So china is a different type of actor in international relations; one that is not seeking to impose its world-view on others, and a power that believes each country is free to do what it wants within its own sovereign territory. Its preferred world order is one that allows for plurality and democracy built on its historical cultural predilection for harmony, virtue and society. Of course, to be different, you have to be different from something and the other in this case is a constructed image of the current world order as dominated by an interventionist unilateralist west that has imposed itself across the world by force if necessary in pursuit of materialistic (individualistic) goals. By saying that china does not have a normative position, and defining this against the dominant normative position of the west (or is it really just the united states?), then this non-normative ideology ironically becomes a normative position in itself. In this respect, it is not so much what china is that is important as what it is not. Thus the attraction of china and china’s preferred view of international relation is predicated on the prior decline of the legitimacy of the ‘western’ liberal global order particularly in those states that had been subject to ‘conditional’ relations with either powerful western states or international financial (or both) and even more particularly after the invasion of lraq.