Skip to main content
Support
Book

China and Coexistence: Beijing's National Security Strategy for the Twenty-First Century

China and Coexistence: Beijing's National Security Strategy for the Twenty-First Century by Liselotte Odgaard

Publisher

Woodrow Wilson Center Press with Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012

ISBN

9781421405636
China and Coexistence: Beijing's National Security Strategy for the Twenty-First Century by Liselotte Odgaard

Overview

Chapters

Reviews

“Peaceful coexistence,” long a key phrase in China’s strategic thinking, is a constructive doctrine that offers China a path for influencing the international system. So argues Liselotte Odgaard in this timely analysis of China’s national security strategy in the context of its foreign policy practice.

China’s program of peaceful coexistence emphasizes absolute sovereignty and non-interference in the internal affairs of other states. Odgaard suggests that China’s policy of working within the international community and with non-state actors such as the UN aims to win for China greater power and influence without requiring widespread exercise of military or economic pressure.

Odgaard examines the origins of peaceful coexistence in early Soviet doctrine, its midcentury development by China and India, and its ongoing appeal to developing countries. She reveals what this foreign policy offers China through a comparative study of aspiring powers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She explores its role in China’s border disputes in the South China Sea and with Russia and India; in diplomacy in the UN Security Council over Iran, Sudan, and Myanmar; and in China’s handling of challenges to the legitimacy of its regime from Taiwan, Xinjiang, and Japan.

Liselotte Odgaard is a professor in the Institute for Strategy at the Royal Danish Defence College. She was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in 2008–9.

About the Author

Liselotte Odgaard

Liselotte Odgaard

Former Fellow;
Associate Professor, Institute for Strategy, Royal Danish Defence College, Copenhagen, Denmark
Read More