China: Revolutionary or Revisionist?

Abstract

Is China a revolutionary or revisionist power in the international order? Debates along these lines run the danger of creating an opposition which isn’t really there. China’s stake in the global order is dependent on material factors, as well as the desire over time to shift norms so that ideas of aggregate economic growth and national sovereignty take precedence over transnational concepts of individual rights. Unlike Russia, which has a clear interest in destroying key parts of the existing global infrastructure particularly in Europe and the Middle East, China has many motivations to preserve or slowly adapt aspects of the existing international order. China is central to the global economy in a way that Russia is not, energy aside; that means that many more countries are dependent on links to China, but also that China itself would find disruption all the more damaging. However, China certainly finds many aspects of the contemporary order deeply irksome, such as its concentration on individual civil liberties as a core element of the human rights agenda, or the continuing debate over the “responsibility to protect” across sovereign borders. Its priority has been to find ways to maintain the structures of contemporary order while seeking to redefine or reinhabit them in ways that better suit its interests.