Engaging China in International Institutions: Case Studies
It can be difficult to precisely define and measure a certain power’s degree of satisfaction with regard to its regional and international behaviors. However, China’s increasingly active involvement in international institutions and particularly internati
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Engaging China in International Institutions: Case Studies
4.1 CHINA’S INVOLVEMENT IN INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND IGOS: CHOOSING CRITERIA AND ASSESSING THE EVIDENCE FOR SATISFACTION OR DISSATISFACTION China has been continuously rising for the past several decades. As endogenous growth theory claims, technological revolution plus political efficiency will help developed societies to maintain steady growth rates, but will not allow them to remain ahead of rapidly developing countries, since developing economies normally can realize higher economic growth rates than the developed economies, but only if they overcome the “poverty trap.”1 When two great powers approach power parity, the important theoretical issue is to measure the contender’s degree of satisfaction in evaluating an expected power transition.2 However, to describe and measure a nation’s degree of satisfaction exactly can be very complicated and difficult, in that there are diverse criteria and points of view involved with which people may disagree based on their different perceptions of the rise and decline of great powers. Nevertheless, to find appropriate criteria that may help us to understand China’s degree of satisfaction with the dominant world system under U.S. leadership is obviously a key issue in the whole discussion of the proposed U.S. engagement of China in this dominant system. In past decades, although China gradually has been recognized as a member in
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 K. Jin, Rising China in a Changing World, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-0827-6_4
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the international community, particularly since its economic reform in the late 1970s, it still maintains its unique political system, which the West and the United States in particular criticizes and opposes. The United States also significantly disagrees with China over issues like human rights and freedom of speech, and claims that China should follow the main values respected by the international community. Meanwhile, the question remains: With its economic success and despite the existing divergences with the West and the United States, has China been genuinely satisfied with its status and the international system that has actually helped China’s rapid emergence? More importantly, what might be the appropriate criteria to prove and assess China’s degree of satisfaction? Satisfaction, according to Organski, is a relative term.3 When the international order and the predominant norm, rules, and institutions somehow still facilitate most of a nation’s goals for its national interests, naturally there be will no sign of significant decrease in its satisfaction toward the system as a whole, although there surely will be discords among great powers regarding different issues. Nevertheless, since satisfaction is a relative term, it can be difficult to directly determine the exact degree of satisfaction or dissatisfaction of great powers in international politics. Besides, satisfaction and dissatisfaction with the whole system or a set of rule
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