Understanding China Today

When the European Union (EU) started referring to China as ‘strategic partner’ in 2003, it announced that the ‘strategic partnership’ with Beijing would facilitate the adoption of joint regional and global foreign and security policies. More than a decade later, however, that has not taken place as Brussels and Beijing have indeed very little (if anything) in common as regards approaches towards international politics and security. In fact, critical scholars and analysts (like this author) have for years argued that there is no ‘strategic dimension’ of EU-China ties beyond the expansion of bilateral EU-China trade and commercial ties. The below-mentioned EU-Chinese dialogue on Asian security e.g. has not produced any tangible results and China’s current regional foreign and security policies in general and those related to Beijing’s territorial disputes in particular are evidence for at least two things: firstly, EU influence on Chinese security policy behaviour remains in spite of a bilateral security dialogue on East Asia de facto non-existent. Secondly, Beijing will continue to completely ignore EU advice and concerns about Chinese regional and global foreign policy behaviour and will continue to pursue regional security policies in general and those related to territorial claims and disputes in particular, which are—to put it bluntly—the very opposite of how the EU approaches and adopts foreign and security policies. Consequently, this chapter concludes that EU-China cooperation in international politics and security will continue to take place largely (if not exclusively) on paper and paper only.

A few years after their national emancipation, the Bandung Conference in 1955 facilitated the establishment of relations between the Republic of India and the People’s Republic of China. Having repelled Western colonialism, each of these two new states has given itself a new political order and is establishing new relations at the international level. Over the course of history, the continuous changes and evolution in the global balance of powers have made new needs arise in terms of self-assertion, defence and preservation. Chindia is quite a recent concept, which is mainly perceived as an economic one, as the vision of a ‘magical land’ where the economies of China and India could merge and unleash unprecedented wealth. The hope (or forecast) of Chindia and the impressive economic development of these two countries, however, are not enough to make these two ‘state-civilisations’ merge peacefully, nor to disengage the economy from the reality of political power and balance. Chindia means a strategy. What will the effects be of the embrace between the dragon and the elephant?

Russia’s interest for the East can be dated back to the aftermath of the 2008/09 global economic and financial crisis. The effects of the crisis revealed Russia’s dramatic exposure to Western developments. Until then the economic potential of fast growing China had been neglected. Developments in 2013–14 were crucial, since Russia finally turned to the East when international tensions linked to conflicts in Ukraine erupted, making her weak- oil price-dependent—economic recovery even more problematic. Building a new Sino-Russian partnership, however, entails risks, since competitive pressures could derail a mutually profitable venture. The challenge for Russia and China is to strengthen their cooperation through dialogue.

This chapter explores the evolution of Sino-Japanese relations in the Xi-Abe era, considering three different areas: security and defence, economic regionalism, and ‘history issues.’ Bilateral relations, despite high levels of economic interdependence, remain constrained by an ongoing security dilemma and by the lack of reconciliation over ‘history issues.’ Moreover, China and Japan are starting to diverge also on how to promote institutionalization in the realm of economic governance.

The quality of the relationship between the United States of America (USA) and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has undergone significant changes over the past decades. This chapter analyses three different phases of bilateral relations, characterized by competition (from 1949 to 1976), cooperation (from 1977 to 2008) and the current phase of ‘competitive coexistence.’ A common view is that the quality of the bilateral relationship will be characterized by a mixture of cooperation, competition and conflict. To be sure, both Washington and Beijing have acknowledged the problem of mutual mistrust, but have yet to develop sustainable ways of reducing them. That said, the US and China are not necessarily doomed to maintain relations prone to conflict if they are able to increase collaboration and limit the differences of how they define and pursue their respective interests.

