Comprehensive Sovereign Agency? China’s Model of International Recognition

Abstract

Abstract This article investigates the confluence of China’s rise and International Recognition Theory through a quantitative content analysis of 166 joint statements on state visits between China’s heads of state and the representatives of 80 partners. China’s partnership diplomacy is a continuous, comprehensive, and dynamic diplomatic strategy for the 21st century. Yet, extraordinarily little research has explored the substance of China’s partnerships and the international experience that they offer. To investigate these dimensions, this article develops a typology of international recognition within which to situate China’s partnership diplomacy. We find that partnership documents exhibit a gradation of sovereign recognition that is transformed into “Comprehensive Sovereign Agency”: a type of sovereignty with Chinese characteristics that establishes the agency of the Chinese government over the comprehensive spectrum of China’s foreign relations. In contrast to earlier international experiences that ground sovereign agency in the functions of security, China’s partnership diplomacy yields a network that emphasizes the productive (economic, scientific, and cultural) functions of state capacity and international interaction. China’s partnership diplomacy reproduces the bilateral relations of preference and solidarity that ground China’s regime legitimacy in economic development. Its partnerships operate outside of the liberal multilateral security communities that generate international affinity through a difference-blind multilateral framework, constituting instead a difference-sensitive bilateral framework that provides a source of international recognition and sovereign agency that circumvent the liberal international experience.