Yu Keping's edited volume, Chinese Perspectives on Global Governance and China, presents writings by Chinese scholars in top government think tanks and university research centres on China's role in reforming global governance. The collection of essays, previously published in Chinese elsewhere and rendered into English for this book by Frances Chan, is timely. There is no shortage of international interest in understanding how Beijing under Xi Jinping's activist leadership intends to transform international institutions. China clearly seeks to leverage its international weight to assert alternatives to the rules and norms associated with the US-led “liberal international order,” and this remains a work in progress. This book presents Chinese scholarship on how this could unfold.

Yu's volume collects essays largely published between 2012 and 2016, a period when it became clear that global governance reform would be one of Xi's priorities. Of course, China's dissatisfaction with the US-led order was apparent even before Xi's selection as China's top leader. For all Hu Jintao's determined dullness, he shattered expectations that China would be foremost a rule taker in the international system. Under Hu's leadership, China challenged customary interpretations of maritime law and broke a de facto moratorium on kinetic ASAT testing that generated massive amounts of new debris in low Earth orbit in 2007, for example. In the wake of the global financial crisis Hu was tenacious in pushing for changes in global economic governance.

Yu, a prominent professor at Peking University where he has been dean of the School of Government, drew attention in the West for his 2011 book, Democracy is a Good Thing: Essays on Politics, Society, and Culture in Contemporary China (with Cheng Li and John L. Thornton, Brookings Institution Press). He is also widely known for having advised Hu Jintao when serving as deputy director of the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau. Yu has long promoted a view that improvements to China's domestic governance were essential ingredients in China's rapid economic development in the post-Mao period. The theme of the essays compiled for this volume, namely that improvements to governance at the global level can help sustain globalization and solve major human challenges, thus reflects Yu's confidence in improvements to governance as a source of human progress.

There is no question that Yu has curated a rich collection of essays of value to scholars focused on the topic of China and global governance, as well as to those needing a handy introduction to leading Chinese scholars’ writings on global governance. It is unfortunate that the essays are not more current. Nevertheless, they offer a valuable sample of the debates among China's policy-oriented elite in the lead up to Xi Jinping's declaration at the Nineteenth Party Congress in 2017 that China would “take an active part in reforming and developing the global governance system” (“Full text of Xi Jinping's report at 19th CPC National Congress,” Xinhua, 4 November 2017).

Yu's goal for his book is in line with Xi's declaration. As Yu frames the volume, it is to contribute thinking that can advance China's capacity to sustain today's fragile globalization: this requires that China “develop its own global governance theories and strategies” (p. 6). A secondary objective is to highlight the diversity of intellectual opinions among Chinese academics (vii). The volume succeeds in this latter goal by capturing a variety of substantive and theoretical emphases.

However, international scholars will also find amongst this diversity a fundamental consensus that the current international order or system for global governance needs reforming. The need to repair the existing system is not just the result of a failure of global governance to keep pace with the exigencies of globalization. Global governance reforms that reflect and reinforce China's growing power and global influence are also seen as necessary. For example, Cai Tuo, a professor at the China University of Politics and Law, explores in his 2014 essay how China can change its largely passive stance toward global governance to contribute more global public goods while also expanding its own influence in the process. He Fan, Feng Weijiang and Xu Jin, whose piece was originally published in 2013, similarly conclude that participating in global governance is an “important way to uphold China's national interests and increase its strength” (p. 47). Chen Zhimin argues in an essay first published in 2016 that, due to China's growing “systemic influence,” it needs to play a “stronger and more active role in shaping a world order” (p. 113).

Essays in the first half of the book highlight China's power and influence, as well as its “unique” experience (p. 113) as reasons why China should actively reform global governance. Essays in its second section comprise more detailed studies of targets of opportunity and priority for China in global governance reform. Lu Jing from China Foreign Affairs University addresses what he terms the “crisis of legitimacy” in the current governance system, given the shift or diffusion of international power. His 2014 essay argues for adopting a flexible approach that builds on regional and small-scale governance mechanisms as way to build toward broader institutional reform at the global level (p. 137). A research group at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR) tackles UN reform in its 2015 article, arguing that concepts advanced by Chinese leaders, like the “shared human destiny” idea, can be used to bridge the divide between the global North and South and forge a “more authoritative” United Nations (p. 260). Other chapters present sophisticated analyses to make the case for proposed reforms of other areas of global governance, from global economic governance to climate and other transnational issues to the global commons.

Yu, in his own contributions to the volume, makes a persuasive case that improvements to global governance are necessary to sustain globalization in the face of rising nationalism. Taken as a whole, however, in the current atmosphere of rising great power competition, his book's assembled essays are also evidence that there is an inherent contradiction in promoting improvements to an established system of rules and norms that draw mostly on one country's wisdom.