ABSTRACT
The postwar period also saw the birth of a new field of study devoted exclusively to China, known as Sinology, which in turn has spawned a subfield of inquiry centered on the study of contemporary Chinese foreign policy. Since the 1950s and particularly since the 1970s, the study of contemporary Chinese foreign policy has developed into a significant discipline of scholarship with a number of competing schools interpreting Chinese foreign-policy behavior. This chapter describes some new thinking through an examination of some of the existing Western theories of decisionmaking as compared to the Chinese practices. It focuses on to construct a meaningful theoretical framework for the study of Chinese foreign-policy formulation and decision-making. The chapter presents the Chinese fable, the elephant and the blindmen—mangren mo xiang— seems most apt in that it captures the dilemma in checking the existing Western theories. The rational actor model, the bureaucratic politics model, and the organizational process model capture parts of a dynamic process.
