Bridging Chinese Foreign Policy Studies and Foreign Policy Analysis: Towards a Research Agenda for Mutual Gains
- PDF / 393,382 Bytes
- 18 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 8 Downloads / 248 Views
Bridging Chinese Foreign Policy Studies and Foreign Policy Analysis: Towards a Research Agenda for Mutual Gains Qingmin Zhang 1 & Yi Edward Yang 2 # Journal of Chinese Political Science/Association of Chinese Political Studies 2020
Abstract Building foreign policy theories with Chinese characteristics has long been an aspiration of Chinese scholars, but has not resulted in much globally recognized achievements to date. This review essay begins with an overview of the obstacles to reaching this goal: confusion over the concept of theory, over-emphasis on policy prescription, confusion between the subject and object of study, restrictions on access to research materials, and lack of methodological diversity. To overcome these obstacles, we argue Chinese scholars should bring Chinese foreign policy studies (CFPS) into the larger field of comparative foreign policy analysis (FPA), and take advantage of FPA’s rich arsenal of methodological tools and theoretical lenses to conduct insightful and rigorous analysis and theory building. Such an effort will not only facilitate the construction of foreign policy theory with Chinese characteristics but also contribute Chinese wisdom to FPA theory building, making it a truly global field of study. Keywords Foreign policy analysis . Chinese foreign policy studies . International relations
. Review essay . Chinese foreign policy
Introduction Building an international relations/foreign policy theory with Chinese characteristics has long been an aspiration of Chinese scholars. In his speech at the founding ceremony of the
* Yi Edward Yang [email protected] Qingmin Zhang [email protected]
1
School of International Studies, Peking University, Beijing, China
2
Department of Political Science, James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Virginia, USA
Q. Zhang, Y. E. Yang
Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) on November 8, 1949, Premier and Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai remarked, “We have accumulated some experiences in external struggle in the past more than ten years since the war against aggression, but the work to sort out and make them a scientific and systematic discipline has not started yet […] [W]e should sinicize diplomacy science, but we are unable to do it now.”1 After Deng Xiaoping’s Reform and Opening Up policy was implemented in 1978, China became increasingly integrated with the international community. Chinese diplomacy in turn became more active and sophisticated in nature. More recently, Chinese President Xi Jinping called for “a distinctive diplomatic approach befitting its role as a major country […] conducting diplomacy with a salient Chinese feature and a Chinese vision.”2 In the Chinese context, the term “diplomacy” is used in a broad sense, encompassing both foreign policy and international studies.3 Recent efforts focus on building grand system-level IR theories rooted in China’s historical and cultural experiences have resulted some achievements. This progress, though having drawn considerable international attentions, fell short on the grounds of theoreti
Data Loading...
