Traditionally the preference of Chinese foreign policy was bilateralism or even unilateralism. From the 1990s, especially entering in the 21^st Century, China paid more attention to multilateralism. This paper analyzes the reasons why China gradually changed its approach. The Chinese understanding of multilateralism is very much different from the European one. In practice the Chinese multilateral diplomacy has both global and regional dimension and is mainly referred to as China's neighborhood policy. The strategy of the Chinese new neighborhood policy is to change from the traditional `bilateral plus regional' approach, i.e., using regional platform just to deal with bilateral relations, to a new `regional-multilateral plus bilateral' approach, i.e., to engage in more regional cooperation and work with neighboring countries within the regional-multilateral arrangement to solve the bilateral problems. China's involvement in East Asian regional cooperation is focusing on economics, especially trade. The basic argument for enhancing the regional economic cooperation with East Asia countries should be a kind of functional approach. The first step is to establish three 10+1 Free Trade Areas (FTAs). The second step is to try a Northeast Asia FTA through three bilateral FTAs, and then the third step is to transfer ASEAN plus one into a real 10+3 as a group, i.e., East Asia Free Trade Area (EAFTA). In order to enhance the economic position, China also tries to upgrade its domestic industrial structure and competitiveness on one hand and to participate in the horizontal international division of labor through regional economic integration in East Asia on the other.

In Asia, the US put forward a bilateral approach by the establishment of bilateral military alliance with various individual Asian countries such as Japan, South Korea, Philippines, etc. In contrast, the US put into practice a multilateral approach in Western Europe within the framework of the Marshall Plan and forced the Western European countries to work together as a group in order to receive the Marshall Plan assistance although the initial objective of the Plan was not to support the European integration.

The People's Republic of China was forced to carry out a so-called `lean to one side' foreign policy and became the member of the Socialist Camp led by the Soviet Union because of the Korean War started in 1950. The Socialist Camp and the Warsaw Pact Organization could be regarded as a multilateral arrangement among the Socialist countries during the 1950s and 1960s. It was also because of the bad experience with the Socialist Camp, the multilateral approach was regarded by the Chinese as a kind of hegemonic system. China finally broke with the Soviet Union, dropped out of the Socialist Camp and put in practice the so-called independent and self-determinate foreign policy. Not only the US but also the Soviet Union was defined as the hegemony in a very negative term. From the late 1950s to 1980s, China kept its position of unilateralism and bilateralism in the foreign relations, and strongly supported the non-alignment movement.

Multilateralism was not very popular in China before the 1990s. It was put on the Chinese foreign policy agenda just several years before. Before the 1990s, what the Chinese concentrated on was multipolarity instead of multilateralism. In both theoretic and pragmatic terms, multipolarity was a kind of balance of power that was favored by many Chinese. During the late 1990s, Chinese scholars started to challenge the concept of multipolarity and advocated pluralism as the replacement and argued that the tendency in the post-cold war era was non-polarity instead of multipolarity. In July 2001, the first academic conference was held in Beijing to discuss multilateralism and multilateral diplomacy and eight conference papers were published by World Economics and Politics, a very influential journal on international studies in China in October 2001. It was the first time for the Chinese scholars to look at multilateralism from both the theoretical and policy perspective. But the Chinese understanding of multilateralism at that time was still very much the same as balance of powers and multipolarity. Some of them argued that multilateral diplomacy was the most important approach to the multipolar world.

International Relations Journal, Regional Integration, Bilateralism, Regional-Multilateralism, East Asia Free Trade Area, EAFTA, Chinese Foreign Policy, World Economics, Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation, APEC, ASEAN Regional Forum, Foreign Direct Investment, FDI, Newly Industrialized Economies, Free Trade Agreement, Global Manufacturing Chain.