The extent to which a rising China’s core interests may, or will, clash with the interests of the existing dominant global power has been a topic of recurring interest for many years—perhaps since Aaron Friedberg identified the potential for growing rivalry in 1993. Indeed, the debate has been featured in some detail in the pages of this journal. Primarily focusing on China’s challenge to US interests in East Asia (rather than on the global scale), the attempt to identify when China might be able to achieve regional ‘primacy, supremacy, or hegemony’ remains ‘the name of the international politics game in Asia’. While this interest in China’s rise did not exactly need to be given a renewed impetus, the question of whether a new period of increased assertiveness in Chinese foreign policy had opened in 2009 (or thereabouts) brought a new dimension to the debates. In this context, disagreement has centred on, first, what it means or takes to be considered ‘assertive’, and second, whether Chinese policy has fundamentally changed or not.
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