In this issue . . .

China's Challenge to Pax Americana

China has been a largely reactive international power for most of the period beginning in 1949 with the formation of the Communist state, willingly—and often skillfully—playing the pivot in the strategic competition of other states. In the 1960s and 1970s, its leaders briefly promoted a model of international order that stressed national revolution and proletarian solidarity. Yet, with that exception, the country has offered no real alternative vision of the international system for most of the past five decades. Beneath the rhetorical veneer, Chinese leaders have conducted their own foreign policy largely on the basis of the same calculations of balance of power and relative national advantage that drove the behavior of other major powers during the Cold War. Thus, Chinese foreign policy evolved during the first 50 years of the People's Republic in a context set almost entirely by others.

In the years since Beijing's 1996 missile exercise in the Taiwan Strait, however, Chinese leaders have begun to articulate a decidedly alternative vision of the underlying principles of international relations. This clarification has emerged gradually, in an ad hoc fashion, and has yet to cohere into a neatly bundled grand strategic vision. The concept is still evolving. Most importantly, it has emerged inadvertently—as a consequence of China's narrow concern with the issue of Taiwan.

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