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foreigners alike. As such, Chinese leaders have for
    2,000 years conceived of China’s role in world affairs as a model of morality in an ethical hierarchy, as they defined it to be, until this self-defined role as the paragon of civilization to its neighbors was demolished through internal disorders and foreign invasions in the nineteenth century.
    Indeed, one may argue that the People’s Republic of China for its first three decades rediscovered China’s moral responsibility to the world through proletarian internationalism and anti-imperialism, with anti-hegemony added in the 1960s after it tried unsuccessfully to challenge the Soviet Union for leadership of the socialist camp. With the collapse of world socialism and the reorientation in the 1980s of Chinese foreign policy toward its home region of Asia, a more statist role conception of China as an independent regional power seemed to have arisen for the Chinese, buttressed by officially sanctioned patriotic emotions in the 1990s. While the need to be supremo of the world socialist movement led China all the way to the Sino-Soviet split and consequently the Zhenbao/Damansky Island dispute, the desire to be respected as a regional power may make China hyper-sensitive about any perceived challenges to its territorial integrity, such as Japan’s claim to the Diaoyutai/Senkaku Islands. Traditional Chinese unfamiliarity with, even disdain for, the darker people of South Asia may also explain why they were ignorant and insensitive toward Indian concerns about their territorial integrity with regard to the Sino-Indian borderlands.
    Given that a state’s interests and policies are affected not only by material capabilities such as economic might or military capabilities, but also by identities, fears and shared norms that are socially, culturally, and historically contingent to its people, the “moral” or psychological basis of China’s “realist” foreign policy is worthy of our attention. A common national identity and shared nationalist discourse between the people of China and Taiwan is the reason why, despite their difference over ideology, regime legitimacy, and even what constitutes China, the Taipei government has always supported the PRC stance in its territorial disputes, albeit in the name of the Chinese nation and not the Beijing government. Without a cultural understanding, the application of our two-level game analysis would be a vacuous and meaningless exercise.

Notes
    I    Introduction
    1    John Alcock, Guy Arnold, Alan Day, D. S. Lewis, Lorimer Poutney, Roland Lance and D. J. Sagar, Border and Territorial Disputes, revised 3rd edn (London: Longman, 1992). The figure for the number of disputes is calculated from appendix A, a listing and summary of disputes between 1950 and 1990.
    2    Paul K. Huth, Standing Your Ground: Territorial Disputes and International Conflict (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 4.
    3    John Vasquez, “Why Do Neighbours Fight?: Proximity, Interaction, Territoriality,” Journal of Peace Research, August 1995, vol.32, no. 2, 277-294.
    4    Alastair Iain Johnston, “China’s Militarized Interstate Dispute Behaviour 1949-1992: A First Cut at the Data,” China Quarterly, March 1998, no. 153, 29.
    5    United Nations Third Convention of the Law of the Sea, (UNCLOS III) 1982, Part VIII, Regime of Islands, Article 121, Paragraph 3.
    6    Jeanette Greenfield, China ’ s Practice in the Law of the Sea (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 229. Appendix 1, “Declaration on China’s Territorial Sea, 4 September 1958.”
    7    Anonymous, Shi Jing . This saying first appeared in the anthology of poems called the Sh Jing [Book of Poems], under the section on “Xiao Ya” [Minor Odes], in the poem entitled “Bei Shan” [Northern Mountains]. The Shi Jing was compiled some time in the last decades of the Western Zhou dynasty (1046-771 BCE).
    8    John Wilson Lewis and Xue Litai, China ’ s