摘要:

How does China’s growing financial power reshape the structure of world politics? Does the expansion of China’s global influence come at the expense of the United States? A growing body of research in International Relations (IR) finds that China is increasingly using its economic power to gain leverage in international politics and engage countries to support its foreign policy. This paper addresses the question of whether “the rise of the Renminbi" – China’s entry into global monetary affairs through its BSA network – boosts its political influence and diminishes US political power on the global stage. To tackle the identification problem, we employ a Bayesian causal inference method devel-oped by Pang et al. (2021): bpCausal. Our analysis reveals intriguing results. First, we find that on average China’s BSAs have statistically a significant short-run causal effect of on governments’ expressed preferences over global issues. That is, BSAs bring the foreign policy ideal points of China and its partner states closer together in the year after a BSA is signed. Interestingly, while BSAs shift signatories closer to China’s ideal point in the UNGA, we find no evidence that BSAs pull countries away from the positions of the United States. On the contrary, weak evidence suggests that governments are moving closer to the United States in the median run, holding all other things constant, though the impact is much smaller compared to moving closer toChina.