This book examines the historical, domestic, and leadership drivers behind the repositioning of China toward center stage since 2008.

In the years of global turmoil that followed the 2008 global financial crisis, China’s foreign policy of the late Hu Jintao years came to be viewed in Western discourse as increasingly ‘assertive’. Displaying a certain cognitive dissonance, China, however, vehemently rejects this viewpoint. Especially after Xi Jinping rose to power in 2012, it is clear that China has abandoned its long-held foreign policy doctrine of ‘keeping a low profile’. Analyzing how language has been produced and reproduced over time, this book explains the shift to a more assertive China by examining the intervening ideas about China’s desired place in East Asia’s regional order. The Chinese Communist Party propaganda offers compelling evidence that there is much greater continuity between the Hu and Xi eras than is exhibited in the current literature. Moreover, the book traces the deeper ideational sources of Chinese assertiveness back to the New Left movement and the Patriotic Education Campaign of the 1990s. Agency for the turn in the late 2000s and the selection of the compromise candidate Xi is attributed to the choices past leaders made, with some Party elders ‘ruling from behind the curtain’.

This book will be of much interest to students of Chinese politics and foreign policy, East Asian International Relations and Security Studies.

Friso M.S. Stevens holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from Leiden University and completed postdoctoral fellowships at the European University Institute and the University of Helsinki. Currently, he is a Senior Fellow at The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies.