ABSTRACT
Qian Qichen, the first foreign minister in the PRC who had been a career diplomat, remarked in 1990: “[F]oreign policy is the extension of China’s domestic policies.”1 Unfortunately, as the preceding chapter suggests, there is an apparent lack of systemic and theoretically informed analyses of the role of domestic politics in the foreign policy of China, especially in the reform era. Fruitful efforts should shed light not only on the Chinese case, but also on the role and dynamics of domestic politics in the formulation of foreign policy in general. In this chapter the critical and various effects of domestic politics on foreign policy will be discussed. The discussion will start with the leaders’ political calculus and the notion of survival of states in world politics. It will then go on to examine how domestic political factors give rise to fundamental changes as well as tactical adjustments in foreign policy. Many existing theories on international relations and foreign policy, espe-
cially realist ones, tend to postulate that the international settings and structure determine the range of policy options available for leaders of the state. This is a questionable premise. Leaders may vary widely in terms of their political vision or world-view, and even power base and core political constituency. More importantly, they represent different regimes or different political coalitions. Therefore, individual leaders may interpret the international settings differently from the others; the policy that they think the best may thus vary widely. Thus, a sensible theory on foreign policy should start with the analysis of what drives leaders in foreign policy since they play the most critical role in formulating it.
