Abstract

The policy of Reform and Open-up, initiated by Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s, has brought about a fundamental change in the People’s Republic of China’s foreign policy making. Prag-matism, not ideology, has been the dominant approach in the past three decades. Although the Tiananmen crisis in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union and its ‘communist bloc’ led to harsh sanctions against China, the Deng-style pragmatic approach was not altered but reinforced in China’s foreign policy making after Deng’s South China tour in 1992 (Vogel 2011). Yet under the mounting pressure from the US-led Western world, China became more passive in its engagements with the outside world till the end of the 20th century.