China’s World: What Does China Want?

China scholar Brown (CEO, China) completes a trilogy on leadership in modern China with this effort to parse the foreign policy of the global superpower. Brown unravels a tangled web of motivations that influence China’s foreign policy thinking. Brown discusses the historical animosities that drive China’s strained relations with Japan, carried over from the Second Sino-Japanese War of the 1930s and ’40s, and the forward-thinking bets on needed resources and expanding markets that have led China to form relationships with African nations guided by a policy that appears to be “amoral and largely driven by self-interest.” The implications presented for China by several recent international geopolitical wild cards, including the Brexit vote in June 2016 and the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president, are explored, adding to the book’s timeliness and relevance. Rarely falling prey to jargon and written in a skilled and approachable style, the book succeeds in making a complex topic accessible to a broad audience. While never providing an overarching answer, Brown shows that the response to the question “What does China want?” may depend on who is asking. [em](Dec.) [/em]