Quo Vadis China?
The discussion of China’s growing prominence in international life attracts increasing attention from publics, policy-makers, and scholars alike. Usually sidelined by the mainstream, such interest in China’s roles and attitudes on the world stage has grown exponentially in the context of the deepening concomitant economic, social, political crises across Europe and North America – which, until very recently, have been considered the traditional locales of powers and influence in world politics. Indicative of the emergent weight and significance of non-Western actors on the global stage, the trend set by China seems to challenge the conventional frameworks of both the study and practice of International Relations (IR).
In this setting, most commentators suggest a nascent ‘Sinicization’ of global politics – seemingly confirmed by China’s extensive involvement not just in the developing world, but also its palpable outreach to all regions on the globe. According to a number of commentators, backstopping such a drive are the perceived and actual aspirations of Beijing’s external outlook. Thus, more often than not, the contention in the literature is that regardless of whether China chooses to develop a cooperative or conflictual stance, it will nevertheless have an important bearing on the patterns and practices of world affairs. The volume edited by Shao Binhong goes to the heart of this conversation. It brings together a diversity of Chinese perspectives on the transformations in and the transformative potential of Chinese foreign policy. In this respect, the collection offers invaluable insight into the concerns, challenges, and hopes of the Chinese academic and policy community.
Dissecting China’s international outreach
The growing propensity and willingness of China’s international outreach presents an intriguing intersection of the discursive memory of the past with the dynamic contexts of the present and the anticipated tasks of the future. By bringing together Chinese-language sources rarely referenced in Western IR literature, the contributors to Shao’s volume manage to construct a thoughtful and extremely vivid picture of the complexity and diversity that mark Chinese IR scholarship. In fact, many readers would perhaps be surprised by the lack of a uniform and centralized IR discourse in China. As Shao’s collection deftly demonstrate such a surprise is reflective of particularly Orientalizing ways of imagining China in the West, which tend to remain detached from the nuanced socio-political, historic, and regional contexts of Chinese IR literature.
The collection includes a number of studies exploring the domestic and international changes and challenges impacting China’s worldviews. At the same time, other analyses probe a diversity of perspectives on the so-called nascent ‘China Model’ (p.69) of world affairs. According to its interlocutors, the China Model has simultaneously economic, financial, security, global governance dimensions. These dimensions – either individually or in tandem – are made apparent in the process and context of specific topics and practices of China’s international outreach. The contributors to the collection also discuss at length China’s interactions with a variety of partners – located both in China’s immediate vicinity and further away. In either case, perceptions of proximity appear to be created not according to the geographic distance from Beijing, but on contextual interpretations of the historical, cultural and socio-political record. Perhaps, unexpectedly, the topic of power transition and the alleged waning of American global power provide an important undercurrent of this conversation. The final section of the volume offers a stimulating forum on the likely trajectories of Sino-American relations in the next decade.
The accounts of China’s international affairs included in the collection edited by Shao testify to the vim and vigor of Chinese IR scholarship. At the same time, the vibrant analyses provided by the contributors to the volume demonstrate what might be termed as the two salient features underlying Chinese assessments of world affairs: their subjectivity and preoccupation with ensuring China’s national interest. The collection therefore demonstrates that IR scholars in China are, on the one hand, much more forthcoming about their own personal predilections and, on the other hand, quite explicit that their theoretical peregrinations in IR are intent on strengthening China’s international status. This appears to be the key distinction from Western IR theory, where the explanation and understanding of any school is expected to conform to a particular understanding of objectivity and scientific method. Not surprisingly, therefore, many of the analyses included in the collection are underpinned by strong normative commitments, prescribing unequivocally that China “should behave as a responsible power” (p.123).
Whither IR with Chinese characteristics?
The collection edited by Shao offers ample evidence of the contested nature of Chinese discourses on international affairs. What emerges is a framing of world affairs premised on the fusion of complex innovation and its creative contextualization within the idiosyncratic experience of China. In this respect, the contributors to Shao’s volume make a timely and extremely pertinent contribution to the discussion of Chinese (and, more broadly, non-Western) approaches to world politics. The erudite analyses included in the volume offer a much needed contextual understanding of how China views and interprets the world. In this way, the collection edited by Shao has succeeded to provide refreshing perspectives on the content, scope, and implications of Chinese IR scholarship. The accounts provided by the contributes make available thoughtful reconsiderations of China’s global roles as well as offer a wealth of solid knowledge and perceptive insights into the evolution, patterns and practices of China’s foreign policy. Thus, to the experts of China’s international interactions, Shao’s volume grants unparalleled access both to comprehensive overviews and a much-needed reassessments of the conceptual outlines of Beijing’s nascent global agency. To the beginners, it makes available accessible, yet rigorous, analytical and empirical engagements with the discourses animating Chinese IR thinking.
Emilian Kavalski, Institute for Social Justice, ACU (Sydney) (emilian.kavalski@acu.edu.au)