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Abstract
The formation and development of the European Union, and the rise of China, are transforming the global order, promoting a more multi-centred world. Sino-EU relations will play a key role in shaping the character of the newly-emerging multi-polarity. In examining how China views Europe, this chapter is concerned to set out China’s strategic perspective on Europe’s role in world multi-polarisation, explaining its significance from the Chinese perspective. By improving its relations with Europe step by step, China has been able to strengthen its own status in a world order dominated by the US. The discussion opens with a consideration of China’s multi-polar conception, illuminating this further by tracing the origins of the analysis to the 1970s, to Mao Zedong’s Theory of the Three Worlds. The chapter then outlines developments in Sino-European relations in the wider context of the changing international situation, to reveal how these have helped shape China’s strategic choices. Finally, the discussion reviews recent Chinese views on relations with the EU and considers the prospects for a strengthening of Sino-EU strategic cooperation.
Abstract
The formation and development of the European Union, and the rise of China, are transforming the global order, promoting a more multi-centred world. Sino-EU relations will play a key role in shaping the character of the newly-emerging multi-polarity. In examining how China views Europe, this chapter is concerned to set out China’s strategic perspective on Europe’s role in world multi-polarisation, explaining its significance from the Chinese perspective. By improving its relations with Europe step by step, China has been able to strengthen its own status in a world order dominated by the US. The discussion opens with a consideration of China’s multi-polar conception, illuminating this further by tracing the origins of the analysis to the 1970s, to Mao Zedong’s Theory of the Three Worlds. The chapter then outlines developments in Sino-European relations in the wider context of the changing international situation, to reveal how these have helped shape China’s strategic choices. Finally, the discussion reviews recent Chinese views on relations with the EU and considers the prospects for a strengthening of Sino-EU strategic cooperation.
This discussion examines wartime debates over the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives’ (CIC) ‘Gung Ho’ movement. The CIC experience provides a distinctive case study of mobilisation in Nationalist China at war, endeavouring to extend the momentum of the ‘great industrial migration’, as a force for social transformation, from the inland cities to the countryside. CIC was also to become a focus for overseas support for China’s resistance against Japanese invasion. The discussion reveals differences over elite- and mass-based strategies for cooperative development as revealed from Western inputs into the CIC debates, at the same time noting different ways in which foreigners sought to strengthen relations with wartime China. While CIC’s promoters reached beyond philanthropism towards a pragmatic solidarity, cooperative experts from the emerging international development community sought universal formulations for overseas assistance, advocating adherence to Western cooperative models, and reinforcing an elitist emphasis on expertise. CIC was to fall far short of its ambitions for a people’s cooperative movement as a permanent force for China’s democratic future. Here it is argued that under combined pressures of Guomindang (Nationalist Party, Kuomintang) statism and Western neocolonialism, CIC’s distinctive developmental strategy, based on the mobilisation of workers in cooperative self-help, was never allowed to fulfil its potential.