Leadership Character And Foreign Policy Decisions

This paper combines western foreign policy analysis theory with China's diplomatic activities in order to find out whether and how the personality analysis mode is fit for Chinese diplomatic cases. Besides, we can learn from that to have a better understanding of Chinese foreign policy. For the sake of representative, this paper chooses Margaret G. Hermann's personality analysis as mode, and Mao Zedong's decision-making as case.Combining personality analysis mode with Mao Zedong's decision-making process, it's appears that the mode and the practice matches a lot, Mao is very interested in managing Sino-Soviet relations and he is not sensitive to environment. According to the mode, his decision-making way should tend to be opinionated and emotional, his policy prone to be extreme and firm, while lack the flexibility and gradation, the goal of policy tend to be idealization.With those hypothesis, we check Mao's decision-making process in two cases, by analyzing his attitude toward"animadvert on Stalin"and the Changbo Transmitter-receiver United Marine Issues, we find out one case is not fit for Hermann's personality analysis mode. That means this mode have both applicability and inapplicability.From the above, a conclusion can be reached , the applicability of western mode is limited .last but not least ,this paper talk about the reasons of inapplicability in Mao's case as well as some reflections last, some reflection of the personality analysis mode was made according to the result of above examination. As enlightenment, some other thoughts should be absorbed to the mode to enhance the interpreting capability of the mode.