India's Foreign Policy

9

CHINA’s QUEST FOR MULTILATERALISM

Swaran Singh

It was as part of reaffirming faith in Deng Xiaoping’s thought that the 15th Party Congress, held during September 1997—the first one after Deng’s death—had formally endorsed China’s pragmatism in international affairs by underlining ‘multilateralism’ as the guiding core principle for its foreign policy initiatives and operations.¹ This new thesis on multilateralism was further elaborated during China’s 16th Party Congress during 2002 and it has since become the critical premise in the country’s fourth generation leadership’s on-going quest for socio-economic development and nation-building as it seeks to gain acceptance as the next global power. As a result, China has gradually moved from treating ...