Does Identity Politics Better Explain Chinas Embrace of Multilateralism?
In the recent literature on Chinese foreign policy, there are contending explanations about China’s embrace of multilateralism. Realist arguments emphasize the pressure of U.S. hegemonic power and assertive security posturing in East Asia as a catalyst for China’s shift to multilateralism, while constructivists look at the role of ASEAN way in socializing Chinese foreign policy elites into an alternative norm of regional ordering. On 3 May 2007, Dr. Xu Xin, a China and the World fellow, offered a different explanation about China’s embrace of multilateralism by looking at the interactive effects of both domestic and international politics on China’s security behavior. With an analytical focus on the politics of identity, he argued that a state has an incentive to maximize its legitimacy by striking an optimal balance between enhancing internal cohesion in terms of state-society relations and seeking external resonance in terms of its place in the international system; that is, under gi