The relations between Italy and China have gone through several stages, characterized by altering highs and lows. The geographical distance between Italy and China makes sure that the economic dimension of bilateral relations is more important than cooperation in politics and security. However, the kind of foreign policies adopted by Chinese leader Xi Jinping calls on Italy to seek to expand cooperation in the areas of politics and security. Since China is expanding its interests abroad, Italy is advised to seek to interact with Beijing on issues such as the fight against terrorism or the development of African countries from where the majority of migrants seek to reach the southernmost shores of the European Union. Such political cooperation can take place in parallel with economic cooperation, moving away from seeking to compete with China’s manufacturing industry but instead seeking to exploit China’s emerging high quality niches within its domestic market. In order to achieve this goal, it will be crucial to convince Beijing and Chinese authorities to forego protectionist trade policies aimed at protecting what in China is referred to as ‘strategic sectors.’

China’s current economic presence in Africa dates back to the early 1990s, and has increased exponentially since the start of the new century, becoming one of the most debated chapters on PRC’s foreign policy agenda. While the mainstream trends to point at the asymmetric nature of the bilateral China-Africa relationship and considers China’s activities in the continent the emblem of a new neo-colonial attitude, the Chinese presence in Africa presents both risks and challenges for China and opportunities for Africa. On the one hand, the growing instability that characterizes most of the countries where Chinese economic interests are concentrated represents a crucial challenge for Beijing, which requires a rethinking of some of the key pillars of its foreign policy. On the other hand, Africa’s inclusion in the maritime branch of China’s New Silk Road Initiative, named the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, can become an opportunity for African economic growth and development.

East Berlin and Beijing lived an ‘eventful’ decade in the 1980s, to say the very least. While Beijing decided to interrupt the process of implementing Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms by shooting on unarmed and peacefully demonstrating on Tiananmen Square in June 1989, The German Democratic Republic (GDR) collapsed altogether without a single shot fired in the same year. What the GDR and China said to and did with each other before Beijing crushed what it ludicrously referred to as ‘counter-revolution’ on Tiananmen Square in 1989 with violence and the GDR landed on the dustbin of history, is analyzed in this chapter.

When Xi Jinping was designated as the head of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 2012, many analysts and observers argued that China’s foreign policy entered a new phase. In less than one term in power, as the ‘core leader’ of the second world largest economy Xi Jinping has managed to reshape China’s image and behaviour at home and abroad. He has reinterpreted the relation with the superpower United States through what he called a ‘New Model of Major-Country Relations’. He promoted the so-called ‘China Dream’, a concept calling for the ‘rejuvenation’ of the Chinese nation. Xi Jinping, through the complex bureaucratic machine of China’s state apparatus, was able to unify political elites and party officials, together with some major public intellectuals and academics to marry and support the project expected to return China to the kind glory and grandeur the country enjoyed since the Roman Empire: the ‘New Silk Road’, better known as the ‘One Belt One Road’ (OBOR) initiative. However, even though support of Chinese ideational narratives has grown vis-à-vis the more significant role China plays at the international level, serious gaps persist as regards to how the People’s Republic of China (PRC) practically conducts its foreign policy in terms of international rules and standards already set by other countries. In fact, with regards to specific issues and areas such as climate change, nuclear deterrence or cyber-security, leaders in Beijing are still struggling to reach a comprehensive understanding in line with the ideas and policies supported by the majority of countries in the West. As a consequence, this chapter concludes that only combing Chinese ideational narratives of world order with a practical understanding of how such policies are discussed at the international level, will allow China to play a growing role in the realm of global governance.

