The contrast with early Ming China is thus clear and striking. Some are also adopting a strategy of exit by downgrading their relationships with China or by switching to closer relationships with other countries, including China’s archrival, the US. The main strategy adopted by most states today is in fact access, an instrumental attempt to maintain relationships with China in order to obtain economic benefits from China’s rise. None of China’s neighbours are developing a strategy of identification, not many states are adopting one of deference either. On the whole, early Ming China’s material primacy in East Asia was also a Chinese hegemony accepted by its neighbours to varying degrees.Īn important criterion for measuring Chinese influence today is the type and nature of regional responses to China’s rise. Ming China never had to confront a systemic, anti-hegemonic response in the form of, say, a counterbalancing coalition characteristic of modern European politics. But that’s hardly surprising: every hegemony is incomplete, even in the case of contemporary US hegemony. Ming China thus only achieved an incomplete hegemony in East Asia. Almost all of Ming China’s neighbours adopted a strategy of deference, whereby they deferred to, but didn’t necessarily accept as legitimate, imperial China’s hierarchical scheme of foreign relations embodied by the tribute system. Ranked from the most to the least cooperative, these four strategies are identification, deference, access, and exit. But hegemony is about more than material capabilities-it’s the conjunction of material primacy and social legitimacy the ability to control important international outcomes and some degree of consent and acceptance from other states in the system.Įarly Ming China’s neighbours adopted four principal strategies in their response to and dealings with the Ming imperial court. By GDP, the economic position of Ming China at the height of its power was stronger than that of the US today. Is Xi’s China ready to resume the glory of its imperial predecessor? We may compare China today with China during the early Ming dynasty (1368-1424), which achieved an incomplete regional hegemony in East Asia. Indeed, as a keen student of history, Xi may be trying to restore the role of China in the contemporary East Asian system to its historical height during the era of the Chinese empire (221BC–1911AD). The two major pillars of Xi’s assertive foreign policy-security activism predominately in the maritime domain, and economic diplomacy by way of the so-called ‘one belt, one road’ policy-suggest that Xi isn’t content with making China a great power in the region and beyond he also wants to make China a leading and even dominant power in key areas of Asia–Pacific regional relations. Xi is now seen as China’s most powerful leader after Deng Xiaoping, if not Mao Zedong. He has surprised virtually every observer by the speed and efficiency with which he’s consolidated power in the party and military.
Domestically, he’s advanced the grand goal of what he calls the China Dream: ‘the great rejuvenation of the Chinese people’. Since assuming the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership in November 2012, Chinese president Xi Jinping’s great ambitions have become well known.
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