Reconceptualising World Order

Chinese Political Thought and Its Challenge to International Relations Theory

At the outset of the twenty-first century, the world is facing a range of problems, including environmental, economic, and security risks, that increasingly challenge the logic of nation-state governance. While American and European models of International Relations and global governance, such as the Westphalian system of states and the Washington Consensus, have come under attack from poststructuralist thinkers, political philosophers from China and Taiwan have tried to reconceptualise the world of the twenty-first century from their own perspectives.

This article examines current streams of Chinese International Relations theorising and confronts them with the case of territorial disputes in the East China Sea. The article analyses the arguments by Chinese realists, ‘worldists’, and procedural constructivists, showing how Chinese scholars creatively revive pre-modern Chinese political theory in attempts to provide new ways in which International Relations scholars might view the world, or: ‘all-under-heaven’.

As this paper shows, the complexities of a conflict surrounding the East China Sea indeed vindicate some of the criticism that Chinese scholars have levelled against mainstream IRT, but the shortcomings in this nascent conceptual framework necessitate a revision and careful expansion. While these creative and novel contributions from China are bound to progressively challenge conventional theories of International Relations, such so-called non-Western theorising will require additional rigorous empirical grounding, a critical perspective on its entanglement with nationalist political discourses in East Asian societies, and the willingness to incorporate existing theories if they are to deliver on their promise to provide fresh perspectives to IR theory.

The research for this article was generously funded by the Leiden University Institute of Area Studies (LIAS) and Leiden’s Modern East Asia Research Centre (MEARC).

How to reference this article

Schneider, Florian (2014), ‘Reconceptualising World Order: Chinese Political Thought and Its Challenge to International Relations Theory’. Review of International Studies, 40(4), 683-703.