China’s world view in the Xi Jinping Era: Where do Japan, Russia and the USA fit?
| DOI | 10.1177/1369148120914467 |
| Date | 01 May 2021 |
| Author | Amy King,Rosemary Foot |
| Published date | 01 May 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue: Chinese foreign policy: A Xi change? |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148120914467
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2021, Vol. 23(2) 210 –227
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1369148120914467
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China’s world view in the Xi
Jinping Era: Where do Japan,
Russia and the USA fit?
Rosemary Foot1 and Amy King2
Abstract
A ‘world view’ perspective is deployed to show President Xi Jinping’s dominance of China’s policy-
making environment and the ideas that he and his leadership group have tried to promote. We use
this framework to explain China’s relations with three major countries that are crucial to manage
successfully in order for China to consolidate its global and regional ambitions – Japan, Russia and
the United States. The article shows how the degree of alignment between China’s and these
great powers’ world views influences their levels of resistance or acceptance of the policies that
flow from Beijing’s world view. We find that, while the United States and Russia lie at opposing
ends of the resistance-acceptance spectrum, Japan represents an important middle ground along
it. This finding encourages movement away from the overly simplistic dyadic depictions of global
politics associated with ‘new Cold War’ or ‘authoritarian versus liberal’ labelling.
Keywords
China-Japan, China-Russia, China-USA, China’s world view, cognitive and normative approaches,
global order, ideational approaches, Xi Jinping
Introduction
The dramatic changes in China’s material and political status since the advent of ‘Reform
and Opening’ in late 1978 finally seem to have resulted in the Chinese leadership’s clearer
articulation of its intention to reshape global order in ways that better reflect its world
view, and its need to reorder its relations with countries of importance to it. As the Party’s
General Secretary and President, Xi Jinping, put it during his lengthy 19th Party Congress
speech in October 2017, the country’s development had reached a new ‘historical junc-
ture’. The Party had propelled China ‘into a leading position’ in all major areas of policy,
and had ensured the country had ‘crossed the threshold into a new era’ (Xi, 2017b: 9).
In this contribution to the Special Issue, we make the following two main moves: first,
we place President Xi Jinping’s world view at the centre of our exploration of some of the
foreign policy consequences of this perceived change in China’s status. Second, we relate
1St Antony’s College and Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
2Strategic & Defence Studies Centre, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia
Corresponding author:
Rosemary Foot, St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, 62 Woodstock Road, Oxford OX2 6JF, UK.
Email: rosemary.foot@sant.ox.ac.uk
914467BPI0010.1177/1369148120914467The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsFoot and King
research-article2020
Special Issue Article
Foot and King 211
that world view to China’s relations with great powers – that is, those states that have the
greatest influence over the trajectory of China’s objectives in world politics – choosing
Japan, Russia, and the United States because Beijing views them as crucial to consolidat-
ing China’s place in this ‘new era’ of international relations (IR). Japan stands as China’s
main economic and political competitor at the regional level, and its alliance with the
United States also enables Tokyo to compete with Beijing in strategic terms. Yet, Japan
has also been important to China as an investment and trading partner, and bilateral coop-
eration holds out the prospect of thwarting any US desire to isolate or contain China.
Putin’s Russia offers China’s Xi a close strategic relationship, together with economic
and military ties that help China to consolidate its position as a strong state. Russia also
plays a role in constraining US power and in bifurcating US attention to two states that
Washington, in its national security documents, has identified as its most significant stra-
tegic rivals. The relationship with the United States, the most complex of the three for
China, is key to China’s global and regional ambitions. Governments around the world,
including China and the United States, typically describe that bilateral relationship as the
most significant in world politics. Beijing recognises that Washington remains the most
capable of the three states – militarily, economically, and politically – of frustrating
China’s return to greatness. Successful management of the relationship is crucial to
Beijing, but the deterioration in ties seems to be accelerating.
Our analytical approach allows us to make two key contributions to the literature.
First, it is puzzling as to why any single policy initiative, whether it be Chinese invest-
ment in developing countries, or island construction activities in the South China Sea,
generates resistance from some states in the global system but acceptance from others. In
demonstrating how these individual policies derive from Xi’s underlying world view, we
show that the degree of US, Russian or Japanese resistance or acceptance lies in the extent
to which Xi’s world view aligns with their own. Second, by analysing collectively China’s
relations with these three great powers, we move beyond the overly simplistic dyadic
depictions of global politics that dominate the IR literature generally, and the study of
China in particular. Indeed, since the advent of the Xi Jinping government, considerable
attention has been devoted to analysis of the China-US relationship, and to a lesser extent
the China-Russia relationship, with that debate often seeking to prove or disprove the
emergence of a ‘new Cold War’, or the rise of authoritarian states seeking to overturn the
liberal international order. We suggest that this is the wrong starting point. Instead, our
approach allows us to conclude that a more complex spectrum exists in China’s relations
with the United States, Russia, and Japan. While the United States and Russia exist at
either ends of this spectrum, Japan represents an important middle ground along it, and is,
most likely, an exemplar of many Asia-Pacific states whose relations with China similarly
defy ‘new Cold War’ or ‘authoritarian vs liberal’ labels.
A world view perspective
More than a decade ago, Jeffrey Legro (2007) highlighted the challenge that China posed
to IR’s two dominant analytical approaches, realism and liberalism, both of which offered
radically different conclusions about a rising China’s future behaviour. Rather than focus-
ing on power- and economic interdependence-based explanations, Legro (2007: 515)
instead advocated a focus on ‘intentions’ or those ‘dominant ideas’ within China that
shaped ‘enduring patterns of national behaviour’. This article takes up Legro’s call, and
the wider social turn that is evident in the study of IR, by exploring China’s relations with
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