China's Three Foreign Policy 'No's : Non-Alignment, Non-Intervention, and Non-Interference

This book looks at non-alignment, non-intervention, and non-interference as they relate to Chinas geostrategic aims in the twenty-first century three principles that, for all their supposed centrality to the countrys foreign policy, have received surprisingly little attention from English-language scholars.

The goal is to provide a dedicated study of the three nos as Chinas conduct on the world stage enters a new phase and the country begins to speak of itself more confidently and self-consciously as a great power (daguo), albeit one whose aims many previous commentators have described as revisionist.

One of the books central questions, then, is whether a rising China will continue to abide by its three nos in the coming decades.

But in seeking to answer this question, it also poses a more fundamental one: Is China revisionist to begin with?

As the chapters make clear, the three nos are by no means uniquely Chinese concerns.

Non-alignment, for example, is a legacy of the Cold War, when the nations of the so-called Third World sought to straddle the divide between Eastern and Western blocs; the same can be said for non-intervention, the historical examples of which are numerous.

In that sense, Chinas continued adherence to the three nos can be viewed as an attempt by Beijing to endow these earlier historical lessons with new meaning as it tries to chart a path of independence and autonomy in the era of waning American unipolarity.