“Resilience” in the official rhetoric of the People’s Republic of China

Abstract

The category of resilience has long since become an actively used term in social sciences. However, more and more actors of international relations, both states and international organizations, have recently been striving to include “resilience” into their agenda and to attach it a conceptual and, what is true in the case of the European Union, even a normative content. Therefore, there emerges a global trend that “resilience” is gradually becoming an important category of foreign policy. This article analyzes the usage of the category of resilience in the official discourse of the People’s Republic of China. At the beginning, we consider how “resilience” was used in the Western academic discussion to describe and explain political processes in China and how that discussion correlates with the current understanding of resilience as an instrument of foreign policy. In this regard, the European Union Global Strategy serves as a starting point in which the category of resilience for the first time has acquired a normative dimension. Then we refer to the examples of using the concept of resilience in the Chinese language and, first, define by means of which words this concept was incorporated into the Chinese discourse; second, we point out some variants of translation of “resilience” being used in the official discourse of the People’s Republic of China; and third, we point out whether this concept assumes any novel normative content in China as compared with the resilience concept set out in the European Union Global Strategy.