ABSTRACT
The spectre of the rise of China that has triggered the putative global power shift has fuelled intense speculations about the future of global order. It has spawned more than a cottage industry in the studies of China rising, with competing visions and claims about its implications for the systemic transformation of global politics in the twenty-first century. Is a rising China a status quo or a revisionist power? How is this awakened lion, ‘peaceful, amicable and civilized’ (Xi 2014), going to use its rising power, and for what purpose? What does China want? Will a China rising in a world not of its own making bring a completely new script to global politics? These are among searching questions that have been grappled with in the existing literature. Anxieties about the rise of China, which is ‘historically outside of the golden circle of influentials in the modern era’ (Agnew 2010: 570), are palpable. Yet, we seem to have at best only very fragmented knowledge, if at all, of the hidden world of intellectual debate within China that shapes Chinese understanding of its changing position and responsibility in the global power hierarchy and informs China’s distinctive visions and imagination of the future global order. In What Does China Think?, Mark Leonard (2008) stated rather provocatively that ‘we know everything and nothing about China’ and proceeded to ask rhetorically
But how many people know about the debates raging within China? What do we really know about the kind of society China wants to become? What ideas are motivating its citizens? We can name America’s neo-cons and the religious right, but cannot name Chinese writers, thinkers, or journalists – what is the future they dream of for their country, or for the world?
