ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the policy discourse of harmonious world under Hu Jintao. It suggests that this term does not have one single meaning that researchers can pin down, but that we can nonetheless study what it does in and to Chinese politics. Hu emphatically launched the harmonious world idea to the United Nations (UN) at its sixtieth anniversary summit in September 2005. Building a harmonious world of sustained peace and common prosperity is a common wish of the people throughout the world as well as the lofty goal of China in taking the road of peaceful development. In this way, through reading the notion of a harmonious world in terms of both its doing and its undoing, its appearance and its disappearance, the chapter suggests a novel way in which scholars of Chinese international relations may study foreign policy concepts in general and Chinese set phrases in particular.
