Contemporary Chinese Political Economy and Strategic Relations: An International Journal (May 2017)
The Dialectic Characteristics of Policies for Asia-Pacific Regional Relations
Abstract
The regional relations within the Asia-Pacific are essentially reflecting a stage for powers to exercise their individual influences. States employ their own strength to echo the themes advocated by the international powers and international organizations in order to introduce their influences for balancing the attempt conducted by the powers for changing the power structure. To establish and shape the regional relations in the Asia-Pacific is basically based on the Asian-Pacific policies of states within or outside the region. All these policies and regional relations as well as the power structure itself is dynamic thus keeping it in development all the time. To well perceive the interest calculation of the Asian-Pacific policies for various states and the principles followed for policy adjustment from this dynamic development process is indeed worthy of further observation. This paper would like to introduce Hegel’s dialectic principles of unity of opposites, transition from quantity to quality and negation of the negation as the tools to observe the Asia-Pacific state formulating their regional policies and by so doing to interpret the rules for them to adjust these policies. As the national interests may extend across various aspects, states therefore need to consider all these factors in order to make the best judgment for the political calculations of their external policies. Precisely based on the plural characteristics of the national interests, there is definitely no absolute friendly or foe relation in dealing with the regional relations. The co-existed competition and cooperation within the framework of the unity of opposites is specifically reflecting such dialectic thinking. By the same token, states adjusting their regional policies must respond to the realities of the power structure accordingly. Yet, the eco-political strength for various states keeps on changing. The commercial activities are gradually evolving and accumulating the variation scales so that eventually overthrowing the previous power structure is fundamentally in line with the rule of transition from quantity to quality. The contradictory movement between the existing norms and the objective realities is more vividly signifying the value of employing dialectic rules to examine and to interpret the power transitions and evolutions of the regional relations in the Asia-Pacific region.
