Epilogue : Whither China and its foreign policy? Future trends, developments, and the logic of relationships of China's international interactions

This volume provides a detailed survey of China's foreign policy. It is expected that to the buffs of Beijing's international relations this collection makes available a superbly researched accounts of China's external outreach. To the neophytes, the analyses on the preceding pages offer rarely comprehensive and insightful glimpses into the diverse perspectives, experiences, concepts, practices, and issues of Chinese foreign policy. At the same time, the essays collected in this volume attest to the vim and vigor in the study of China's external affairs. It needs to be acknowledged that, despite its breadth and scope, this collection illuminates only a segment of the diverse opinions and approaches to the study of China's international interactions. Relying on the privilege of editorial" superpower," this epilogue d rafts a hesitant outline of some of the themes zigzagging across the analyses of the preceding chapters. The following remarks, therefore, are not intended to impose coherence on the contributions, but to highlight a few trends that have been suggested in them. To begin with, it appears that Warner Levi's observation in the epigraph no longer appears to offer an adequate representation of Beijing's contemporary engagements. None of the contributors have indicated "helplessness," "wavering," or "indecision" as defining features of Chinese foreign policy. While there still seems to be some uncertainty about China's global roles, this uncertainty emerges not because of the country's presumed "weakness," but its alleged strength. The following sections outline some of the key domestic and international variables suggested by the contributors to this volume that are likely to affect the future trajectories of Chinese foreign policy. These developments are then used to emphasize the emerging "logic of relationships" of Beijing's international interactions. Informed by the nascent tendency toward the formalization of such logic of relationships in the discourses of the country's diplomacy, this epilogue advances a proposition on the nascent "struggle for recognition" underpinning the patterns and practices of China's external affairs. The proposition is that the foreign policy of a country such as China is not merely about a set of bilateral and multilateral interactions, but about the capacity to establish "generative relationships" which can change the way Beijing's partners see their world and act in it (Lane and Maxfield 1995: 4).