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Debates about decolonising knowledge production are underway across many disciplines. One prominent example that sits at the intersectio n of China studies and International Relations (IR) is the recent scholarsh ip on Chinese IR theories. Authors and advocates of these theories\, often referred to in the literature as the “Chinese School of IR\,” claim to prov ide alternative perspectives on world politics that rival\, if not surpass\ , our existing theoretical inventory\, specifically mainstream Western IR t heories. Critics\, on the other hand\, have pointed out the former’s embedd ed Sinocentrism\, self-Orientalism\, and often binary thinking (China/East vs. West)\, along with a tendency to justify the foreign policy interests o f the Chinese state\, despite their alleged rejection of ethnocentrism and exceptionalism. Recent interventions have further scrutinised the historiog raphy of China\, commonly employed in Chinese IR theories\, which obscures diversity while glorifying violence and domination within a Sinocentric hie rarchy.
How should we continue the mission of decolonising knowledge production without reintroducing another form of highly politicised knowled ge that serves to support authoritarian rulers' claims of radical cultural alterity and denies the possibility of studying the subject\, let alone eng aging in critical intervention\, from outside? In this talk\, I will explor e a novel approach to critically engaging with alternative knowledge tradit ions\, such as the theoretical contributions of the “Chinese School\,” in w ays consistent with the mission of emancipating our knowledge production fr om its Eurocentric bias.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Sinan Chu is a Research Fellow a
t the Institute for Asian Studies at the German Institute for Global and Ar
ea Studies (GIGA) in Hamburg. His main research interests include contempor
ary Chinese politics (in particular ethnic politics) and non-Western perspe
ctives of international relations. He is the principal investigator of the
DFG project “Intellectual Contestation over China’s Multiethnic Regime” (20
25-2027) and the editor-in-chief of Journal of Current Chinese Affairs.