3. China’s Peaceful Development Grand Strategy

Defensive and offensive realists see the international system as anarchic. They focus on states that they see as unitary, monolithic actors. This is different from liberal International Relations scholars who see the state as permeable, meaning that interest groups within a state as well as organizational processes are of relevance to them. Realists tend to see the national interest of a state rather than multiple interests of different groups within it. For realists, the national interest can usually be defined as survival and security of the state for defensive realists, and power maximization for the sake of security for offensive realists. Realists see their grand theory of international relations as universally applicable through time and space, with no need to take culture, values, or the like into account. This may also be due to the theoretical parsimony of realism, that is, the striving for as few variables as possible to explain or predict something.

This is part of a paper presented at the 56th Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association in New Orleans, February 18–21, 2015.

World War I, for example, may be said to have been partly caused by the rising German power and the falling Austro-Hungarian Empire. The rising Japanese Empire may be said to have caused conflict during the First and Second Sino-Japanese Wars, and Germany during World War II in Europe. For a good account of this phenomenon, see, for example, Kliman (2014).

Well-meaning analysts usually call China a ‘Neo-Bismarckian giant’; that is, a great-power that engages its neighborhood, reassuring it of peaceful intentions—much like that practiced by the Prussian (and later Imperial German) Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in the latter third of the nineteenth century. A few analysts see China going in the direction of Germany under Wilhelm II, though.

See, for instance, Roy (2013).

For a good summary of the course of the course of ‘Peaceful Rise’ rhetoric of the last few years, see Luttwak (2012), pp. 273–276.

See, for example, Pu (2012). For background on this debate, see Kawashima (2011).

See China (2005) and China (2011).

See, for instance, Christensen (1996), Layne (2009), or Ye (2011).

See Christensen (1996).

See Ye (2011).

See Layne (2009).

See, for instance, Pu (2012), or Richardson (2012).

See, for instance, Shih and Huang (2015).

As explained above, the drives of habit and reason will be omitted from this analysis, as habit is not emphasized very much anyway by Lebow, and reason is a Eurocentric cultural drive that does not really apply to China’s case.

See, for example, Booth (1979), or Johnston (1998).