What Is at Stake in Decolonizing Chinese IR?

With: Sinan Chu (German Institute for Global and Area Studies, Institute for Asian Studies)
Discussion: Earl Wang (CERI, Science po)

As calls to decolonize knowledge and critique Eurocentrism gain momentum across International Relations (IR), Chinese IR has become a prominent site of both intellectual possibility and normative tension. The rise of the People’s Republic of China as a central actor in global politics has intensified efforts—within and beyond China—to articulate theoretical alternatives to Western-dominated paradigms. Concepts such as Tianxia, relationality, moral realism, and civilizational statehood are increasingly presented as resources for pluralizing IR and challenging entrenched Eurocentric assumptions about sovereignty, order, and modernity. Yet the project of decolonizing Chinese IR is neither politically nor epistemically neutral. While critiques of Eurocentrism rightly expose the parochial universalism embedded in mainstream IR, some alternative visions risk reproducing a different form of centrism—Sinocentrism—by re-essentializing “China” as a civilizational subject with internally coherent, transhistorical attributes. Others move toward radical relativism, implying incommensurable civilizational worlds that resist shared normative standards and thereby foreclose meaningful critique. In certain cases, these discourses align—intentionally or otherwise—with state-sponsored narratives that legitimize domestic governance practices and foreign policy ambitions. What, then, is at stake in decolonizing Chinese IR? This talk unpacks the challenge of sustaining a dual critique: to provincialize Europe without naturalizing China; to pluralize knowledge without abandoning critical evaluation; and to resist epistemic hierarchy without collapsing into civilizational particularism.

Organizer: Juliette Genevaz (U. Lyon III/ Ifrae) View e-mail