Description: Is China's rise a threat to international order? Fractured China shows that it depends on what one means by 'China', for China is not the monolithic, unitary actor that many assume. Forty years of state transformation - the fragmentation, decentralisation and internationalisation of party-state apparatuses - have profoundly changed how its foreign policy is made and implemented. Today, Chinese behaviour abroad is often not the product of a coherent grand strategy, but results from a sometimes-chaotic struggle for power and resources among contending politico-business interests, within a surprisingly permissive Chinese-style regulatory state. Presenting a path-breaking new analytical framework, Fractured China transforms the central debate in International Relations and provides new tools for scholars and policymakers seeking to understand and respond to twenty-first century rising powers. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in China and Southeast Asia, it includes three major case studies - the South China Sea, non-traditional security cooperation, and development financing-to demonstrate the framework's explanatory power.
Brief description: Lee Jones is Reader in International Politics at Queen Mary University of London. His other books include ASEAN, Sovereignty and Intervention in Southeast Asia (2012), Societies Under Siege: Exploring How International Economic Sanctions (Do Not) Work (2015), and The Political Economy of Southeast Asia: Politics and Markets under Hyperglobalisation (2020).
Review Quotes: 'This book is a long overdue and convincing corrective to recent studies of China's rise that assume a coherent grand design by an all-powerful Chinese state, which would inevitably lead it to the trap of conflict or the temptation of world domination, or both. The reality, as Fractured China argues, is that China is no unitary actor and messy politics and competing domestic interests shape its foreign policy behaviour, whether in the long or short term. And outstanding book.' Amitav Acharya, American University, Washington DC, and Author of The End of American World Order (2018)