Fractured China: How State Transformation is Shaping China’s Rise

Lee Jones discusses his new book, co-authored with Shahar Hameiri: Fractured China: How State Transformation is Shaping China’s Rise. The book intervenes in the central debate in International Relations today: is China’s rise a threat to the established international order? Fractured China shows that it depends what one means by “China”. For China is not the monolithic, unitary actor that many assume. Forty years of state transformation – the fragmentation, decentralisation and internationalisation of party-state apparatuses – have profoundly changed how its foreign policy is made and implemented. Today, Chinese behaviour abroad is often not the product of a coherent grand strategy, but results from a sometimes-chaotic struggle for power and resources among contending politico-business interests, within a surprisingly permissive Chinese-style regulatory state. Presenting a pathbreaking new analytical framework, Fractured China transforms the central debate in International Relations and provides new tools for scholars and policymakers seeking to understand and respond to twenty-first century rising powers. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in China and Southeast Asia, three major case studies – the South China Sea, non-traditional security cooperation, and development financing – demonstrate the framework’s explanatory power.