As the People's Republic of China (PRC) has become an increasingly significant global power, understanding its international behaviour has become a central question for scholars, analysts, and policymakers worldwide. Out of this profusion of competing perspectives, the authors identify four distinct ideal-typical approaches employed to explain the PRC's international behaviour: universalist, exceptionalist, political-institutionalist, and particularist. They find that at their core, the fundamental issues of disagreement between these approaches concern the degree to which they conceptualise the PRC as a unitary and/or distinctive actor. Crucially, these are not fixed attributes; they vary over time and across policy domains. Based on this, we make the case for a contextualised approach that adjusts its analysis to such variation. The authors illustrate their approach by examining PRC behaviour in the South China Sea and in relation to its Belt and Road Initiative. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
