China and Coexistence: Beijing's National Security Strategy for the Twenty-First Century

Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies presents Liselotte Odgaard.

Speaker:
Liselotte Odgaard, Institute for Strategy at the Royal Danish Defence College

“Peaceful coexistence,” long a key phrase in China’s strategic thinking, is a constructive doctrine that offers China a path for influencing the international system. While emphasizing absolute sovereignty and noninterference in the internal affairs of other states, the pursuit of nonviolent dispute resolution through dialogue and compromise gives a rising power like China considerable international influence without requiring it to act as a great power militarily or economically. Professor Odgaard presents the ongoing appeal of peaceful coexistence, especially to developing countries, and she studies China's handling of actual tensions by examining China’s border disputes in the South China Sea, with Russia, and with India; diplomacy in the UN Security Council over Iran, Sudan, and Myanmar; and the handling of challenges to the legitimacy of China’s regime from Taiwan, Xinjiang, and Japan.

Liselotte Odgaard is associate professor at the Royal Danish Defence College. She was a visiting fellow at the Fairbank Center in spring 2007, and a residential fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 2008-09. At the Woodrow Wilson Center, Professor Odgaard worked on a project on China’s national security strategy. Her latest publication China and Coexistence: Beijing’s National Security Strategy for the Twenty-First Century? is forthcoming in March 2012.