China's Grand Strategy: Modernity, Identity and Position in International Society

Efforts to understand current Chinese foreign policy and grand strategy are connected with uncertainty, doubts about its coherence, provisionality in interpretation, limited insights into China's foreign policy decision making process and contradictions in China's behavior and/or rhetoric. Instead of trying to decide whether (and how much) China is now getting assertive, aggressive or revisionist, the paper focuses on what is possible to identify with a higher degree of certainty – on tracing China's response(s) to the (Western) modernity. I argue that China's responses to the (Western) modernity have always underpinned and structured more specific grand strategic formulations (existing in coherent grand strategic programs or more partial formulations) since China's conflicting encounter with the West in the middle of 19th century. Besides providing insights into current China's strategic/political actions, the paper aims to construct an analytical framework which may be useful for analyzing grand strategic orientations of all states that had/have to position themselves in relation to the Western modernity. I suggest that finding a way how to deal with the Western dominance and cultural influence in world order was/is a key motive for many non-Western states, especially those that understand themselves as having own civilizational history and/or history of great powers. The paper will briefly analyze continuity and dis-continuity in Chinese grand strategic formulations which emerged from critical moments of China's modern political development and point out how these previous tendencies and modernity responses reappear and, as will be argued, intensify when it comes to two top foreign policy priorities of China's current leadership – 1) creation of the “One Belt, One Road” initiative which is aimed to build favorable foreign policy environment and 2) current China's actions in South China Sea. As an initial analytical tool, the paper will construct a simple matrix of responses to the Western modernity, self-understanding vis-à-vis the West and modernization strategies through which we can follow development of China's grand strategic formulations, their character and their dis/continuity. The matrix will be derived from the literature on orientalism (initiated by Edward Said's work) which can help to categorize how states, in principle, can relate their identity to the Western modernity and how they can try to instrumentalize some elements of the Western modernity. In order to refine the analytical framework, the paper will turn to two other strands of literature. Firstly, the literature on multiple modernities will help to illuminate how China's specific “national style” of modernity got developed from its positioning against the West. Secondly, the literature on liminality (which is understood as quality of being in-between usual/established categories) should help to show how China's foreign policy and identity is sometimes caught up between Western and non-Western, between admiration and refusal of the West, between (re-)inventing indigenous responses and the ever-present Western modernity.