Learning to cooperate: Chinese foreign financial policy and Asian regional cooperation, 1990--2005

This study explains the ideational sources of China's proactive multilateral diplomacy toward Asian financial cooperation by employing learning thesis. In so doing, this case study intends to shed light on the general question of whether and how a rising authoritarian power, namely, China can learn to cooperate in an era of economic globalization.; Overall, this study focuses on ideas and their causal relationship to behavior. This project demonstrates that the state learning model developed in the present study is a useful analytical tool with which to explain the broader relationship between ideas and behavior in international relations.; This study critically reviews prominent alternative hypotheses, such as power-transition thesis, realist balancing thesis, economic utility thesis, and interest group thesis, and show how the learning explanation can complement and outperform such competing materialist explanations.; The central argument of this study is that the collective learning of Chinese policy elites explains much of the changes in China's role and relational identities, as well as, China's philosophical and instrumental beliefs regarding regional cooperation. The collective learning occurred through cognitive dissonance, feedback effects, transnational persuasion, in addition to intervening variables such as the nature of information, the desirability of new ideas, and the availability of new ideas. These prior ideational shifts helped determine China's behavior change from its muted opposition of Asian financial cooperation in the 1990s to its active support of regional financial cooperation in the early 2000s as evidenced in the emergence of the Chiang Mai Initiative, Chinese-Japanese-South Korean trilateral financial cooperation, and the Asian Bond Fund Initiative.; My finding of Chinese learning suggests that China's proactive support for regional financial cooperation would be more consistent and stable in the near future than skeptics might think. China's learning and subsequently new national preference is more likely to continue to encourage China to play a lead role in creating and consolidating not only the new Asian financial arrangements but also other regional multilateral arrangements in the domain of trade and security in the foreseeable future.