Democratic prospects: China and Taiwan
The contrast between democratic conditions and prospects in Taiwan and the People's Republic of China (PRC) can be stated easily: Taiwan is already a democracy, the PRC isn't, and the prospects for China becoming democratic, much less a democracy, are poor. Would Taiwan have been better off under Beijing's rule since 1949, or has it prospered economically and politically by maintaining its separation and virtual independence? Even Mainlanders find it hard to disagree with the notion that Taiwan's separate development has been its salvation. Although Taiwan endured Leninist rule for decades, its economy expanded. Floating one hundred miles off the Fujian coast has spared the island a succession of traumas from which it will take the Mainland years to recover, and then only when Communist rule comes to an end. Of these traumas only the most damaging need be mentioned, all of them subsumed under Chairman Mao's celebrated justification and exhortation: 'A revolution is not a dinner party ... [I]t is an act of violence by which one class overthrows another'.
Chinese Power and the Idea of a Responsible State
The interrelated themes of power and responsibility are useful concepts for understanding Chinese foreign policy during a troubled yet remarkable half a century of Communist Party rule. Evaluations of the behaviour of the People's Republic of China (PRC) over these five decades have often related directly to concerns about the use the PRC has made of its material and ideological resources. Has Beijing worked to support the dominant norms of the international order, or has it striven to overturn them? Has it ever deserved to be called a "responsible power", a term defined by the dominant states, or has it acted irresponsibly? To place these questions more explicitly within an international relations framework, has China shown itself since 1949, and more especially during the period of reform and opening since 1979, as capable of being socialized into supporting global norms? Or, as realists would predict, have there been signs that its rising power over the past two decades has generated new tensions in the international system? Looking more to the future, what kind of challenge does its enhanced capabilities pose to the status quo?'
Thinking Globally in Post-Mao China
For the first time in modern history, China has become an active, if somewhat still elusive, member of the global system. With this momentous transformation comes myriads of new linkages, new contexts, new demands, new opportunities and new costs and consequences for China/global interaction. Proceeding from the premise that what China does or does not do becomes part of the global problem or part of the global solution, the article seeks to situate post-Mao China in the global/local problematique. The article advances the concept of global learning as a way of exploring diachronic changes and shifts in Chinese global thinking. Global learning is conceptualized as a two-way interactive linkage process in which domestic actors' restructuring of their cognitive maps and the changing global reality mediated by positive participatory experience in the global system become reciprocal in terms of cause and effect, constituting mutually essential parts of the same global/local process. Global learning is applied as a guide to examining Chinese global policy in three issue areas - global peace; global development; and global human rights. Global learning is also suggested as a possible bridge linking Chinese global policy and global policy studies. The paper concludes that some changes and shifts in Chinese global thinking have occurred and explains them as interest-driven adaptive readjustments to the dual logic of modernization imperative and of the world situation. From a post-Tiananmen perspective, the paper also critically evaluates the nature and scope of Chinese global learning as well as its new possibilities and old limitations.