Introduction1
The diffusion of the ideology and practices of globalization over the last two decades has been accompanied by proliferating cultural claims on modernity that are audible in calls for the recognition of multiple and alternative modernities. It is ironic that modernity globalized – global modernity – calls modernity into ques-tion as a coherent cultural concept. The quesques-tioning of modernity also challenges modernity’s ways of knowing, including the claims to universality of knowledge produced under the sign of science, which now appears as only one among many ways of knowing. As the globalization of modernity erodes the centrality to it of its Euro/American origins, its epistemology, too, loses its hegemony, and retreats into parochialism as the product of one cultural province among others of moder-nity. Theory, an essential tool in the production of such knowledge, and one of its foremost symbols, follows the fragmentation of knowledge into fragmentary spaces of culture (see Dirlik 2007, pp. 70–9).
IR theory would seem to be no exception. Since the 1990s, the question of culture has moved to the forefront in discussions of IR. Newcomers to IR theory, such as academics from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), have qualified their desire to participate in the global discourse on IR with the condition that their particular concerns and outlook be part of any such discourse. Discussions of theory in the original homeland of IR in the United States have on their part repeatedly raised the question of its parochialism, and the need to incorporate in it the voices of others if it is indeed to live up to its universalist pretensions. Some authors have seen in “the return of culture” the revival of questions that were part of IR theory at an earlier stage (in the 1930s and 1940s).2 Culture was indeed quite prominent in the US social sciences in general in an earlier period, most importantly in discourses of development informed by Weberian assumptions.
The present needs to be distinguished from the past, nevertheless, for the vastly different part culture has come to play. Earlier discussions deployed culture in the consolidation of Euro/American hegemony, in explanations of backwardness that viewed backwardness as a function of inherited cultural traditions. Those same cultural traditions are deployed presently by the “backward,” now competitors in modernity, not only to explain their success but to challenge the hegemony of Euro/America.
I take up in this discussion problems presented by the “cultural turn” in IR theory with specific reference to the PRC. IR in the PRC is a relatively new dis-cipline, going back to the beginnings of the “reform and opening” initiated after 1978. Chinese academics deplore the underdevelopment of IR theory in the PRC, and express a determination to become part of global theoretical discussions. On the other hand, uncertainties about the future of IR in the global IR establishment provide openings for alternative approaches, making this a propitious time for newcomers such as the PRC. China appears to some, moreover, as “the most obvi-ous candidate for an independent IR tradition based on a unique philosophical tradition” (Waever 1998, p. 696). What then might be problematic about Chinese entry into the global discourse on IR theory, or the assimilation of IR theory in the PRC?
The answers to these questions may have much to reveal about problems of IR as a disciplinary undertaking in general, and the PRC orientation to it in particular.
It is quite obvious from contemporary discussions that IR is a deeply divided discipline, raising questions for any newcomer on where and how to find the most effective entry into its domain. On the other hand, consideration of what scholars from the PRC or other Chinese societies may have to contribute to IR theory needs to guard against the pitfalls of Orientalist reductionism. Chinese scholars are by no means unanimous in their attitudes toward IR theory – or even on what may constitute theory. Furthermore, there is nothing obvious about China’s so-called
“unique philosophical tradition,” or the relationship of that tradition to contem-porary Chinese perceptions of the world and the policies that issue from them.
Indeed, on the basis of evidence available, if one were forced to choose between a future for IR theory of greater universalism made possible by the assimilation of diverse traditions, such as the Chinese, or fragmentation under the pressures of difference, it would seem wiser to bet on the latter rather than the former. Where theory (in contrast to policy) is concerned, moreover, with the intensified trans-nationalization of education (among other things, including class and ethnic and gender interests and alignments), divisions in approach that cut across national boundaries may be at least as significant as differences between national group-ings of scholarship. Still, this very predicament of fragmentation may contribute to further disciplinary development by bringing to IR theorization a more critical sense of history both in disciplinary practice and in the discipline’s consciousness of its own development and limitations.
