Reappraising the Chinese School of International Relations: A Postcolonial Perspective

This article aims to revisit the enterprise of the Chinese School (CS) of IR and discuss how it should be viewed and handled in the discipline, specifically from within the analytical framework of the power/resistance nexus put forward by Foucault, Bhabha, and Spivak. The argument of this article is twofold. Firstly, the CS attempts to reinvigorate traditional Chinese concepts (that is, humane authority, the Tianxia system, and relationality), which mimick Western mainstream IR. These concepts channel the CS into a realist notion of power, a liberal logic of cosmopolitanism, and a constructivist idea of relationality. Thus, the CS uses against the West concepts and themes that the West currently use against the non-Western world. Nevertheless, as the second part of the argument will demonstrate, the enterprise of the CS can still be justified because it can be regarded as a reverse discourse; mimicking yet altering the original meanings of the taken-for-granted concepts, ideas, and principles used by mainstream IR scholars. Moreover, with the judicious use of strategic essentialism, the CS can potentially be one local group in a wider effort to contest diffused and decentred forms of Western domination through linking various struggles to form a unified 'counter-hegemonic bloc' of post-Western IR in the discipline.