The concept and analytical framework of China s status as a developing great power integrating geographical thinking

Abstract

Clarifying the status of China as a developing great power is an important basis for the development of China's diplomacy. In recent years, Western countries led by the United States have repeatedly raised doubts about China's status as a developing great power and attacked China in diplomatic negotiations. In response to Western suspicions, Chinese scholars of international relations, international political economy, and geopolitics have mainly demonstrated China's developing country attributes and status from the perspectives of country comparison of development factors. At present, there is a lack of research that integrates comprehensive, regional, spatiotemporal, and scale thinking of geography. By reviewing the literature of national development status and China's status as a developing great power, this article summarized the problems and deficiencies of existing research. National development status can be understood as a nation's position in the global system. The level of national development and national influence as two indicative dimensions of national development status, respectively, reflect different identity characteristics of the national development status, and the characteristics of a country in the global development pattern, "core-periphery" structure, hierarchical structure, network topology structure, and national influence pattern are all the external manifestations of the country's status in the global system and have the characteristics of scale effect. Based on this understanding, this study interpreted the conceptual connotation of national development status from three dimensions of time, space, and scale. Based on the classic geographic research paradigm of pattern-process-mechanism-decision, an analytical framework integrating geographical thinking for the study of China's status as a developing great power was proposed. Furthermore, the core issues such as the division of national development types and the main research line of China's status as a developing great power integrating geographical thinking were discussed. The integration of geographical thinking into the study of national development status can not only enrich and improve the national development theory and world system theory, but also contribute to the development of regional (global) geography theory. In addition, it can also provide valuable references for the related studies on the status of China as a developing great power.