Introduction : engaging China's foreign policy

Offering the most conspicuous indication of a global power transition "to the East," China's enhanced confidence and ability to fashion international relations has attracted growing public, policy, and scholarly attention. Thus, while in the wake of the Cold War, commentators were pondering how far Western ideas could spread in a world marked by "the end of history," today the conversation seems to be about how far Chinese ideas will spread in a "world without the West" (Barma et al. 2007). Such a shift seems to attest to both the transformations in and the transformative potential of Chinese foreign policy practice and attitudes. At the same time, the prominence of Beijing' s international agency suggests the nascent contestation of the conventional explanation and understanding of world politics and reminds observers of the Coxian adage that changes in practice reveal the inherent arbitrariness of knowledge about "the ways in which human affairs are organized" (Cox 1981: 126).