Beijing hosted the presidents of the United States and Russia in recent days. China’s rise in diplomatic standing is no accident. It is rooted in the tradition of relationship diplomacy going back centuries and reflecting in the growing recognition in the capitals that Beijing is a reliable partner.
The clearest explanation of China’s foreign policy values comes from the scholar Qin Yaqing, the former president of the China Foreign Affairs University, who has trained more than 600 Chinese ambassadors, the guardian of Foreign Minister Wang Yi, often called “the pit of Chinese diplomacy”.
Qin’s relational theory of world politics organizes China’s foreign policy around the concept of guanxi, a network of relationships rooted in Confucian thought and woven through the everyday social life of Chinese people.
Imagine dropping a stone into water, causing ripples to spread out in circles. Each state sits in the center of its circles, with the inner ring holding the closest allies. Nations move inward or outward as relations strengthen or falter, but they remain within the network. For Beijing, rapprochement is always possible because in this system, no relationship is beyond repair.
Schools of international relations in Western countries often treat states as special units with defined interests prior to any inter-state interaction. Beijing regards them as something more loosely defined: states are “actors-in-relationships” whose identities and interests emerge from the relationships that bind them together. Cooperation does not follow prior interests; it is what creates relationships. This network of relationships is increasingly visible, reflecting China’s diplomatic sophistication and sophistication.
Order, for China, is less a structure imposed by powerful nations than a process recreated by actors within the web. What binds states are relationships, not the laws that create them. Relationships are more inclusive than contracts because they create equity investments rather than external obligations. Status within the web has something to lose by leaving the relationship and something to gain by strengthening it.