IR theory with “Chinese characteristics”
There is an irony to the study of IR in the PRC. Like their Euro/American coun-terparts, Chinese scholars wish to globalize. But globalization does not carry the same meaning for all concerned. To Euro/American scholars, the globalization of IR means to incorporate in it difference, including Chinese difference, to make IR more universal. Chinese scholars, on the other hand, desire above all to
“Westernize,” to become part of a “Western” discourse on IR, while retaining an identity of their own. The irony presents the analyst with a basic question: What is the difference that difference makes?
IR in the PRC is so far a dependent discipline with little claim to originality.
Ever since Deng Xiaoping declared plans for a “socialism with Chinese character-istics” as the goal of post-1978 reforms, Chinese politicians and academics have gotten into the habit of attaching “Chinese characteristics” to everything from the most significant to the most trivial. A cynical reading would suggest that the phrase serves as a cover to disguise mimicry of the “advanced” societies of Europe and America that has been the core of developmental policy since the 1980s, a cover that works because of a persistent Orientalist fascination with Chinese difference.
More charitably, it points to a search that has been under way for over a century now for a Chinese essence that may give the country a unique present and future even as it is transformed radically by forces from abroad. Both readings have some validity, and account not only for oscillations between universalism and parochialism that have marked modern Chinese history, but also the contradic-tions that have played an important part in dynamizing it. The contradiction may also help us grasp some of the issues in Chinese perceptions of the world, and the way they may help shape the course of IR as academic undertaking.
IR in China is a new discipline, going back to the ‘reform and opening’ in the early 1980s. As the standard account goes,
Before the 1980s no real IR theory was taught in China. The so-called theory of international politics before then was just interpretation of the viewpoints of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Zedong . . . University courses were just to explain theories of imperialism, colonialism, national liberation move-ments, and war and peace.
(Song 2001, p. 63)3 This situation has changed drastically since the 1980s, when IR came into its own as an autonomous discipline. In the early 1960s, only the People’s University in Beijing and fudan University in Shanghai had departments of foreign affairs.
These universities were joined from the late 1980s by Nankai University in Tianjin and the foreign Affairs College in Beijing in the teaching of IR theory, which now began to include Western IR theory. IR theory was also taught in government and party institutions, as well as in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS).
Universities around the country began to offer courses on contemporary world politics, stimulating the market for textbooks. Initially poor in quality, and mostly copied from one another, the textbooks have considerably improved in quality over the years since then.
Access to foreign writings on IR has also improved, and China now compares favorably with the United States in this respect. A recent study on IR by Fudan University professors Zhao Kejin and Ni Shixiong includes in its bibliography, in addition to the most important US publications on IR in English and Chinese translation, Chinese translations of works translated from German, French, Italian, Swedish, and Japanese (Zhao and Ni 2007). Journals and journal publications have proliferated in tandem. However, developments in IR theory have not been commensurate with these institutional developments in research and teaching.
Gerald Chan wrote in 1999 that,
The Chinese theory of IR, if there is a coherent one at all, does not pose any significant challenge to existing (Western) theories of IR. In the foresee-able future it is likely that the Chinese theory will only add marginally to and complement current theories, making IR theory more pluralistic, more representative, and more interesting, as will the theories or perspectives of other major countries.
(G. Chan 1999, p. 3) It is safe to say that the situation has not changed much over the last decade and, despite brave talk of “Chinese characteristics,” Chinese writings on IR remain derivative. This could still be explained as a consequence of the time lag in entry into the disciplinary realm of IR, but in order to assess the potential of the dis-cipline for intellectual and theoretical breakthroughs, we need to consider other possible obstacles to the development of a “Chinese theory” that are internal to the institutional and ideological development of IR in the PRC over the last two decades. These include fetishization of development, and the dependency it has created on Euro/American, especially American, intellectual models that are barely disguised by recourse to the cover of Chinese characteristics. They include, contradictorily, the persistence of the legacies of the revolution, however distorted, that haunt post-revolutionary developments – which is most evident in the ambivalence toward theory. They also include the problem of how to define
“Chinese characteristics,” and to integrate it in theoretical work. The latter also involves the fundamental question of how “Chinese characteristics” may be rel-evant not just to theory or IR as a discipline, but to what we might call the actually existing world which, after all, must be the ultimate referent for all theoretical work if the latter is to be anything other than academic entertainment.
