The Convergence and Divergence of Chinese Leaders’ View of International Order

• In Event: Chinese Foreign Policy

Abstract

Do different generations of Chinese leaders have a consistent view of international order? If not, to what extent do their views change over time? How do leaders’ catchphrases differ when the audience they address changes from domestic to international, from small/medium powers to great powers? By using natural language processing and network techniques, such as word embedding, topic modeling, and knowledge graphs, this study systemically explores the answers to these questions. We create a novel dataset that includes all foreign policy-related speeches from three top Chinese leaders in the past three decades: Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping. Our analysis suggests that despite facing different internal and external environments, the three Chinese leaders converge on four ideas about international order: (1) international order should be understood and maintained through a relational perspective; (2) power dynamics shape international order; (3) an ideal international order is characterized by fairness, equality, justice, democracy, development, peace, multilateralism, and multipolarity, where current international order meets its limits; (4) China does not strive to overturn the established order but to take its responsibility of revamping it so that it can be more representative; (4) maintaining socialist characteristics is essential in dealing with the outside world. In addition to these broad consistencies, we also compared and analyzed the idiosyncratic points of these leaders about international politics and order. We show that these Chinese understandings, which cannot easily be captured by traditional qualitative studies, shed light on contemporary Chinese foreign policy.

Authors

• Liuya Zhang, Ohio State University

• Haoming Xiong, Ohio State University

• Bear F. Braumoeller, Ohio State University