"Conditioning China’s Influence: Intentionality, Intermediaries, and Institutions" - by CWP alum Courtney Fung, Enze Han and Austin Strange
According to conventional wisdom among policymakers, journalists, and pundits, China’s international influence appears to be taking effect in a multitude of domains within China’s immediate neighborhood and further afield, on issues ranging from vaccines to drone sales to smart city development.2 International relations scholars, however, have been more cautious, and a growing body of literature challenges popular claims of China’s influence. Theoretically informed studies separate measures of China’s power from measures of its influence, repeatedly illustrating that the former does not necessarily translate into the latter.3 Researchers have considered the questions of how to understand, conceptualize, and measure China’s influence, discussing whether China’s influence is congruent with its material power in various domains, and if there is a discrepancy, why? We lay out a summary of the literature here and, building on these earlier efforts, offer three new avenues for researchers to consider how China’s purported influence can be more effectively studied and understood. These avenues include influences that accrue unintentionally, the role of sub-state actors and other intermediaries in Chinese influence generation, and the conditioning effect of host country institutions. Attention to these channels can help balance debates on Chinese influence, which traditionally emphasize China’s own aims and actions, toward environmental factors often outside of China’s direct reach that nonetheless condition its influence bottom line.
Conditioning China’s Influence: Intentionality, Intermediaries, and Institutions
Courtney J. Fung, Enze Han, Kai Quek, and Austin Strange
Courtney J. Fung is Associate Professor in the Department of Security Studies & Criminology at Macquarie University. She is concurrently Non-Resident Fellow at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University; Asia Society Australia; LSE IDEAS, and the Lowy Institute. Courtney is on the editorial board of Contemporary Security Policy, the Australian Journal of International Affairs and H-DIPLO ISSF. Her research examines how rising powers address the norms and provisions for global governance and international security, with an empirical focus on China.
Courtney was previously an associate professor with tenure in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong; a research fellow with the East Asia Institute (Seoul) in their Program on Peace, Governance, and Development in East Asia, and a post-doctoral research fellow with the now Columbia-Harvard China and the World Program.
Courtney is author of China and Intervention at the UN Security Council: Reconciling Status (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), which explains the effects of status on China's varied response to intervention and foreign-imposed regime change at the United Nations. Her book was shortlisted for the BISA LHM Ling Outstanding First Book Prize and received the 2019 - 2020 HKU Research Output Prize for the Faculty of Social Sciences. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Contemporary Security Policy, Cooperation and Conflict, Global Governance, International Affairs, Journal of Cyber Policy, Journal of Global Security Studies, Journal of Contemporary China, PS: Political Science & Politics, The China Quarterly, Third World Quarterly, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, and International Peacekeeping.
Courtney holds a PhD in International Relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. She serves on The Fletcher School Board of Advisors and the National Foundation for Australia-China Relations. She will be a a Fulbright Scholar at Georgetown University in 2024/Q2 through the DFAT-funded Professional Scholarship in Australian-American Alliance Studies.
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Professor Enze Han is Associate Professor at the Department of Politics and Public Administration. His research interests include international relations of East Asia, China’s relations with Southeast Asia, Southeast Asian politics, and ethnic politics in China. Professor Han received a Ph.D in Political Science from the George Washington University in the United States in 2010. Afterwards he was a postdoctoral research fellow in the China and the World Program at Princeton University. During 2015-2016, he was a Friends Founders’ Circle Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, USA. In 2017, he was a fellow at the East Asia Institute in Seoul, South Korea. During 2021-2022, he was Lee Kong Chian Fellow on Contemporary Southeast Asia at the National University of Singapore and Stanford University. His research has been supported by the Leverhulme Research Fellowship and British Council/Newton Fund. Prior to HKU, Professor Han was Senior Lecturer in the International Security of East Asia at SOAS, University of London, United Kingdom.
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Austin Strange is Associate Professor of International Relations in the Department of Politics and Public Administration. He researches and teaches Chinese foreign policy, international political economy, and international development. Austin’s research mainly focuses on China’s historical and contemporary roles in the world economy.
Austin is a Public Intellectuals Program Fellow with the National Committee on US-China Relations from 2023–2025. Previously he was a Wilson China Fellow at the Wilson Center and a fellow with the Columbia-Harvard China and the World Program. He received a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University, M.A. from Zhejiang University, and B.A. from William & Mary.
Austin received HKU’s Early Career Teaching Award in 2022, Research Output Prize in 2023, and Outstanding Young Researcher Award in 2024. With colleagues he was awarded the Best New Dataset Award from the International Political Economy Society.
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