READING CHINA’S SELF-DEFINITION OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS FROM INTERGOVERNMENTAL CONFERENCES

abstract

The investigation of intergovernmental conferences is an important lens to examine international geopolitical issues that seem to remain understudied in the existing literature, especially from the perspective of how emerging countries shape their discourse, image, and geopolitical imaginations through such conferences. This paper aims to read China’s relationships with the outside world from both its holding and participating in intergovernmental conferences between 2002 to 2017. Based on the textual analysis of conference materials from 919 intergovernmental conferences in which China has been involved, this paper highlights three lines with which China’s self-definition of its geopolitical positions in international politics can be understood. First, China’s delicate balance between the United States and Russia consists of the most fundamental structure of Chinese geopolitical views; second, China’s self-construction as a responsible regional power also makes up a large portion of China’s geopolitical view; third, the crucial role of intergovernmental conferences for the Chinese government is to convey China’s nonthreatening model of development, which is also the most important principle of China’s foreign relations. This paper helps to understand how China constructs its international relations and shapes international discourse and image through intergovernmental conferences. Such conference-based and self-defined geopolitics has furnished a special and, most importantly, a Chinese-styled geopolitical view that can further the understanding of international politics.

Keywords:

• China
• critical geopolitics
• textual analysis
• intergovernmental conferences
• international politics

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the high-performance computing support from the Center for Geodata and Analysis, Faculty of Geographical Science, Beijing Normal University [https://gda.bnu.edu.cn/].

Notes

¹ The notion of “non-Western geopolitics” has been theoretically proposed by other scholars. See J. Agnew, 2007. Know-Where: Geographies of Knowledge of World Politics. International Political Sociology 1 (2): 138–148; N. An, X. Cai, and H. Zhu. 2017. Gaps in Chinese Geopolitical Research. Political Geography 59: 136–138.; N. An and H. Zhu. 2018. Conceptual and Theoretical Debates in Modern Geopolitics and Their Implications for Chinese Geopolitics. Area Development and Policy 3 (3): 368–382.; and Y. Liu, F. Wang, and N. An. 2018. The Duality of Political Geography in China: Integration and Challenges. Geopolitics 1–21.

² A small number of human geographers have still been concerned with the geopolitics of conferences. See J. W. Crampton, 2006. The Cartographic Calculation of Space: Race Mapping and the Balkans at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Social & Cultural Geography 7 (5): 731–752.

³ The number in the brackets indicate the times of Chinese participating in the relevant intergovernmental conferences between 2002 to 2017, which is calculated from the Chinese Diplomatic Yearbook (2003–3018), and the same below.

⁴ The geographical division of the world is based on continents, but the division of Asia in which China is located is more detailed. Except China, Asia is divided according to the common Asian geographical division.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants No. 41871128, Grants No. 41701149), the major project of National Social Science Foundation of China (Grants No. 16ZDA041), and the China Scholarship Council.