China's International Roles: Challenging or Supporting International Order? (Role Theory and International Relations)

This collection examines changes in China’s international role over the past century. Tracing the links between domestic and external expectations in the PRC’s role conception and preferred engagement patterns in world politics, the work provides a systematic account of changes in China’s role and the mechanisms of role taking. Individual chapters address the impact of China’s history and identity on its bilateral role taking patterns with the United States, Japan, Africa, the Europe Union, and Socialist States as well as China’s role in international institutions, the G-20, and East Asia’s Financial Order.

Each of the empirical chapters is written to a common template exploring the role of historical self-identification, altercasting and domestic role contestation in shaping the PRC’s role. The volume provides an analytically coherent framework evaluating whether cooperation or conflict in China’s international engagement is likely to increase, and if so, the extent to which this will follow from incompatible domestic demands and external expectations. By combining a theoretical framework with strong comparative case studies, this volume contributes to the ongoing debate on China’s rise and integration into the international society and provides sound conclusions about the prospects for a transition of China’s purpose in world politics.

Sebastian Harnisch is Professor of Political Science at Heidelberg University. His research focuses on international relations theory and comparative foreign policy analysis, and other topics in security policy.

Sebastian Bersick is Associate-Professor at Fudan University’s School of International Relations and Public Affairs as well as Executive Director of the Centre for China-EU Relations, Shanghai. He is also Associate Fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations in the China and Asia-Pacific Program. His areas of research cover the political economy of EU-Asia relations.

Jörn-Carsten Gottwald is Professor for East Asian Politics at the Ruhr University Bochum. His research interests cover the politics of regulation of financial services, EU-China relations and Chinese foreign economic policies.