Search results

China’s swift economic rise, as symbolized by the first Chinese Olympics and by surpassing Japan to become the world’s second largest economy despite the recent global financial meltdown, has been accompanied by a transformation of Chinese foreign policy behavior. After spending the last decade emphasizing China’s “peaceful rise” or “peaceful development,” Beijing has begun to expound its policy preferences and territorial claims more forthrightly, even assertively. The purpose of this chapter will be to consider the origins, consequences, and likely future of the new Chinese foreign policy in the wake of the leadership transition at the 18th Party Congress in 2012 and the 12th National People’s Congress in 2013.

This chapter falls into two parts. The first offers a theoretical overview of three actor perspectives on issues of development intervention: (a) activity theory, (b) actor-network theory and (c) actor-oriented interface analysis. The second provides an illustrated discussion of the usefulness of actor perspectives for understanding the encounters that take place between ‘development experts’ (local and foreign) and so-called ‘beneficiaries’. The argument draws upon ethnographic data relating to issues of development interface, actor identities, networks and discourse.