Strategic Cooperative Culture and Social Network Centrality.

Is China a cooperative or a coercive state? The answer is important to the debate over whether China's rise to power will be peaceful. Under what conditions are China's political elite predisposed toward cooperative foreign policies? The underlying concept of this paper, which the results of an OLS regression model support, is that China's intensity of cooperation is partly explained by the broad measure of strength of strategic culture found in the Central Committee. The object of this study is to express the Central Committees' social network as representative of the PRC's strategic culture, to use the characteristic of network centrality of each CC, and to compare annual changes in centrality with the intensity of state cooperativeness. This is a longitudinal study of the CC and China's interactions with other states since the founding of the PRC in 1949 until 1978. The Party Secretary General's centrality and the foreign policy choices of the Central Committee are directly related. Decreasing centrality is correlated with decreasing intensity of interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]