The Manchester China Institute

A conversation between Prof William Hurst and Prof Pete Gries on how both domestic and foreign policy shapes China in IR.

Most international relations scholarship ignores or oversimplifies the role of domestic politics. Conversely, most analysis of domestic politics, even in reference to the making and implementation of foreign policy, downplays or occludes the influence of international factors. Only by looking at the two in tandem can we make significant headway. Ruling governing coalitions make foreign policy largely to advance domestic political aims and agendas, but they do so in international structural environments that incentivise and constrain their strategies and behaviour.

By looking at China’s relationships with the United States and several Southeast Asian countries over time, I propose a theory of interaction between domestic and international factors to explain the dynamics of Chinese foreign policy and international relations more broadly.

About the Speakers

William Hurst is a Chong Hua Professor of Chinese Development at Cambridge University. He works on labor politics, contentious politics, political economy, and the politics of law and legal institutions, principally in China and Indonesia. He is currently completing a book manuscript on the comparative politics of law and legal institutions in China and Indonesia since 1949. For this work, he has completed more than one year of fieldwork in each country since 2006.

He has been at Northwestern University since 2013 before he was a postdoctoral fellow at Oxford and an assistant professor at the Universities of Texas and Toronto.

Peter Hays Gries is the Lee Kai Hung Chair and founding Director of the Manchester China Institute at the University of Manchester, where he is also Professor of Chinese politics. He studies the political psychology of international affairs, with a focus on China and the United States.

He is the author of The Politics of American Foreign Policy: How Ideology Divides Liberals and Conservatives over Foreign Affairs (Stanford, 2014) and China’s New Nationalism: Pride, Politics, and Diplomacy (California, 2004), and co-editor of State and Society in 21st Century China (Routledge, 2004) and Chinese Politics (Routledge, 2010). He is also on the editorial boards of the leading academic journals in three fields, The China Quarterly, Political Psychology, and Nations & Nationalism.