The remarkable success of the Chinese economy is not unprecedented and was preceded by other Asian economies’ development according to what is referred to as the so-called ‘Asian development model.’ In particular, the Japanese economy shows a development path that, apart from some significant dissimilarity, proves to be forerunner of the Chinese one. This is relevant when we analyse the ambiguous behaviour of Chinese policymakers in providing and safeguarding the economic global public goods in cooperation with other countries (The concept of global public goods [GPG] has become an integral part on the agendas of bodies and institutions like the United Nations, The International Monetary Fund [IMF], the World Bank and non-governmental organizations. Education and knowledge, a clean environment, health services, intellectual property rights, peace and security are among others defined as global public goods.). Like for Japan in the past, China’s mercantilist practices today are a central cause for its problematic trade and investment relations with its major economic and trading partners (the United States and the European Union). China’s political elites and policymakers do not seem to be sufficiently convinced that the provision of ‘global public goods’ is eventually beneficial for China’s economic development. Moreover, the debate on Chinese contributions to ‘global public goods’ takes place at the time when the country is seeking to develop and present a viable alternative to existing (Western) geopolitical and geo-economic models. Consequently, the level and frequency of China providing ‘global public goods’ will also depend on the country’s ability to adopt economic and structural reforms (as the instrumental basis for the provision of such goods) in the years ahead. To be sure, cooperation between Washington and Beijing could become even more difficult under the US administration led by Donald Trump.

Demographic policies carried out in China over the past 50 years have dictated the speed and timing of demographic transition in this country. The population’s health conditions have improved bringing the life expectancy at birth to a very high level compared with other developing countries while China’s One-Child Policy has led to the reduction of fertility. It also created a relatively long period of demographic bonus, providing long-term economic development with manpower. However, in 2015 the aging of population and gender bias let the Chinese government abandon the country’s One-Child Policy in favor of the Two-Child Policy. We will know only in the future if this option will have a positive impact on the demographic balance or whether it is coming too late for Chinese couples.

The author, former Financial Attaché at the Italian Embassy of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in Beijing, analyzes the structure and evolution of the Chinese banking and financial systems since the adoption of China’s economic reforms in the late 1970s. Furthermore, the chapter examines the system’s persistent ‘command’ approach, analyzes the quality and problems of the supervisory and regulatory frameworks and assesses the challenges ahead for financial stability. Moreover, the chapter provides a brief overview of the non-banking segments of the financial market and the more flexible non-bank financial operators. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the state and prospects of the internationalization of the Chinese currency.

In recent years China has become a key protagonist in the discourse on sustainability, a discourse that goes well beyond environmental concerns. The growing stress on sustainability has had wide effects on the ongoing reforms of China’s legal systems, leading to the drafting of new rules in several legal fields and the shaping or re-shaping of legal institutions affecting the implementation of these new rules. These developments have also led to several relevant transformations of the legal framework within which foreign businesses operate, such as the publication of a fundamental regulatory document establishing Chinese government priorities for foreign investment: the so-called Catalogue for the Guidance of Foreign Investment Industries. This chapter will analyse some of these transformations, focusing on the issue of legal incentives for foreign investors’ sustainable investments.

This chapter analyses the position of recent Chinese leaders on political reform: the similarities between Xi Jinping and Hu Jintao, and the different rhetoric and approach by Wen Jiabao. Moreover, it examines the concept of the so-called ‘democracy with Chinese characteristics’ and the concept’s interpretation by Yu Keping, an innovative theorist of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The final part of the chapter deals with the special features of the model of reference pursued by Chinese leaders—the so-called ‘Deng Xiaoping Model’, which over the last decade underwent evolution and revision.

Government information disclosure in China is a set of procedures, tied to the public institutions, aimed at generating a steady and timely flow of information between the state and the citizens. From 2007 to 2016, the scope and the procedures of this policy have been codified by a number of official documents, and these texts can be considered expressions of the Chinese institutional discourse on government information disclosure. The policy on open government information has led to a scholarly debate on the concrete goals the Chinese central government is pursuing through the implementation of information disclosure. In this chapter, a corpus of texts on government information disclosure (including all of the relevant official documents published from 2007 to 2016) will be analysed through a genre-based approach, in order to contribute to the discussion on the implementation objectives and their development. Finally, the statements stemming from genre analysis will be examined taking into account a variety of lexical features of the corpus documents.

