ABSTRACT
Introduction The Chinese School debate has become more outward-looking than the more defensive and inward-looking debates about “IR with Chinese Characteristics” (Chan 1997; Geeraerts and Men 2001: 269). Interventions in the Chinese School debate seek to enter “global IR” and this chapter reads the Chinese School as an effort to become a “traveling theory”; a theory rooted in the Chinese geocultural context but able to travel and to carve out a space in the “global” IR discipline. The prospect of becoming a traveling theory depends on the Chinese School’s navigation of the core-periphery structures of “global” IR, however. There is not really a “global” IR discipline in which ideas and theories, or at least the best ones, travel seamlessly through space. As I will further argue below, IR is a stratified space with asymmetric core-periphery structures of communication. In the most simplistic formulation, there is not one IR discipline but several national disciplines, of which the American core dominates most syllabi, textbooks, journals and conferences. The Chinese School and the Chinese IR discipline has largely imported IR from the United States and taken “American IR” as “global IR”. This is a problematic assumption and it is necessary to take other national disciplines, and thus potential audiences, into account when situating the Chinese School in “global IR”. This chapter views the Chinese School from the outside-in focusing on its position(ing) in the core-periphery structure of global IR; the Chinese School in relation to the core “American social science”; the Chinese School as a “school among schools”, mostly schools in the European semi-periphery; and finally, the Chinese School compared to IR in other “rising powers” from the periphery, like India and Brazil. First, the Chinese School operates in a discipline notoriously dominated by an American core and is put forward as an alternative to this American core. The Chinese IR discipline was virtually imported from the United States and remains deeply influenced by and focused on the US discipline. Chinese School theorizing seems to have recognition in the United States as the primary goal and its focus on theorizing China’s “Peaceful Rise” is largely a response to American “China threat” discourses. Second, as a school among schools, the Chinese School is inspired in form by European “schools” in the
semi-periphery of this US-dominated discipline, notably the English and Copenhagen schools. Even in substance, Chinese IR shares some affinities with the English School – which was imported to China from the United States – in the traditionalist focus on theorizing ancient Chinese thoughts and history, but the engagement with other so-called European “schools” such as the Copenhagen, Aberystwyth and Paris schools in critical security studies has been marginal, although some of these theories seem to speak to the concerns of the Chinese School. Third, the Chinese School is often seen as a natural response to China’s rising power. But there has been little engagement with IR in other so-called “rising powers”, like Brazil and India, where there have been parallel concerns over the dominance of American and Eurocentric theories and voices calling for a recovery of indigenous resources, albeit to a lesser extent and in different ways than in China. The chapter concludes with a call for audience diversity and the exploration of alternative (e.g. South-South) dialogues for the Chinese School as traveling theory.
