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Chinese Approaches to International Security

This chapter briefly summarizes the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), explaining the underlying paradigmatic shift in the understanding of international security and how it relates to the issue of state control. While China might have been expected to reject this development, the PRC selectively adopted some core elements of the emerging norm while rejecting others. By examining two particular decisions—on the Libyan war in 2011 and the Syrian civil war—the chapter demonstrates China’s contradictory approach. It explains the PRC’s decisions in both cases as a trade-off between different domestic sources of economic and nationalist legitimization, coupled with the dynamics of decision-making within the foreign policy apparatus. The chapter elaborates on the consequences of these findings for the future international order. Two modes of action—an instrumental approach to law and the undermining of core definitions that shape international security policy—translate China’s contradictory R2P policy into systemic influence.