In this chapter I undertake a systematic investigation of the coverage of the main foreign countries in the Chinese newspaper China Daily, a state-run newspaper English (during the period from 2002–2009). The available empirical evidence allows for the conclusion that a country obtains significantly more coverage the higher its GDP and the geographically closer it is to China. The second finding is that ‘bad news’ are more newsworthy than ‘good news’: China Daily is found to devote more coverage to a country when its unemployment rate is high. In fact, how coverage of a given country does increase with higher unemployment does not in turn depend on its economic power and geographical proximity to China.

At the beginning of the 20th century, democracy and communism were introduced in China to counterbalance Confucianism and in order to overcome the deep social crisis and strive for the modernization of Chinese traditional culture. The contemporary history of China is the history of struggle between Confucianism, democracy and communism. No foreign ideology can survive in China unless it has capacity of harmonizing itself with Confucianism. Learning from the Italian experience of the development of culture in order to successfully modernize the country’s traditional culture, China needs to recognize and protect more the individual rights and freedom and build up a society in pursuit of the truth by the elimination of the traditional bureaucracy-oriented mentality and money-worship idea. A political order modelled on the Roman Principate, characterized by the centralization of powers in a head of state and rule by law, can be a realistic and interim solution for China to realize at low cost the passage from totalitarianism to republicanism. Before reforming successful its traditional culture, it is convenient for China to implement continuously Deng Xiaoping’s so-called ‘24-character strategy’.

Starting from late 1936 to early 1937 Italy’s policies towards and relations with China became more and more complex while at the same time Rome and Tokyo had begun to move towards rapprochement. From 1937 to 1945 Italy-China relations were marked by some important historical and political trends and questions. In this chapter I will focus on two of them. Firstly, Italy’s choice to support Wang Jingwei’s decision to collaborate with Japan (late 1930s-early 1940s), which led to crisis in relations with Chiang Kai-shek’s China. Second—within the larger context of the new Italian anti-fascist foreign policy—the resumption of Italy’s contacts and relations with Chiang Kai-shek’s China in the final part of the war.

Human resources management (HRM) in China requires a different approach from the ones commonly implemented in Europe or the United States. For the casual observer, what stands out are the difficulties that Chinese workers are accustomed to facing, such as overtime work, extreme working conditions due to hazardous materials, a lack of safety regulations, and an increasing unemployment rate in low technology energy-intensive industrial sectors that is casting a shadow over the near future. The Western media tends to focus on the negative consequences such as environmental and social degradation after three decades of China’s so-called ‘economic miracle’ accompanied by double-digit GDP growth. However, it is imperative to contextualize these and other related issued within the country as a whole. While China has been evolving at breakneck speed, this fast-changing process has led to China becoming the ‘world’s factory’, it was able to reinvent itself during past and current global economic and financial crisis. This chapter introduces some case studies of Italian businesses operating in China, analyzing different phases of HRM, starting from the past financial and production crises that have led to the bankruptcy of thousands of small and medium—sized companies to the most recent collapse of Chinese stock markets. The analysis will take account of the different categories of Chinese companies such as state-owned companies (SOEs), companies that operate with other companies through joint ventures and wholly foreign owned enterprises. China’s historical and cultural background and cultural information too are considered in order avoid a mere Western interpretations of phenomena and realities that need to be understood in a local context.

The distinctive features of the Chinese concept of legality, as established and developed through the years in the People’s Republic of China and further defined by constitutional amendments in 1999, give the cue for some reflections with regard to the existing dialectic between legal norms and ‘alternative’ systems of rules and norms, in particular between what is referred to as fa (law) and guanxi (personal relations, personal connections). This relationship has implications also for Western operators conducting business in China: differences between knowing and applying law as formulated in text books together with the difficulty on moving on unknown ground in business operations in China, where history, politics and culture are intertwined, leading to a notion of a ‘fluid’ and pragmatic concept of business ties in general and a contract in particular. This chapter concludes with the analysis of some of the reasons why Western business operators have difficulties negotiating contractual relationships with Chinese counterparts.