China and the Liberal International Order (1978-2018)

Date: Thursday, 13 July 2023
Time: 16:00-17:00
Venue: AM102, Alan MacDiarmid Bldg VUW (map to the venue)
Register: ChinaCentre@vuw.ac.nz

Abstract

China's Reform and Opening (Gaikai) in the past 40 years was effected to integrate China into the Liberal International Order. The LIO's expansion in post-Cold War East Asia was also to incorporate China into the underlying power and authority structures of the LIO. This mutual engagement though did not in the end bring China and the LIO into a full integration or incorporation as in the case with Japan. This seminar discusses the structural, institutional, and normative dynamics that drove the rise and fall of the mutual engagement and argues that it is inadequate to understand international relations in East Asia as merely the effects of US-China rivalry, as their actions and interactions are driven by more complicated power structures, institutional arrangements and normative values effective on influential states in East Asia.

About the Speaker

Xiaoming Huang is Professor of International Relations at Victoria University of Wellington. Dr Huang teaches and researches on East Asian politics, political economy, and international relations at VUW since 1997. His latest publications are Political Order in Modern East Asian States (Routledge 2022) and International Relations of East Asia (McMillan 2019). He is currently working on a manuscript-length project on China's evolving relations with the liberal international order. Professor Huang is also the founding director of the New Zealand Contemporary China Research Centre.