Introduction : are Asia's thinkers accommodating China's rise?

In 1998, Professor Lucian Pye made famous scathing remarks about East Asia’s chronic memory-blockage and the consequent identity malaise muting any East Asian claims to global leadership. At the height of the Asian Financial Crisis and merely a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Pye deemed neither China nor Japan capable of rising above their own parochialisms and cultural self-absorption to find an appropriate global idiom with which to envision an alternative East Asian world order. Pye was not even sure China, despite its economic promise, fitted at all into the dominant nation-state world order, being as it was a ‘civilisation pretending to be a nation state’

China's New Generation Trade Agreements : Importing Rules to Lock in Domestic Reform?

Since the beginning of the 21st century we have witnessed a proliferation of Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) in Asia Pacific. China has been at the forefront of this development. Initially, China's PTAs were very shallow and mainly aimed at building friendly relationships with developing countries. However, over time, China has started to negotiate deeper PTAs with developing and developed countries alike. This notable shift has thus far been understood to result from four broad motivations: China's desire to access key export markets; the facilitation of regional production networks; to address resource security concerns; and/or to further geostrategic interests and political influence. We propose that these motives are not sufficient to fully account for China's new generation trade agreements. We suggest that China is increasing its integration into the world economy to push for domestic marketization and reform by credibly committing to trade liberalization through PTAs. Deep and comprehensive PTAs oblige a country to follow a set of rules that leave little leeway to violate the terms. In order to successfully implement and enforce PTA commitments, China has also gradually strengthened its regulatory state by investing in regulatory capacity and capability in the field of trade policy. We test the plausibility of our argument through an in‐depth analysis of the PTAs signed by China since 2000 and find evidence that China's PTAs are indeed in part driven by a desire to lock in domestic economic reform, which has gone hand in hand with a strengthening of its regulatory state

Building a New Political Order in China: Interpreting the New Directions in Chinese Politics

Building a new political order has become the central theme of Chinese politics in post-Deng China not a clearly defined goal of the Chinese leadership, but the direction that Chinese politics are pointing to and it will be the ultimate challenge for the fourth generation of Chinese leadership produced at the 16th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)