Tang, Wai Hong (2019) China, institutional leadership and regional order: the cases of ASEAN Plus Three and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, 2007 - 2017. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

This thesis examines China’s leadership behavior in ASEAN Plus Three (APT) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) after the global financial crisis. Notwithstanding the Chinese government’s rhetoric, the question of leadership in the two regional institutions was pivotal to the rising power’s renegotiation of the geopolitical definition of East and Central Asia. Adopting an interdisciplinary and eclectic approach, this thesis dissects institutional leadership as the ability to promote an institution’s identity by guiding its adaptation to a changing environment. Based on a conception of leadership behavior as the combination of relationship and task, I develop an analytical framework of six types of leadership behavior – delegating, supporting, brokering, soft selling, hard selling and directing – to explain how a leader responds to external challenges.

This thesis finds that although China demonstrated increasing capacity to provide public goods, it remained unable to unite member states behind its purpose. Under Hu Jintao, the precedence of relationship over task led Beijing to promote APT and the SCO’s identities through supporting and soft selling, employing its capabilities to advance capacity building while proposing institution-building initiatives. The combination of external and internal pressure, however, led task to precede relationship under Xi Jinping. The launch of the Belt and Road Initiative and other parallel initiatives constituted China’s attempt at hard selling in economic cooperation by redefining collective purposes and initiating structures of cooperation on its own terms. Nevertheless, the problem of trust, together with structural and institutional constraints, confined Chinese institutional leadership in both APT and the SCO largely to functional tasks in the economic domain, and consequently prevented the two regional institutions from fully adapting to a changing environment. China’s behavioral shift represented a change in its approach toward the geopolitical reconstruction of East and Central Asia, from anchoring them to APT and the SCO under Hu Jintao to (re)integrating them into an expanding, Sino-centric geopolitical construct of periphery under Xi Jinping.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Subjects:	D History General and Old World > D History (General) H Social Sciences > HB Economic Theory K Law [Moys] > KN Common Law, Private Law
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	ASEAN Leadership Awards on Rural Development and Poverty Eradication, Financial crises -- China, Leadership
Official Date:	May 2019
Dates:	Date Event May 2019 Published
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	Department of Politics and International Studies
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor:	Breslin, Shaun ; Sinclair, Timothy J.
Sponsors:	University of Warwick. Department of Politics and International Studies
Format of File:	pdf
Extent:	xiii, 357 leaves: illustrations
Language:	eng

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