Ferran Perez Mena, University of Sussex
During the past decades, both Chinese and Western International Relations (IR) scholars have drawn their attention to the advent of the ‘Chinese School of IR’ (中国国际关系学, Zhongguo guoji guanxi xuepai). In this article, ‘the Chinese School of IR’ is defined as a loose group of Chinese IR scholars with divergent research interests that have been advancing an indigenous Chinese IR theory drawing on Confucianism, Chinese traditional political thought, and Anglo-American IR theory since the 2000s. It is commonly believed that the study of such an intellectual project can enable us to understand China’s international behaviour in a growing multipolar world.
Mainstream literature on the ‘Chinese School of IR’ tends to render its advent and development as the product of a revisionist China that allegedly seeks to compete with the US both in the material and ideational spheres. Indeed, this Realist view has been mainly prompted by the anxieties that the China’s rise has triggered in the Euro-American IR community. This article will cast into question this narrative. Through a materialist approach, I contend that the ‘Chinese School of IR’ is better understood as an intellectual enterprise that seeks to provide a normative horizon for China’s integration into the liberal capitalist order[i]. Consequently, these indigenous Chinese IR theories reveal China’s ‘Kautskyian moment’[ii] that unfolded during the 2000s, where the elites of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) believed that China needed to cooperate with the US in order to continue with the development of its socioeconomic forces.
The argument is set out in three steps. Firstly, I situate the rise of the ‘Chinese School of IR’ within China’s ‘Kautskyian moment’ after the 2000s. Secondly, I briefly analyse the theoretical work of Qin Yaqing, one of the main members of the ‘Chinese School of IR’. In this respect, I show how Qin’s Relational theory embodies such a historic moment of great power cooperation. Finally, I will provide a short conclusion. Now, let me turn to situate the advent the ‘Chinese School of IR’ during China’s ‘Kautskyian moment’.
China’s ‘Kautskyian moment’ and the rise of the ‘Chinese School of IR’
According to Van der Pijl, since the Glorious Revolution (1688), the global political economy has been organised around the Lockean heartland and a set of contender states. These refer to two distinct state/society complexes. Historically, the Lockean heartland emerged in the English-speaking countries and represented the bourgeoise liberal state with its civil society and clear distinction between the ruling and the governing class. This state/society complex expanded transnationally. In contrast, contender states such as China emerged as a result of the geopolitical pressures of the Lockean heartland. The state was ruled by a “state class” that hegemonized the state apparatus and directly commanded the economy. The main concern of the “state class” was to resist being peripheralized by the Lockean heartland through a tight control of social development that selectively copied the practices of the Lockean heartland.
In the context of China after 1979, the CCP embodied such a ‘state class’, which commanded state development and enabled China’s “capitalist restoration”[iii]. The CCP understood China’s integration into the capitalist liberal order as a necessary step to catch up with the Lockean heartland, to resist peripheralisation and generate a new social contract that could cement the party’s legitimacy. Up until the 2000s, China’s relation with the West was defined by Deng’s principle of “keeping a low profile”[iv]. However, during the 2000s, this relation began to transform. Consequently, China not only became more integrated within the Lockean heartland but also gained more international and political prominence in the global political economy.
Indeed, this new historical relation revealed China’s “Kautskyian moment”[v] with the Lockean heartland. In 1914, Karl Kautsky, a prominent socialist theorist during the Second International of socialist and labour parties, wrote a seminal article titled ‘Ultra-imperialism’ in Die Neue Zeit. Kautsky argued that “national ruling classes had the tendency to form international alliances to jointly exploit the world’s resources, leading to cooperation rather than, or alongside, conflict between capitalist states”[vi]. Despite the ideological differences between the Lockean heartland and the Chinese contender state, China’s role as an “engine of the globalisation”[vii] was seen as a win-win situation by both the Western liberal elites and the CCP. The former saw it as a process of “socialization” that could contribute to China’s integration into the liberal capitalist order on US’s terms. Eventually, this process could lead to the liberalisation of China and the emergence of new social forces that could demand a liberal democracy. In contrast, the later conceived this historical situation through a purely pragmatic lens. China could benefit from the economic openness of the liberal capitalist order to advance its socioeconomic forces and cement its regime of accumulation of wealth.
The rise of the ‘Chinese School of IR’ occurred during this “Kautskyian moment”. Historically, up until the 2000s, the Chinese IR community had been more concerned about studying the international consequences of Deng’s economic reform and the political and economic frictions that stemmed from China’s incipient integration into the liberal capitalist order. Most of analysis were mainly informed by Anglo-American IR theory and an indigenous Chinese normative IR theory was almost non-existent. However, in 2000s, a group of Chinese IR scholars began to discuss the possibility of developing an indigenous Chinese IR theory. This call coincided with a new historical and geopolitical moment characterised by great power cooperation. After its entry into the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 2001, it became evident that China had “gone global”[viii] and wished to play a greater role in the global governance of the 21st century.
Unlike the previous decade, where China found itself in an international position of relative vulnerability, after the 2000’s, China had gained higher agential power in global politics. This became obvious after the Financial Crisis of 2008. In this respect, China played a fundamental role in assisting the US economy[ix] to keep afloat. Against this backdrop, Chinese IR scholars sought to develop an indigenous IR theory that could furnish China’s foreign policy with a normative horizon that could take into consideration China’s national interests, its political autonomy and greater agency. Nonetheless, rather than producing and IR theory fuelled by Realist anxieties, such a theory reflected the great power cooperation between China and the US, which was key to sustain the regimes of accumulation of wealth of two rival state/societies complexes enmeshed in a difficult economic position.
