Answering the “China Question”: Local Responses to Global China

Given the complexity of the phenomenon of China’s “rise”, as well as the ambiguity surrounding China’s identity, strategic objectives, and policy targets, a key challenge is how to structure an effective inquiry into its features and implications. Studying China’s growing international footprint has often relied on the unpacking of drivers, objectives, and strategies of China’s foreign policy and relations. Additionally, the rise of China is also often approached through the lens of international relations theoretical models, which inevitably gives primacy to abstract over concrete, and conceptual over empirical. We instead suggest that studying “global China” is best approached locally. That is because the “China Question” is mediated and engaged through the unique national and regional contexts made up of particular identities, strategies, divisions, preferences and power-relations, and inevitably to substantially varied outcomes. That is, China’s international role and impact might be best explored by focusing on the local variations in how China is perceived and responded to, and from there, considering what these variations amount to on an aggregate level. We conclude against the premature generalizations about the transformative role China has in line with the often taken-for-granted scenarios and assumptions of a linearly progressive rise of China. China is neither consistent in how it approaches its foreign relations, nor engaged by others in a standardized fashion.