The problems thrown up by these tendencies are already visible in debates among Chinese scholars over the development and nature of IR. Song Xinning, himself a leader in efforts to establish IR theory in the PRC,4 has attributed dis-ciplinary divisions mostly, if not wholly, to generational differences, implicitly holding an older generation for the inertia in the field. Song wrote in 2001 that,
Most Chinese scholars, especially the younger ones, are optimistic about the future development of IR studies in China. First, the domestic political atmosphere is improving, although there are still limitations. As long as the open-door policy continues, China’s IR scholars will have more freedom to express their views both within the profession and in public forums. Secondly, due to the implementation of the enforced retirement system, those con-servative, senior university professors will eventually withdraw from their positions in IR studies. More and more junior scholars who have received academic training in foreign institutions of higher education are taking over important academic and administrative posts.5
Divisions have been primarily over the understanding of theory, and the ques-tion of “Chinese characteristics.” Aside from the issue of Chinese characteristics,
which I will discuss below, Chinese scholars have been divided over the nature and function of theory. In the words of Geeraerts and Men Jing,
The basic concept of theory in China differs markedly from the one found in mainstream Western epistemology. While according to the latter, the function of theory consists in explaining and predicting, theory in the Chinese concep-tion has to serve the purpose of socialist revoluconcep-tion and construcconcep-tion. Such a conception stresses both a theory’s ideological content and effectiveness in application. Thus theories are strongly ideologically oriented and must be able to instruct practice the ‘right’ way. Ideological soundness as well as effectiveness in guiding policy-making are paramount in judging a theory’s value.
(Geeraerts and Jing 2001, p. 252) From this perspective, “the research conducted by Western IR scholars is una-voidably restricted by the national and cultural environment in which they are nested” (yuan Ming, cited in Geeraerts and Jing 2001, p. 252). In a broad sense, there are only two types of IR theories, Western bourgeois and Marxist–Leninist (G. Chan 1999, pp. 7–8; Geeraerts and Jing 2001, p. 253).6
These views are associated in the literature with an older group of scholars, such as huan Xiang, Liang Shoude, and feng Tejun, who, regardless of their own reservations, must be considered the first generation of post-revolutionary IR scholars. Their efforts to integrate IR theory with the legacies (and goals) of socialist revolution appear outmoded from the perspective of a younger genera-tion alienated from the socialist revolugenera-tionary past, and more in sympathy with (if not products of) “Western” understanding of science, in contrast to the older gen-eration’s equation of “scientific” with Marxism–Leninism, including its Chinese incarnations in Mao Zedong thought (Mao Zedong sixiang) and Deng Xiaoping theory (Deng Xiaoping lilun), as ideological orthodoxy has enshrined them. This younger generation, desirous of participation in the most “advanced” intellectual trends in the world, seems to have no problems with the global scope assumed by
“Western” theory, its claims to transcend particular interests of nation, class or gender, and its aspirations to universal validity.
As Song Xinning’s qualification (cited above, fn. 8) suggests, however, these generational differences should not be understood totalistically, as characteristics of every member of the generation, but only as historical markers that may be used to distinguish one generation from another. Equally important may be the political differences that cut across generations, producing intra-generational dis-agreements, and keeping alive seemingly outmoded ideas that may be resurrected once again if circumstances warrant it. In the case of the PRC, the very persistence of rule by the Communist Party has given staying power to Marxism as a referent for theory. Although Marxism has receded to the background of theoretical dis-cussions with academic liberalization and greater educational transnationalism, it has by no means disappeared.
