016) 7:4 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12348 ©2016 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 7 . Issue 4 . November 2016 491
Research Article
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