China's assertive turn: grand strategy and foreign policy adjustment through the belt and road initiative
- Autores: Alejandra Peña
- Directores de la Tesis: Laura Feliu Martínez (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona ( España ) en 2019
- Idioma: español
- Materias:
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
- Resumen
In the aftermath of the 2008 global economic crisis, the rise of emerging powers such as China has contributed to the shifting balance of global power from the West to East and continue prompting significant transformations to the international system and the global economy. In this scenario, China is seen as an increasingly pivotal player in the world arena and much interest is dedicated to its external behavior and foreign policy and to the scope and role of its grand strategy. Recent debates on the nature and impact on China’s foreign policy have raised the question of the ways in which China is developing a more proactive international profile and becoming more capable of accomplishing its foreign policy objectives through its global economic and diplomatic engagement.
The central argument of this dissertation is that China’s engagement in the world through its grand strategy and foreign policy have undergone strategic adjustments to meet China’s growing power aspirations, project a more proactive and leading international profile, increasing Beijing’s worldwide influence, and to cope with the complex challenges that the rise of China has brought in. This dissertation hypothesizes the existence of domestic and systemic factors driving China’s grand strategy and foreign policy adjustment in Xi Jinping era. The empirical contribution of this dissertation explores the existence of three periods in the evolution of China’s foreign policy: the dogmatic, the pragmatic and the assertive periods, and it accounts for the rationale and motivations of the Belt and Road Initiative as a foreign policy tool under Xi Jinping’s era.
Most scholarly contributions tend to study the rise of China from a particular level of analysis, either systemic or domestic, some including regional perspectives, and they also tend to adopt a single theory-based approach. This generates partial or focalized studies or insights about China’s rise which add great value to the debate yet lack a more comprehensive perspective that cuts across levels of analysis and studies multiple conceptualizations. This dissertation aims to fill that gap in the literature by presenting a multi-level and multi-theoretical framework for analysis which identifies a series of observable factors categorized into two different levels (systemic and domestic) to account for the drivers and rationale of the adjustment in China’s foreign policy and grand strategy.
This research aims to explore the rationale and motivations behind China’s assertive turn in its foreign policy. To do so, it poses one overarching question and one specific case-oriented question: Firstly, how have domestic and systemic factors driven China’s grand strategy and foreign policy adjustment in the Xi Jinping Era? And secondly, how has the Belt and Road Initiative contributed to such adjustment? The case study selected is the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) following a single crucial-case rationale. By focusing on the BRI as the most-likely case, this research is able to obtain more observations of the adjustment and change of China’s foreign policy.
To summarize, this research tackles the analysis of China’s recent foreign policy adjustment as well as the study of its grand strategy in a context of interdependent and mutually reinforcing systemic and domestic factors. In doing so, it argues that China is undergoing a process of adjustment in its foreign policy that is driven by the interaction of systemic factors such as the changes in the global economy and the fluctuations in the international power structure, and of domestic factors such as regime preservation, the exhaustion of the development model and elite restructuring. Moreover, it sustains that the BRI is a central tool for the shaping and implementing of China’s foreign policy in accordance with its grand strategy.
