Introduction
“China is a sleeping lion, when she wakes, she will shake the world.”1
Napoleon Bonaparte
“The lion is already awake, but a peaceful, friendly, and civilized lion.”2
Xi Jinping
While it is debatable whether the quote attributed to Napoleon is true, the description of China as an awakened power by the President of the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping, during his visit to France in March 2014, aroused considerable interest in international public opinion. This discourse, which Xi Jinping frequently repeated after taking office as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in November 2012 and as the President of China in March 2013, has been described as a harbinger of essential transformations in China’s domestic and foreign policy. In fact, despite the reform and opening up policy initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, China, which pursued a foreign policy primarily based on the understanding of ‘hide your talents, keep a low profile, and bide your time’ until 2013, quickly turned toward a pre-emptive and active foreign policy under the Xi Jinping government.
China’s emergence as an enormous economic power in the 21ˢᵗ century and Xi Jinping’s new foreign policy discourse, the product of his unique politics, have been predominantly evaluated in Western-centered media outlets and academia as a reflection of China’s quest for hegemony and the creation of an alternative international order. For example, the number of analyses in journals such as the U.S.-perspective Foreign Policy and the UK-perspective The Economist, that China seeks to establish an alternative hegemony to the U.S. hegemony in Asia, has rapidly increased after Xi Jinping’s rule.3 China’s growing influence in Asia has been read as a threat to the role of the U.S. and Russia in the region, with publications analyzing China-Russia regional rivalry from a conflict perspective.4 Similarly, international relations experts who make assessments from the perspective of mainstream theories have mainly focused on the fact that China is seeking to build a new hegemony first in Asia and then in the whole world. For example, Mearsheimer, a prominent figure of the realist theory, argued that China’s economic rise in the 2000s was not peaceful and had the potential to create a new hegemonic power rivaling the U.S. at both regional and global levels.5 Ikenberry, a prominent figure of the liberal theory, argued that the reality of Chinese hegemony could only be removed as a threat by the U.S. through a power-sharing arrangement in Asia and by keeping China within the liberal order.6
