ABSTRACT
From the outside looking in, the rise of China in the emerging global order appears either remarkable and miraculous, or simply threatening.1 Looking from the inside out, the re-emergence of China as an influential regional power has been accompanied by the political anguish and intellectual agony that Chinese elites have experienced in coming to terms with the changing power configuration in the new international system. At the same time, such re-emergence has been decisively facilitated by China’s opportune positioning of itself in the emerging global order to cultivate the opportunities provided by the transformation of the global strategic landscape and accelerated economic globalization. In the last decade, China has exhibited a pattern of international behavior that is often seemingly contradictory to its own declared principles and certainly much more complex than in the previous decades.
