A World of Our Making: Constructivist Understanding of China's Arms Control and Disarmament Policy

Constructivism maintains that the world is socially constructed by human practice, and seeks to explain how this construction takes place by stressing the importance of intersubjective meanings and understandings and the interaction between agent and structure. This article employs the norm as an intersubjective meaning built into domestic milieu in order to understand the constitutive process of the norm's impact. As an aggregate of the interaction between states and international institutions (regimes) in a certain time span, the concept of a “constitutive dynamism” between state and institution illuminates how the individual state's interest could be influenced and transformed. The Chinese perspective on the international ACD agenda diversified and significantly transformed into a more norm‐oriented direction. The norm‐bound belief spreads more and more among the ACD experts once the ACD regimes won “universal reality” which international society approved. The dynamism, which integrates the social structuring of international relations by reconstructing the state (agent) and the international system (structure), provides a tool for comparative analysis, which differs from existing rationalist approaches. This would make it possible for IR researchers to draw a more complete picture of the interaction in our interdependent world, which is now undergoing a sovereignty‐blurring phenomenon.