"State Transformation and Chinese Foreign Policy If we want to understand China's international behaviour, we have to open the black box ... State authority is fragmenting, more and more actors are involved in the making of foreign policy, and implementing it. Authority is increasingly decentralised, and the players are increasingly internationalised. Researcher, Chinese Ministry of Public Security (Interviewee A32 2018) This chapter sets out the three main vectors of state transformation - the fragmentation, decentralisation and internationalisation of state apparatuses - and theorises their impact on China's foreign relations, establishing the framework that we deploy in the following empirical chapters. It argues that China's state transformation has shaped, and been shaped by, the post-1978 shift from the Maoist command economy to a capitalist economy. After describing the party-state's transformation, we theorise how Chinese foreign policy "works" in this new era. Rather than arguing that central authorities have simply lost power, we explore how power is exercised within the transformed party-state. We argue that a Chinese-style regulatory state has emerged, wherein top leaders rarely control state outputs directly, but rather seek to "steer" and coordinate a diverse array of actors towards often vaguely defined ends (Jones 2019). The mechanisms they use include the promulgation of party doctrine; speeches and slogans; the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) powers of appointment, appraisal and discipline; discretionary fiscal and policy concessions; and coordinating institutions. In turn, however, actors within the disaggregated party-state and state-society complex may influence, interpret, or even ignore central directives. Political outcomes depend on evolving struggles for power and resources within the Chinese-style regulatory state, which may involve both complementary and competitive interactions between actors within different agencies and located at different territorial scales. These struggles are rarely, if ever, decisively resolved, but continue throughout, and strongly influence, the implementation of foreign and security policies. Moreover, they interface with struggles for power and resources in other societies."
