Description
The existing literature has acknowledged that rising authoritarian powers, such as China, have acted as norm entrepreneurs, shaping liberal norms and advocating for alternative ones that align with their normative preferences and identity. However, what remains relatively underexplored is how they promote their preferred norms in different issue areas, particularly in a comparison between those issue areas encompassing well-established liberal norms and those emerging areas in which liberal norms are less institutionalised. There is also a need for a better understanding of how these norm entrepreneurship and contestation behaviours are perceived and accepted by diverse domestic and international audiences.
To contribute to these questions, this chapter analyses two cases of China’s norm entrepreneurship: developmentalism in human protection (an institutionalised issue area with well-established norms and practices) and cyber sovereignty in AI and global cyberspace (an emerging issue area with less-developed norms and practices). Through this analysis, this paper delineates China’s varied strategies of norm entrepreneurship across the two issue areas and examines the extent to which target audiences embrace the norms and principles promoted by China. This chapter further offers implications for the complex impacts of the rise of authoritarian powers on the liberal international order.
