英文摘要 |
This article reviews Sino-American relations in the last three decades since the two countries normalized their diplomatic ties. The authors conduct the analysis by building a specially tailored framework of ideal types inspired by the German sociologist, Max Weber. Three ideal types of roles of foreign policy are employed to comparatively evaluate China's foreign relations and its US policy: balancer, responsible stakeholder, and revolutionary revisionist. The key components of these types include specific position in the international system and identity in the international community. It found the earliest ten years (1980s) of China's foreign policy can be best portrayed as ''balancer,'' while mid and late 1990s saw China's ''responsible stakeholder'' vivid during its ''great power diplomacy'' reached its peak. As China's economy kept growing fast and the US was hit by the Iraq-Afghan war as well as economy recession, China gradually adopted a ''soft balancing'' approach towards Washington. It is still too early to say China is to oppose the US hegemony revolutionarily, but it does embrace a degree of ambition to revision the rules of the game guarded by the US and the West as a whole. |