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China's Quest: The History of the Foreign Relations of the People's Republic of China . JOHN W. GARVER . Oxford and New York : Oxford University Press , 2016. xviii + 868 pp. £32.99. ISBN 978-0-19-026105-4
Book Reviews
John Garver has written the most complete, balanced and up-to-date account of the foreign relations of the People's Republic of China (PRC) available. It likely will remain so for a long time. This well written, lucid and lengthy volume should be a core component of all Chinese foreign policy reading lists. Because of its emphasis on the domestic political drivers of external behaviour, China's Quest also has considerable relevance for those interested in domestic politics. It should be understood that Garver's book is more about the content of China's foreign relations and less about the process by which it is made.
Garver's core analytic assertion is that Chinese foreign policy has been driven by the ongoing need for Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders to overcome a domestic political legitimacy deficit by pursing a sequence of broad foreign policies (three in number) that each, in its own distinctive way, has sought to provide a legitimacy to the CCP regime that its domestic actions alone could not provide. For...