China’s Rising Foreign Ministry: Practices and Representations of Assertive Diplomacy By Dylan Loh. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2024. 240 pp. $75.00 (cloth)

Representations of Assertive Diplomacy, is likely to become a central work for the study of PRC foreign policy.The book tackles a difficult subject of study-a foreign ministry that is not particularly known for being willing to be studied.As I am sure that the readers of this review are aware, the PRC diplomatic bureaucracy (as also detailed in the book) is relatively opaque and not exactly welcoming of outside scrutiny.It is a system that maintains considerable discipline over its members, and this means that much of the research that we do see on Chinese foreign policy works from statements and actions that are observable from a distance and/or quantifiable via external analysis.Loh, however, did not let the obstacles that surround the object of his study discourage him, and he has been able to paint a very comprehensive picture of the current status of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) within the larger PRC foreign policy apparatus.This he did by using interviews with both Chinese officials and insiders to the system as well as their foreign interlocutors, not to mention by engaging an extensive set of primary and secondary sources.The portrait he renders is one in which the MOFA is both taking on a much more central role in certain elements of PRC foreign policy and using the tools that it has at its disposal-"advising, implementing, and facilitating/coordinating"-to exert its influence.The book is densely packed, but, roughly speaking, its initial chapters introduce existing literature and its theoretical apparatus-practice theory-and make an argument for considering the influence of its subject: MOFA.To these ends, Loh cites various illustrative incidents that demonstrate MOFA's increasingly high profile, including Wang Yi's aggressive response at a press conference in Canada, intervention in ASEAN's statements on the South China Sea, and PRC interference with a transshipment of military materiel through Hong Kong to Singapore.It then moves on in its third chapter to situate MOFA within the institutional setting of the