At the 2024 NATO summit in Washington, the alliance’s joint communiqué declared that China’s stated ambitions and coercive policies continue to challenge NATO’s interests, security, and values. Then secretary general Jens Stoltenberg called China the chief enabler of Russia’s war in Ukraine and warned Beijing it cannot have a normal relationship with the West while fuelling the war in Europe. 

China-related rhetoric in NATO’s recent communiqués has been escalating. The 2019 London summit named China for the first time in an official NATO document. The 2022 Strategic Concept, approved in Madrid, identified China as posing systemic challenges to Euro-Atlantic security.

What does China make of all this? The Western literature contains an extensive discussion of NATO’s emerging China policy, but the Chinese side of the conversation has been largely opaque. Because the Chinese foreign policy apparatus is closed, Western analysts have struggled to gauge how Beijing’s leadership actually understands NATO. Our research argues that Chinese IR scholarship is a usable proxy. It is not a perfect window on the leadership’s mind, but it is the best one available, and it has been almost entirely unexamined.

We ran a bibliometric analysis of Chinese-language IR scholarship on NATO from the China National Knowledge Infrastructure database. The initial keyword search using “北约” (NATO) returned 2,577 articles in the Politics and International Relations category. After filtering for indexed and core-journal publications, 1,663 articles remained. We then read a representative sample of articles by leading scholars and from prestigious journals. The picture that emerged is more textured than either dismissive Western readings of Chinese academia, or the official Chinese state line, would suggest.

NATO is a Modest Topic that is Suddenly Less Modest

The first finding is that NATO has not been a major topic in Chinese IR. From 1978 to 1994 the field produced about 19 NATO-focused articles a year. The single dramatic spike came in 1999, when 507 articles........

© OpenCanada