China's elaborate September 2015 military parade marking the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War allowed Beijing to showcase some of its newest high-tech weapons, including some of China's most advanced nuclear missiles. This display of China's growing strategic capabilities, along with Beijing's relevance to the North Korea and Iran nuclear issues, highlights the need for more scholarly attention to be devoted to the subject of Chinese nuclear arms control and nonproliferation policy. Some excellent work has already been done in this area, including Evan Medeiros, Reluctant Restraint: The Evolution of China's Nonproliferation Policies and Practices, 1980–2004 (Stanford University Press, 2007), Jeffrey Lewis, The Minimum Means of Reprisal: China's Search for Security in the Nuclear Age (MIT Press, 2007) and Alastair Iain Johnston, Social States: China in International Institutions, 1980–2000 (Princeton University Press, 2008). Such work has explored Beijing's thinking about nuclear force modernization and nuclear deterrence, as well as its arms control and nonproliferation policies. Yet the fact that some of these studies are now almost a decade old – and that China's capabilities have been growing and its influence rising since these books were published – underscores the importance of revisiting these important and evolving subjects.

In this context, China and Global Nuclear Order: From Estrangement to Active Engagement, by Nicola Horsburgh, a British Academy postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict at Oxford University, is a timely contribution to our understanding of China's nuclear, arms control and nonproliferation policies in particular, and to the fields of China studies and nuclear issues more generally. Horsburgh aims to offer a new perspective on Chinese nuclear policy by examining it in the context of the “global nuclear order.” Although many scholars and practitioners have expressed fears that the “global nuclear order” is currently under threat, there is less agreement on what exactly the “global nuclear order” really is. Indeed, as Horsburgh explains in her introduction, scholars in the United States, China and elsewhere have defined the term in a number of ways, and sometimes only vaguely. While the definition of the term remains a subject of debate, in this book, Horsburgh conceptualizes the “global nuclear order” as encompassing four key elements: nuclear deterrence, nonproliferation, arms control and disarmament. It seems also to include a set of associated regimes, institutions, policies and practices. Horsburgh's main argument is that tracing China's decades-long journey from its early estrangement from this “global nuclear order” to active engagement with it presents a “different perspective from which to evaluate Chinese nuclear weapons calculations, past and present, as well as its rise in international affairs today” (p. 1).

Horsburgh evaluates the evolution of China's position beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, when Beijing viewed arms control agreements and other treaties with great suspicion, seeing them largely as an attempt by the US and the Soviet Union to consolidate a nuclear order in which they would secure their own positions at China's expense. China's position began to change in the 1980s, and its engagement became considerably deeper in the 1990s with its signing of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1992 and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in 1996. This story will be familiar to readers of previous research on Chinese nuclear issues, but Horsburgh aims to apply a different lens – the concept of “global nuclear order” – and to bring the story up to date by covering more recent events. Particularly noteworthy in this regard is her assessment of China's approach to nuclear issues in the 2000s, which provides some useful insight into a number of issues of contemporary policy relevance, such as China's response to perceived threats to the credibility of its nuclear deterrent and its policies toward North Korean and the Iranian nuclear issue. Horsburgh concludes that during this period China has maintained its focus on a retaliatory nuclear strategy, while China's approach to nonproliferation has been more tentative and ambivalent, featuring cooperation with the US and other countries in some instances, but a narrower focus on the pursuit of China's own energy, economic and security interests in others.

Horsburgh makes a strong case for her claims that China has had “a bigger hand than previously thought in the creation, consolidation, and maintenance of global nuclear order” (p. 38), albeit sometimes indirectly, and that Beijing's nuclear policies are in large part of function of China's pursuit of its broader diplomatic and security interests. In addition, throughout the book, Horsburgh draws on an impressive collection of Chinese language sources, including official documents, statements, journal articles, memoires and other publications, and fieldwork that included interviews with some 65 experts on nuclear issues in China and the US.

Whether the closing prediction that flows from the book's main findings – that major changes in China's approach to its engagement with the “global nuclear order” are unlikely to take place under Xi Jinping's leadership – is correct remains to be seen, but either way the book should be of value to China specialists and to scholars and practitioners who focus on nuclear, arms control and nonproliferation issues.