Most commentators, Chinese and foreign, focusing on disciplinary
developments, take for granted a break in the 1980s between a pre-IR and post-IR theory periodization, accompanied by a teleological assumption that Chinese scholarship must follow an inevitable path from its revolutionary past to greater integration with “Western” scientific theory. This may or may not be the case, but both the understanding of the break and of its aftermath may be misleading in ignoring the contradiction that persist, which are the contradictions of a post-socialist society. Clearly there were international relations, as well as IR thinking, before the 1980s. The appearance of another kind of IR thinking, consistent with the turn away from revolutionary socialism to accommodation with capitalism, did not merely write a script on a blank sheet of paper.7 The beginning was not just a beginning, but also a suppression of something that existed earlier. Although suppressed in order that IR can become an academic discipline (within a broader political context), this earlier thinking that is the legacy of revolution has refused to go away, and continues to haunt post-socialist thinking. It is, in fact, one impor-tant sense of the phrase “Chinese characteristics.” And if it shows more strongly with the first post-revolutionary generation in IR theory, it has not disappeared from later thinking. Nor is there any reason to expect its ultimate demise with time, at least not in the immediately foreseeable future (on postsocialism see Dirlik 1989; see also Yuan 2007).
More interesting have been changes in the content of Marxism. IR theory in China has been bound not only to “Marxism,” but to a Marxism that is subject to reinterpretation with changes in policy. Since the 1990s, new interpretations have been added to it as a changing leadership adds its own signatures to the theory. More recent works on IR theory in the PRC have sought to accommodate themselves to Jiang Zemin’s “Three Represents” (sange daibiao) and Hu Jintao’s
“harmonious society” (hexie shehui) or “harmonious world” (hexie shijie). It is possible to speak of a progressive compromising of Marxist theory as a radical sociology as it is forced into ever-intensifying accommodation of capitalism, and the emergence of a class society in the PRC, but even this requires great cau-tion, judging by the greater attention given to social problems of development and ideological rejuvenation under the current leadership.8 What is more directly pertinent here is the way in which these changes have transformed the idea of
“Chinese characteristics” as well.
Reference to “Chinese characteristics” immediately invokes thought of “an independent IR tradition based on a unique philosophical tradition,” in the words of Waever, cited above. It is probably fair to say that Chinese have been a great deal more ambivalent about that tradition than their Euro/American admirers (or, for that matter, critics). Although there is a good case to be made that, as socialism has receded, the “unique philosophical tradition’” has moved to the foreground of Chinese self-identification, reference to “Chinese characteristics” still retains an ambiguity, referring, depending on the speaker, sometimes to the philosophical traditions of imperial China and sometimes to the socialist revolutionary tradition.
Indeed, writers on IR in the PRC for the most part agree that it was the socialist tradition that was foremost in the minds of the first post-revolutionary generation, who argued for an IR theory that would be consistent with China’s circumstances
as a socialist society. The IR theory that these scholars sought to create was one that would integrate the insights of “Western” theory with Marxism as it had been interpreted by Mao Zedong, and subsequently Deng Xiaoping, to account for the special circumstances of Chinese society. Chinese scholars claimed that Chinese IR research before the 1980s had concentrated on
imperialism, national liberation movements, international solidarity, and principles of peaceful coexistence. From the beginning of the 1970s, [they]
probed into theories of interdependence, international cooperation, diplo-matic strategy, and cultural elements in international relations.
(Geeraerts and Jing 2001, p. 256) A popular text often cited listed Chinese contributions as the “five principles of co-existence,”9 “strategic division of the Three Worlds,”10 “peace and develop-ment in the world,” (heping fazhan), and the new international political order (Tejun and Xinning 1992, pp. 36–7, cited in Chan 1998, p. 13). More generally, IR theory as conceived by these scholars was to be attentive to the guoqing, a term that does not exclude culture, but is not reducible to it either, as it captures simultaneously material conditions and the intangible elements that make up a
(Geeraerts and Jing 2001, p. 256) A popular text often cited listed Chinese contributions as the “five principles of co-existence,”9 “strategic division of the Three Worlds,”10 “peace and develop-ment in the world,” (heping fazhan), and the new international political order (Tejun and Xinning 1992, pp. 36–7, cited in Chan 1998, p. 13). More generally, IR theory as conceived by these scholars was to be attentive to the guoqing, a term that does not exclude culture, but is not reducible to it either, as it captures simultaneously material conditions and the intangible elements that make up a