ABSTRACT
Wags muse that the great issues the world faces are too important to be left to historians and too difficult to be left to political scientists. Chinese conceptions of world order can now confidently be placed into the ‘great issues’ category. A decade ago Gerald Segal could pen, with a hint of bitterness but no irony, an essay entitled ‘Does China Matter?’1 The big issue of today is ‘What Does China Think?’ The topic has moved from a mainly academic concern to top-of-mind for government leaders, journalists and pundits around the world. When a Chinese Premier refers to China as a ‘great power,’ as Wen Jiaboa did in London in the spring of 2009, it gets attention, adding a note of immediacy to the earlier debates in China and abroad about ‘peaceful rise’, ‘peaceful development’, ‘harmonious society’, and ‘harmony without uniformity’.
