Answering the “China question” : local responses to global China

Abstract

In a short span of time, China has moved from the periphery to the centre of the international system, becoming globally consequential in a vast array of domains—economy, global governance, security and military affairs, education, science and technology, culture, as well as the values and norms underpinning the international relations across all these domains (Shambaugh 2013: 4–5). The evaluations of this phenomenon have however been starkly diverging—as a harbinger of an era in which China “rules the world” (Jacques 2012), but also as offering evidence of China’s “shallow” and at best “partial” power constrained by a variety of structural problems that prevent China from achieving a position of global eminence in the foreseeable future (Shirk 2007; Shambaugh 2013).