China’s Peripheral Security Environment:Analytical Framework,Indicator System and Evaluation *

Since the end of the Cold War, the West and China have had diverginginterpretations of “security environment.” China tends to define security from theperspective of development, while the West’s definition concerns external threatsto security. In Chinese circumstances, the understanding of security environmenthas evolved from simply military to a more comprehensive one covering military,politics, economics and public opinions. This article develops a theoretical frameworkto analyze China’s peripheral security environment in the new era, and constructs anindicator system to evaluate it. The indicator system consists of the political securityenvironment, military security environment, development security environment,public opinion security environment, and China’s periphery strategy, drawing uponthe theories of Realism, Liberal Institutionalism and Constructivism. Furthermore, thisarticle analyzes indicators through dimensionless methods based on the databases of theWorld Bank, the “Foreign Relations” database of the Institute of Modern InternationalRelations at Tsinghua University and the People’s Daily, and compares three peripheralsecurity environment scenarios. The result shows that in a general sense, China’speripheral security environment has improved over the past decades. However, thesituations after the 2008 global financial crisis have diverged, and different theoreticalperspectives provide very different images. It seems that China has entered a verydifferent environment, and for stable security environment in the future, China needs tocooperate with neighboring countries.