Chinese History and the Foreign Relations of Contemporary China

It is frequently implied that there is something peculiarly "Chinese," derived from the millennia of a separate and remarkable cultural tradition, which operates to motivate the foreign relations of the People's Republic of China (P.R.C.). It is, of course, absurd to expect that there would be no residue of the past at work in the present, even after the profound revolutionary changes that China has undergone in the past century. That persistence of tradition, however, is not simple and unproblematic. Precisely what out of the past has a functional role in contemporary China requires explication. A distinction between influences from the pre-nineteenth-century "Great Tradition" and those growing from the importunate impact of the outside world on China in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries must be made. And the weight of tradition/history must be compared with that of other factors influencing the formation and execution of foreign policy. This paper examines five components which have determined the foreign relations of the P.R.C. and suggests that they may be ranked in the following order of importance: 1) nationalism; 2) the politics of the international Communist movement; 3) China's domestic politics; 4) Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideology; and 5) a strategic-political imagery based on a traditional spatial-ideological world order.