24 A new engine for pragmatism in the international security order? Greg Austin In 2002 China appointed senior diplomat Wang Shijie as special envoy to the Middle East and in 2003 it approached NATO with a proposal for a formal relationship similar to that which Russia has with the Atlantic alliance. 1 In recent years China has gradually been resuming its economic aid programs to poorer developing countries at the same time as it has been intenSifying its efforts to shape global arms control and proliferation regimes and expanding the reach of its defence diplomacy. China's international security policy has gone global. Is this a gradual accretion of global interests following on the internationalisation of China's economy, or does it represent a more deliberate effort by China to return to an international security strategy with the sort of global reach China pursued in the 1950s and 1960s? If China were pursuing a global reach now, it would be for far different reasons than in the 1950s and 1960s. But it is worth recalling that era. At that time, China supported wars by national liberation movements in Africa through the provision of military and economic aid, it supported the export of communism in Southeast ASia, and it engaged in proxy wars against both the former Soviet Union and the United States. By 1974, China began abandoning these global aspirations and retreated to a periphery-oriented national security strategy while it undertook important domestic economic and political reforms. China's leaders now appear to be abandoning the periphery-dominated national security strategy in favour of a new international security strategy with global reach. According to well-placed sources in Beijing, China's leaders decided through the course of 2002 that this was the only choice open to them in the face of continuing 458