China Analysis: Geopolitics on Chinese Terms

On Wednesday October 6th 2010 the EU holds summit meetings with both China and South Korea. Europe will only be able to deal effectively with rising powers like China if it understands China’s approach to a world undergoing historical changes.

In the latest issue of China Analysis - ‘Geopolitics on Chinese Terms’- published by ECFR and Asia Centre, we look at the debate within the Chinese foreign policy community over how it should deal with Europe and the rest of the world.

Important trends include:

• The US and Western institutions are no longer seen to dominate the world. Instead there is permanent flux and complexity, and China needs to manoeuvre carefully if it is to continue its rise.

• Powered by the supercharged growth in the Chinese economy, Beijing no longer has a victim mentality when it deals with the outside world. In foreign policy circles there is little evidence of the nationalist and populist trends that are often highlighted by Western media.

• Europe, Japan and Russia are considered to be losing influence rapidly. There is a widespread belief that Europe’s status within international institutions in untenable.

• Chinese relations with the BRIC countries are a high profile concern, and there is a widely held belief that the emergence of rising powers is changing the nature of foreign affairs.

For the full text click here

* We apologise but the initial version of the report had two small errors, noted below. The corrected version of China Analysis is now available.

On page 4 - We mention that a measure of the growing influence of China, Brazil and India is that they are all G7 members - we meant to say that they are G20 members.

On page 9 - BRICs discussions did take place in Hokkaido in 2008 but not in G20 format.