Will Trump make China great again? The belt and road initiative and international order

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In this article I study the competing US and Chinese narratives about the South China Sea. Arguing that the practice of calculating power shifts in terms of the changing distribution of material capabilities is inadequate, I complement existing literature by taking ideational and normative dimensions of power into account. I ask what the alternative Chinese narrative of power and leadership in the South China Sea looks like and how it is perceived by others in comparison with the dominant US narrative. While a "hard" power transition is ongoing, China's preferred narrative has yet to become widely accepted and the US narrative will remain dominant for now. Nevertheless, China has been making progress in shifting the narrative of what the future could look like with China's vision for a post-US regional and global order now seen as a possible alternative.

Section: Moving Beyond the South China Seamentioning

confidence: 92%

Understanding Power (Shift) in East Asia: The Sino-US Narrative Battle about Leadership in the South China Sea

Weissmann¹

2019

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“…What China wants to be is a crucial question in East Asian international relations that has implications throughout and beyond East Asia, even more so since the introduction of the Belt and Road initiative (BRI) in 2013. BRI here offers a new vision of the future of the world, as a concrete manifestation of previous visions such as "harmonious world" and "peaceful development," as well as Xi's own "Chinese Dream" of rejuvenation of the Chinese nation (Callahan 2013;Nordin 2016;Nordin and Weissmann 2018). Thus, while first and foremost an economic undertaking, at the same time, the success of the BRI is at least in part dependent on the attractiveness of China and the Chinese offer.…”

Section: The Limitations Of Soft Power In Research On East Asiamentioning

confidence: 98%

“…In the last years, China has moved even further in its attempts to influence the international agenda. The most striking example here is Xi Jinping's offering at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2017 where he stood among other world leaders and offered Chinese leadership, promising that China would be a defender, promoter, and leader of global capitalism and free trade (for details see Nordin and Weissmann 2018).…”

Section: Capturing Power Shift: the Case Of Chinamentioning

confidence: 99%

Capturing Power Shift in East Asia: Toward an Analytical Framework for Understanding “Soft Power”

Weissmann¹

2020

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Mainstream International Relations (IR) theory has problems fully accounting for the regional dynamics of East Asia. This article explores whether the pursuit of soft power-a concept that has been given a prominent position in research on East Asian IR-can provide one piece of the puzzle for understanding East Asia's regional dynamics. This article proposes an analytical framework for analyzing soft power that problematizes the rigid soft power/hard power binary. The framework proposes a way to understand soft power and the hard-soft spectrum of behavior that allows for the inclusion of economic power while still drawing a line between hard and soft power, where not all economic power is soft, but nor is it all hard. It is argued that to keep the concept of soft power relevant in the East Asian context economic power needs to be included. The line is drawn between economic coercion and economic inducement, arguing that when induced there is still a certain level of freedom as one can choose whether the payments or bribes offered are good enough for it to be worthwhile to change one's preference and behavior. Coercion, in contrast, utilizes a different dynamic where the point is to force someone to do something they are unwilling to do.

“…The "Belt and Road" project may be created to build infrastructure links across central and South Asia toward Europe and Africa and to develop new markets in all these areas. But this initiative could be viewed as a way of laying the material foundation for China to construct an alternative global order in the future (Nordin and Weissmann 2018).…”

Section: Obamamentioning

confidence: 99%

Contending Narratives of the International Order: US/Chinese Discursive Power and Its Effects on the UK

Li¹

2019