After renaissance: China’s multilateral offensive in the developing world

Abstract

Why does a re-emerging China pursue institutional strategies to expand its multilateral ties all over the world? This study explains the genesis of China’s new multilateral diplomacy toward Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. The central argument of the study is that many strands of structural arguments drawn from realist, liberal, and constructivist insights cannot provide complete explanations about China’s multilateral activism without recourse to cognitive feedback dynamics. China fed its regional experiences of multilateralism back into its global policy formation. This experiment-based approach has been a pervasive feature in Chinese multilateral diplomacy as well as Chinese domestic reforms during the post-Mao period. The cognitive feedback model developed in this study intends to complement the prominent structural explanations by identifying micro-level dynamics and seeks to contribute to today’s debate over power transition and international order.

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