The primary aim of Chapter 1 was to understand how different ways of studying China lead to different conclusions and predictions. It would be rather disingenuous, though, to pretend that it was a totally neutral analysis, and this chapter starts from the assumption that a full and sophisticated understanding of China's rise ‘requires us to capture some of the key complex and simultaneous interactions between the global and domestic levels in the study of China's external relations’ (Foot, 2013: 1). In short, the argument here is that studying the domestic can tell us things that question a number of the assumptions of those studies that focus more on the international/global level.

This rather simple statement immediately generates two important responses. The first is that it is indeed rather simple. Students of Chinese domestic politics will certainly find it an unremarkable and underwhelming re-statement of the very obvious. However, the reason that it needs to be made is that what is obvious to one scholarly community is frequently absent in scholarship that emerges from other intellectual endeavours. As Hameiri and Lee (2015) have argued, much IR scholarship on China still starts from the assumption of a single Chinese national interest and sees Chinese action as the result of state control to attain state goals. Furthermore, as suggested in Chapter 1, the neglect of domestic diversity in generating transnational activity seems to be more pronounced in the study of China than it is with the study of other states. Here the nature of the Chinese political system makes it easier to assume a conformity of interest than, for example, in liberal democracies where ideational and policy competition is much easier to observe, and frequently leads to changes in ruling parties and policies.

The second is the use of the word ‘bounded’ to qualify both plurality and diversity. The aim of this chapter is to show that there is more to what Chinese want and do inside and outside China's borders than just the goals of the central leadership in Beijing.