That Is Not Intervention; That Is Interference with Chinese Characteristics: New Concepts, Distinctions and Approaches Developing in the Chinese Debate and Foreign and Security Policy Practice

Abstract

There is among Chinese international relations scholars an intense debate about how China can protect and promote Chinese global presence and interests while at the same time continue to adhere to the principle of non-intervention. New concepts, distinctions and approaches are developing as the debate progresses. The current Chinese foreign and security policy practice reflects a more flexible and pragmatic Chinese interpretation – and implementation – of the principle of non-intervention with different degrees and types of intervention. This article explores the search for “legitimate great power intervention” characterizing both the debate among Chinese international relations scholars and the current Chinese foreign and security policy practice, and uses this case as the departure point for a more general discussion of the drivers of change – and continuity – in Chinese foreign and security policy.

Studying Chinese Foreign Policy Narratives: Introducing the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Press Conferences Corpus

“…Recent studies have mapped the patterns of Western narratives towards China arguing that some popular arguments may have questionable empirical basis and lead to ineffective policy responses, possibly even creating self-fulfilled prophecies [ 7 , 39 , 52 ]. More effort is also seen in the study of China’s political discourse with the focus on topics like political slogans [ 26 ], narratives in Chinese foreign policy [ 22 , 37 , 47 ], overlap of international and domestic issues [ 30 , 56 ], uniqueness of Chinese discourse in general [ 45 ], personal attacks used by the spokespersons [ 36 ], politicians’ and journalists’ aggressiveness [ 58 ], or construction of national face [ 29 ].…”

China’s changing engagement in global peace building and conflict resolution: drivers and trends

“…From the above discussion on China's efforts to distinguish developmental peace from the Western liberal peace model, we clearly already see here how the Chinese peace building paradigm is, as a 'foreign policy', at least partly motivated by China's sense of a need to distinguish its contribution to global governance from incumbent Western approaches (Sørensen, 2019). This firstly relates to China's sense of a need to build its great power status through assuming more proactive leadership in global governance (Hirono et al, 2019, 575, 583;Sørensen, 2019). Accordingly, China is being driven by the incentive of assuming the role of norm entrepreneur in the international system and the leadership power this can enable (Abb, 2018;Hirono et al, 2019, 588).…”

Separating Intervention from Regime Change: China's Diplomatic Innovations at the UN Security Council Regarding the Syria Crisis

“…5Wuthnow 2013; Fung 2016b; Richardson 2011. For analysis of the Chinese scholarly debate on intervention, see Duchâtel, Bräuner and Zhou 2014; Chen 2016; Sørensen forthcoming.…”