China’s Strategic Shift and Sino-EU Relations in Global Governance: The Quest for Identity?

Over the past decade, China’s foreign policy strategy has shifted from Tao Guang Yang Hui (Keeping a low profile) to Fen Fa You Wei (Striving for achievement). China’s pursuit of international leadership has significantly intensified concerns that an assertive China could challenge the EU’s normative ambitions in promoting a rules-based international order and attempt to create an alternative Sino-centric order that better suits its preferences and interests and reflects its values. This study focuses on two salient domains of global governance in which China has begun to pursue international leadership and where the EU has projected itself as a normative power for decades: global climate governance and global economic governance. It analyses the changing Sino-EU relations in three cases in terms of Self-Other interactions, i.e., international climate negotiations, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and the Belt and Road Initiative. This study finds that China’s increased international leadership role in global climate governance and global economic governance as part of its strategic shift over the past decade has been shaped by and at the same time has sustained China’s changing construction of its international identity from a ‘Developing Country’ towards what this research conceptualizes to be a ‘Yinling Leading Power’. This new Yinling Leading Power identity positions and represents China as a global leading actor that pursues a shared international leadership. China’s self-restraint embedded in its ambitions for shared international leadership, and its flexibility in adjusting its behaviours on the base of international feedback, as well as the inclusiveness exercised by Western counterparts regarding international leadership contributed significantly to facilitating the further integration of an assertive China into the multilateral order of global governance as well as to promoting global governance and its reform. In response to China’s strategic shift and increased international leadership in global governance, the EU has largely reconstructed its international leadership as a normative power, in spite of the anticipated challenges posed by China’s rise, by upholding and promoting global multilateral governance. This research suggests that a perspective that goes beyond systemic and structural institutional factors and emphasizes identity construction and intersubjective interactions between states as crucially shaping the governance outcomes and mutual relations, allows us to see a more nuanced, pluriform outcome of China’s rise and international leadership. An outcome that may not conform to Western-centric conceptual frames about leadership and rivalry, but that allows for assertiveness to co-exist with cooperation, such as in the cooperative and inclusive interactions between China and the EU in terms of promoting global multilateral governance; an outcome in which that reveals that the pursuit of international leadership can occur in combination with self-restraint such as in the construction of a Yinling Leading Power. An outcome, indeed in which China is not destined to be an enemy of the Western world and the liberal international order and in which a new cold war between China and the West is not the only possible future on the horizon.