China and the International System: The Formation of a Chinese Model of World Order

Abstract

During its 72-year history, China has gone through a difficult path of changing the diplomatic strategies of relations with the outside world. The first period, thirty years from 1949 to 1978, was ideological, directed by Mao Zedong and completely ignored international organizations (IOs). The second, the next 30 years (1978-2008) - economic, which was determined by Deng Xiaoping's policy of reforms and opening up, and the gradual embedding of the PRC in the IOs. Now China is implementing the third, political stage under the leadership of Xi Jinping, who set the country with the tasks of great power diplomacy and the formation of new / alternative international structures in which it plays a leading role and has a real impact on the future model of the system of international relations. The formation of the PRC in 1949 and the Korean War (1950-1953) that followed soon after, where Chinese "volunteer" soldiers fought with the united UN forces, blocked the possibility of contacts between the PRC and this universal international organization for two decades. The country's internal problems in the form of a "cultural revolution" also did not contribute to the solution of this problem. Even the restoration of the PRC's rights in the UN in 1971, the establishment of diplomatic relations with the United States in 1979, and Deng Xiaoping's reforms could not significantly accelerate the PRC's accession to other international organizations. This process took about twenty more years and, on the whole, ended only in 2001 with the entry into the WTO. In the 21st century, especially after the 2008 global financial crisis, China began to actively use existing and create new international organizations with partner countries. The purpose of the article is to analyze the Chinese academic discourse on the problem of relations between the PRC and international organizations and international system, where Western countries, headed by the United States, dominate to this day, and China does not see a prospect for itself to take a place worthy of its complex power. The article examines the history of the formation of relations between the PRC and international system, identifies the reasons for the dissatisfaction of the PRC with its status in its structures and traces the process of creating international organizations in which China occupies a dominant position and in global competition with the United States can influence the future model of the world.