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What explains rising powers’ approach to emerging norms that challenge ontological order? The article uses a controlled comparison of two rising powers, China and India, as they address the responsibility to protect, which reconceives state sovereignty as contingent. Both states rejected the norm at its inception, before diverging as UN Security Council members during norm application in the Libya intervention. China assumed a creative resister role, offering tactical concessions, while using traditional sovereignty norms to renovate norm content. India assumed a norm begrudger role, typified…

Awardees 2022: Awarded to Yeling Tan for her book Disaggregating China, Inc. State Strategies in the Liberal Economic Order, Cornell University Press (2021).

Yeling Tan’s Disaggregating China, Inc. makes a major contribution to the fields of international political economy, comparative political economy, and Chinese politics. The book investigates China’s responses to pressures for reform arising from its entry into the World Trade Organization at the end of 2001. Tan convincingly shows that such pressures did not simply call for China to make policy adjustments…

In 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping launched two important connectivity initiatives: An economic silk road and a maritime silk road. The idea behind both was to create a network of connectivity between China and mostly developing countries that would boost both mutual collaboration and prosperity. These two initiatives were the foundation of what would come to be termed the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a gargantuan infrastructure, trade, and connectivity venture encompassing billions of dollars of Chinese investment in projects across the globe. 

Since its inception, BRI has generated…

The past two decades have witnessed increasing scholarly analysis of China’s growing presence in Africa. How does African agency operate within the asymmetric power relations between China and African states? How do African actors use foreign-sponsored projects to achieve domestic objectives? Some analyses take a China-centered perspective, with divergent views about how Chinese economic engagement promotes or inhibits African development. Scholarly work increasingly recognizes the agency of African actors. I advance upon the African agency argument by proposing a concept of presidential…

The 13th BRICS Summit, featuring the five major emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, took place virtually earlier this month. It was chaired by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and the leaders of the other BRICS members—Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa—all tuned in. Modi’s speech was avidly covered by the Indian press, and the summit itself drew significant coverage by newspapers in India and China, the two most populous BRICS members.

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Since President Xi announced China’s grand strategy, the Belt and Road Initiative, in Kazakhstan in 2013, it has grown so much in geographic and conceptual scope that it has become difficult to measure. Agreements setting out some form of formal affiliation with the initiative have been signed with 146 countries. Meanwhile, the projects covered by this grand strategy have increased in number but also in terms of sectoral and geographic complexity, from the Arctic to the deep oceans, from Latin America to outer space. 

The COVID-19 pandemic, however, has been a major complication for the…

China’s outward investments are likely to have a substantial impact on global sustainability. Through capital, technology, and standards, China’s investments, including through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), have the potential to act as catalysts for sustainable, climate-conscious development—or to accelerate resource depletion, pollution, biodiversity loss, and carbon-intensive resource depletion. This policy paper draws from several pieces of research analyzing the political economy of China’s outward investments and consequent environmental impacts. Findings from these analyses…

This book provides a timely, critical, and thought-provoking analysis of the implications of the disruption of COVID-19 to the foreign aid and development system, and the extent to which the system is retaining a level of relevance, legitimacy or coherence.

Drawing on the expertise of key scholars from around the world in the fields of international development, political science, socioeconomics, history, and international relations, the book explores the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on development aid within an environment of shifting national and regional priorities and interactions. The…

The Chinese delegation “rat-f––ed” the negotiations, fumed Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, after yet another day of gridlock. It was a Friday afternoon in December 2009, and the COP-15 climate conference in Copenhagen was going off the rails. U.S. President Barack Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, and dozens of other world leaders had assembled in a last-ditch attempt to salvage a deal. They sat cheek by jowl in uncomfortable straight-backed chairs. The conference table was strewn with empty espresso cups and large…

Chinese policymakers are increasingly convinced that the United States is determined to implement a full-fledged strategy of containment against China. Beijing views the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity as the economic mirror of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue and AUKUS, two U.S.-led security pacts that Beijing regards as anti-China coalitions. Chinese officials, academics, and media rhetoric increasingly talk of self-reliance and are preparing for a forced decoupling from the United States. Fang Xinghai, a vice chairman of the China Securities Regulatory…

America’s recent turn towards protectionism has raised concerns over the future viability of the liberal international trading system. This study examines how and why public attitudes towards international trade change when one’s country is targeted by protectionist measures from abroad. To address this question, we fielded three original survey experiments in the country most affected by US protectionism: China. First, we find consistent evidence that US protectionism reduces support for trade among Chinese citizens. We replicate this finding in parallel experiments on technology cooperation,…

In 2013 President Xi Jinping announced the launch of two new Chinese connectivity projects: an “economic belt” along the historical Silk Road in Eurasia and a twenty-first-century Maritime Silk Road to expand cooperation between China and Southeast Asian nations. The common theme of both was to increase China’s collaboration and communication with regional nations to bolster mutual development and prosperity.

Over the next decade the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) became a gigantic infrastructure, trade, and connectivity project, spreading beyond Eurasia and Southeast Asia to regions such…

Governments around the world, including that of the United States, have grown increasingly anxious about the nature and impacts of Chinese-financed global development projects. One source of concern is China’s pursuit of influence via foreign aid and less concessional, debt-based financing in other countries. But given the scale and complexity of China’s overseas development portfolio, expectations that development dollars translate linearly into political influence are unrealistic. This essay argues for instead focusing on the major nodes of China’s overseas development program most relevant…

In long-suffering Shanghai, victory seems to have arrived. The city reopened on June 1, with jubilant locals in the streets—even as tens of thousands remain in COVID-19 quarantine. Beijing seems ready to declare victory over its own outbreak soon.

But all is not well for Chinese President Xi Jinping. Although the Beijing and Shanghai outbreaks have been controlled for now, the rapidly spreading omicron variant keeps breaking through the wall of China’s “dynamic zero-COVID” policy, as officials describe it. With several months left before the 20th Party Congress, the economy…

The impacts of the novel coronavirus (hereafter COVID-19) pose one of the greatest crises of our generation. The policy decisions that the US and Chinese governments take will shape the current order of international relations, the global supply chain of medical supplies, and US–China relations. The COVID-19 crisis leads to the empirical puzzles: how do the two great world powers construct their narratives on the global pandemic and toward each other? What are the meanings, if any, of fear in US–China relations? This study explores the narrative of fear that is constituted in the US and China…