Qin Yaqing’s Relational Theory: integrating the Chinese contender state into the capitalist liberal order
Qin Yaqing is the President and Professor of China Foreign Affairs University, which is directly under the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In addition to his academic role and being one of the main proponents of the ‘Chinese School of IR’, Qin was also actively involved in the UN High Panel for Challenges, Threats and Changes (2003-2004) and in China-ASEAN Eminent Persons Group (2005)[x]. According to Qin, “he participated in East Asian regional integration. Not as a scholar but as a Track II practitioner (…) [he] began to be a key figure in NEAT, the Network of East Asian Think Tanks”[xi]. During the 2000s, he put forward his Relational Theory of IR (过程建构主义, guocheng jiangou zhuyi )[xii].
Drawing on Anglo-American Social Constructivism and Zhongyong dialectics, he developed an indigenous Chinese IR theory based on three main assumptions: interrelatedness, identities of social relations, and process. His Relational theory allowed him to conceive the international society as a process[xiii]. The main aim was to demonstrate how China’s peaceful rise within the international society was possible. Through the deployment of Zhongyong dialectics that celebrate harmonious relations over conflictive ones, Qin argues that two polar forces can completement each other and interact in a harmonious way. Indeed, Qin’s Relational theory not only aimed at providing a normative horizon for the integration of the Chinese contender state into the Lockean heartland during the 2000s but also sought to legitimise and protect the internal nature of the Chinese contender state characterised by its dual nature of state interventionism and economic liberalism. In this light, Qin Yaqing’s Relational Theory of IR embodied the ‘Kautskyian moment’ that China was experiencing during the 2000s.
Unlike the previous ‘IR theory with Chinese characteristics’ that emerged during the 1990s, Qin’s Relational Theory reflected China’s higher degree of political autonomy in global politics and a willingness to play a more prominent role in the global governance. In this respect, China’s integration to the capitalist liberal order was conceived from a position of strength. Nonetheless it is important to note that Qin’s Relational theory should not be understood as a theory of global hegemony but rather as a theoretical project that reflected a more prosaic reality often overlooked: China’s rise was still dependent on the cooperation with other great powers and the international openness that such a cooperation had enabled.
Conclusion
In this article, through a brief introduction to Qin’s Relational Theory, I have argued that the ‘Chinese School of IR’ is better understood as an intellectual enterprise that seeks to provide a normative horizon for China’s integration into the liberal capitalist order. Their integration is from a position of greater agential power and the willingness to play a more prominent role in global governance. Furthermore, Qin’s IR theory embodied the ‘Kautskyian moment’ that unfolded during the 2000s, where both the US and China fostered a great power cooperation. In this light, this argument casts into question the Realist views that see the ‘Chinese School of IR’ as a product of a crude Chinese nationalism and a revisionist China. Even though current global politics seem to point out how great power collaboration is losing traction, Qin Yaqing remains one of the main voices within the Chinese IR community that advocates for such a cooperation. Perhaps Karl Kautsky’s spirit left Washington, but there’s no question that it is still lingering in Beijing. Qin’s work proves it.
Ferran Perez Mena is a doctoral student in international relations, security, and global governance at the University of Sussex. His research expertise in on the production of international relations theory in East Asia and East Asian social movements.
[i] Even though in this article I only focus on the theoretical work of Qin Yaqing due to space constraints, my argument also applies to the work of Yan Xuetong and the ‘Shanghai School of IR’. I develop this in my doctoral research.
[ii] This idea was inspired by Shuhong Huo and Inderjeet Parmar, “‘A New Type of Great Power Relationship’? Gramsci, Kautsky and The Role of The Ford Foundation’s Transformational Elite Knowledge Networks in China”, Review of International Political Economy 27, no. 2 (2019): 234-257.
[iii] Kevin Gray, “Labour and The State in China’s Passive Revolution”, Capital & Class 34, no. 3 (2010): 449-467.
[iv] Xuetong Yan, “From Keeping a Low Profile to Striving for Achievement”, The Chinese Journal of International Politics 7, no. 2 (2014): 153-184.
[v] Current Sino-US relations seems to point out that such a “moment” is currently vanishing.
[vi] Shuhong Huo and Inderjeet Parmar, “‘A New Type of Great Power Relationship’? Gramsci, Kautsky and The Role of The Ford Foundation’s Transformational Elite Knowledge Networks in China”, Review of International Political Economy 27, no. 2 (2019): 238.
[vii] Michael Dauderstädt and Jürgen Stetten, “China and Globalisation”, Intereconomics 40, no. 4 (2005): 226-234.
[viii] Yongjin Zhang, China Goes Global (London: The Foreign Policy Centre, 2005).
[ix] Xulio Ríos, “China Ante La Crisis Financiera Internacional”, Anuario CEIPAZ3 (2009): 197-213.
[x] “PRIO”, Prio.Org, 2021, https://www.prio.org/People/Person/?x=10961.
[xi] B. Creutzfeldt, “Qin Yaqing on Rules Vs Relations, Drinking Coffee and Tea, and a Chinese Approach to Global Governance”, Theory Talks, 2011, http://www.theory-talks.org/2011/11/theory-talk-45.html.
[xii] Yaqing Qin, A Relational Theory of World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
[xiii] Yaqing Qin, “International Society as A Process: Institutions, Identities, And China’s Peaceful Rise”, The Chinese Journal of International Politics 3, no. 2 (2010): 129-153.
