China's Foreign Policy Behaviour: Understanding through the Lens of Geopsychology

Abstract

This article examines China’s foreign policy and diplomacy within the theoretical framework of geopsychology, which may be defined as the geography-embedded prism of a people’s attitudinal and behavioural patterns toward others, rooted in past experiences, historical processes, cultural constructs and societal structures. The article seeks to illuminate those key components that have potentially gone into framing China’s geopsychology over the past centuries and its impact on Beijing’s foreign policy behaviour.
Paradoxically enough, China on the one hand talks of anti-hegemonism but it practices hegemonism while dealing with its own neighbours and peripheries on the other. There are several examples that show China’s bellicose postures in affirming its position as an unchallenged regional hegemon, while being psychologically unprepared to tolerate intervention by extra-regional powers,
for instance, in the South China and the East China Sea. Fired by nationalism and the historical ambition to rule the roost, China is determined to become a regional hegemon regardless of US attempts to encircle it through the balancing coalitions. Also, China is firm to change the rules of the game in pursuit of advancing and calcifying its core national interests. So far as America is
concerned, China has blueprints in place to counter US bullying tactics.