Debates about decolonising knowledge production are underway across many disciplines. One prominent example that sits at the intersection of China studies and International Relations (IR) is the recent scholarship on Chinese IR theories. Authors and advocates of these theories, often referred to in the literature as the “Chinese School of IR,” claim to provide alternative perspectives on world politics that rival, if not surpass, our existing theoretical inventory, specifically mainstream Western IR theories. Critics, on the other hand, have pointed out the former’s embedded Sinocentrism, self-Orientalism, and often binary thinking (China/East vs. West), along with a tendency to justify the foreign policy interests of the Chinese state, despite their alleged rejection of ethnocentrism and exceptionalism. Recent interventions have further scrutinised the historiography of China, commonly employed in Chinese IR theories, which obscures diversity while glorifying violence and domination within a Sinocentric hierarchy.
How should we continue the mission of decolonising knowledge production without reintroducing another form of highly politicised knowledge that serves to support authoritarian rulers’ claims of radical cultural alterity and denies the possibility of studying the subject, let alone engaging in critical intervention, from outside? In this talk, I will explore a novel approach to critically engaging with alternative knowledge traditions, such as the theoretical contributions of the “Chinese School,” in ways consistent with the mission of emancipating our knowledge production from its Eurocentric bias.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Sinan Chu is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Asian Studies at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA) in Hamburg. His main research interests include contemporary Chinese politics (in particular ethnic politics) and non-Western perspectives of international relations. He is the principal investigator of the DFG project “Intellectual Contestation over China’s Multiethnic Regime” (2025-2027) and the editor-in-chief of Journal of Current Chinese Affairs.
