ABSTRACT
Under the top leadership lie the foreign affairs bureaucracies of ministerial ranking. As examined in Chapter 1, these bureaucratic institutions represent the foreign-policy elements of the three major systems of Chinese political power: the party, the government, and the military. Officially these institutions make decisions over the details in the implementation of foreign policy made by the central leadership. According to their respective functions, they can be roughly placed into three main categories: (1) policy consultation, coordination, and supervision—the Central Foreign Affairs LSG and the CPC Foreign Affairs Office, (2) policy recommendation and implementation—the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), the Ministry Of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation (MOFTEC), the CPC Central Committee International Liaison Department (ILD), the Second Directorate of the PLA General Staff Department (GSD), and the Commission of Science, Technology, and Industry for National Defense (COSTIND), and (3) information and research—Xinhua News Agency, the Third Directorate of the PLA GSD, the Ministry of State Security (MSS), 1 and academic foreign affairs research institutes. Of the bureaucracies and institutions, only the MFA, MOFTEC, and ILD play official policy roles. Others only represent bureaucratic interests in foreign policies, with the elements of the PLA one of the newest.
