The Chinese visions outlined in Chapter 5 do not tell the whole story, so Chapter 6 moves from Chinese global ‘visions’ to ‘actions’ by offering two contrasting but related case studies of the discursive debates explored in this book, focusing on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and maritime politics in Asia respectively. As discussed in the earlier parts of this book, discourse is not purely rhetorical but engages the material by highlighting how the material is presented and understood, which aspects are privileged or downplayed, and how these processes can be instrumentalized to take forward particular interests and agendas. In both case studies I show evidence of the three dominant narratives discussed in previous chapters: the return of geopolitics, contesting liberal order and collaborative governance.

The two cases selected for this chapter are ripe for this treatment. Both bring together material developments and discursive shaping and framing by actors in China, the West and elsewhere. Both have been the subject of intense debate about China as a global actor under Xi Jinping. But the dynamics of the two differ: the BRI was a Chinese initiative to which the West and others have responded, while the maritime politics agenda (particularly the focus on disputes) has largely been set from the West (and to some extent other parts of Asia), with China playing the role of responder. These contrasting dynamics is one key reason for including both cases in this chapter, rather than focusing just on one.

‘China is an illiberal state seeking leadership in a liberal world order’ writes Elizabeth Economy (2018, p 17) in her book on China under Xi Jinping. This stark statement codes China as ‘illiberal’, in clear opposition to a ‘world order’ which is ‘liberal’. The implication of this and the claim that China is ‘seeking leadership’ is that ‘China’ desires not just a dominant position, but a world order which would be illiberal, not liberal.

There is perhaps more nuance in Economy's overall account, but this sentence reflects the second dominant framing identified in this book's debates of China, and one which has become a conventional wisdom in many Western discussions, particularly in policy research and advocacy. A similar formulation runs through a Foreign Affairs piece by Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner (2018), the ‘Democratic Party foreign policy realists’ (McCourt, 2022, p 618) who went on to occupy key positions in the Biden administration's China team. Their core message was that ‘the liberal international order has failed to lure or bind China as powerfully as expected. China has instead pursued its own course, belying a range of American expectations in the process’. They argued that ‘greater commercial interaction with China was supposed to bring gradual but steady liberalization of the Chinese economy’ but ‘since the early years of this century, however, China's economic liberalization has stalled’ and ‘cooperative and voluntary mechanisms to pry open China's economy have by and large failed’.

The picture of complexity and contestation in understanding China's rise set out in Chapter 2 is not the mainstream in public discussions of China today. The ‘global China’ idea of China's ‘incorporation into global capitalism’, with its connotations of connectivity and convergence, is crowded out by rhetoric of ‘state capitalism’ with an emphasis on the ‘state’ as ‘authoritarian’ or by uncritical portrayals of China as ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’, terms with negative connotations in the West. Meanwhile, putative Chinese ambitions to extend its international influence are contrasted unfavourably with existing US hegemony. These formulations portray a Chinese authoritarian state capitalism as fundamentally different from a benign, ostensibly liberal democratic and market capitalist Western Other.

One common feature of these framings is that they are primarily state based. Rather than seeing global capitalism as a significant force shaping the global political economy and providing the structural context within which China's rise has taken place, they privilege competition between great powers in framing international politics. This state-based framing informs the two dominant narratives about China which will be examined in Chapters 3 and 4: the ‘return of geopolitics’ and a contested ‘liberal’ or ‘rules-based’ international order. Bill Callahan (2016, p 227) has highlighted these as the two dominant ideas in International Relations (IR) studies relating to China, stating that:

In remarks delivered at the opening ceremony of the fifth annual meeting of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) in Beijing on 28 July 2020, Xi Jinping said that ‘The global response to COVID-19 has made it clear that mankind rise and fall together in a community with a shared future’ (Xi, 2020). This was a reference to an important concept in China's official statements about global affairs, the idea of building a ‘community of shared future for humankind’ 人类命运共同体 renlei mingyun gongtongti (hereafter ‘community of shared future’ or CSF). This chapter focuses on the history and interpretations of this concept as a way of exploring China's global visions of collaborative governance, the third major narrative critiqued in this book. The aim is to present some of the ideas behind these and the ways that they have developed in contrast to – and sometimes in dialogue with – the perspectives discussed in earlier chapters.

Getting to grips with Chinese visions is no easy matter, and the purpose of this chapter is not to make a simple claim about ‘how China sees the world’.1 As noted in Chapter 1, ‘the Chinese self-image is increasingly a contingent, pluralized product of contentious negotiations between an overweening state and a restless population’ (Lee, 2017, p 260), and given the complexity and multi-dimensional nature of Chinese perspectives on global issues, simple answers are not possible. To help deal with this complexity, this chapter focuses on CSF to give some structure to the discussion of Chinese visions.

In their introduction to a survey of contemporary Chinese intellectual debate, Timothy Cheek, David Ownby and Joshua Fogel (2020, pp 15– 16) write that ‘China has achieved modernity in the form of wealth and power … We have entered the Chinese century.’ In the 2020s it is commonplace to describe China as a major power and its rise as an established phenomenon (Breslin, 2021; Brown, 2023). Not long ago, however, China's rise was a significantly contested topic, both inside and outside China (Glaser and Medeiros, 2007), and just how influential and powerful the country has become remains the subject of some debate today.

The aim of this chapter is to engage in an inter-disciplinary review of secondary literature which seeks to explain the contested phenomena of China's rise, its growing global power and influence, and its domestic socio-economic transformations, in order to establish a framework for subsequent analysis and to contextualize the present study. The chapter is structured around two main questions: first, the reasons for China's rise as a comparative international political– economic process (explaining how we got here); and second, how to characterize the politics, economy and society of a transformed China (understanding where we are now). Answers to the second question depend somewhat on the first, as they require interpretation of the process of China's rise.

Prelude

At the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC or CCP)1 in Beijing in October 2017, Party General Secretary Xi Jinping declared on behalf of the gathered political elites that China was entering a ‘new era’ of socialism with Chinese characteristics. Among the many points made at the Congress was an affirmation that ‘peace and development remain irreversible trends’, a reference to a central notion in the Party's public assessment of the global context within which the People's Republic of China (PRC) had developed since the 1980s. However, China's external political environment was changing. A year later, this was made clear when then United States (US) Vice President Mike Pence elaborated on a different ‘new era’, one of great power competition, in a speech which set out a confrontational policy of strategic rivalry with China (Pence, 2018). It followed the publication in December 2017 of the first National Security Strategy of the US administration led by President Donald Trump, which described the return of ‘great power competition’, with China and Russia ‘contesting [the US’s] geopolitical advantages and trying to change the international order in their favor’ (National Security Strategy, 2017, p 27).

The extent of the deterioration in US– China relations and the changes in China's external environment have become more apparent over time.