ABSTRACT
China's continued growth and increasing global reach and significance stands in contrast to a crisis of global neoliberalism that the existing structures of global governance failed to foresee and prevent. A historical review shows that China has actually moved a long way from relative isolation and a rejection of Western-dominated institutions of global governance, to becoming an active member of many of them. In terms of formal global forms of governance, the Chinese emphasis is on empowering the United Nations system, utilizing the G-20 as a mechanism for bringing about broader global change, and working through the World Trade Organization (WTO). The relative ease with which China was welcomed into the Washington-based financial institutions was not repeated when it came to the fifteen-year attempt to join the WTO. It is worth parsing how China emphasizes the multilateral arenas within the UN system and the G-20.
