ABSTRACT
The People's Republic of China's policies and its importance have led to a quantitative explosion of literature studying the different aspects of its foreign policy. Yet, there is still no single coherent theory in international relations that can explain and predict all aspects of China's foreign behaviour. Therefore, different theoretical approaches have been applied to explain and predict China's foreign behaviour, but none is able to give a consistent explanation that can be applied to the conduct of every Chinese foreign policy initiative and at any given time. Many theoretical frameworks have successfully been applied to explain and predict China's foreign policy regarding specific issues and situations, but they remain mostly one-sided explanatory approaches.
