 I'm Salvatore Babonis and today's lecture is Relationality, Tinsha, and the Chinese School of International Relations. China is widely perceived as a challenger to U.S. global leadership, but Chinese academia is actually closely integrated into U.S. academic networks. On the right side here you see the Shanghai Jiao Tong University ranking of world universities, the academic ranking of world universities, or ARWU. And you'll see from all those flags that according to the Chinese official rankings, U.S. universities make up something like 17 of the top 20 universities in the world. And even those non-U.S. universities that make it into the list are U.K. and Canadian universities. As a result, Chinese universities strongly prefer to hire U.S. or at least North American and British-trained social scientists. By China's own ranking system, no Chinese school even scores in the top 100 of global universities. And part and parcel of this is the fact that theories that originate in the United States tend to have high prestige in China. And U.S. prestige is particularly high in the field of international relations. International relations is a new discipline in China, and IR scholars are still often hosted in other departments. They're not even necessarily in departments of politics or international relations. In the pre-1990 world, communist theory condemned international relations as a bourgeois discipline that failed to embrace communist internationalism. As a result, China had schools of international politics, not international relations. After all, in the communist world view, the entire world would eventually become stateless, one big communist society. And as a result, they focused in schools of international politics on studying the political systems, the bourgeois political systems of other countries. And particularly the political system of the United States. So the Chinese Journal of International Politics is the leading journal of international relations in China. And it started out as a journal that focused on the exotic political systems of non-Chinese countries. Of course, now that it's published in English and published internationally by Oxford University Press, it has more of an international global flavor. Chinese IR scholarship has now entered the mainstream of the discipline, though still with a very strong emphasis on US-style realist international relations theory. Established Western theories of all kinds, however, are now routinely applied by Chinese scholars. And typical subjects of Chinese IR scholarship include the empirical study of contemporary Asian international relations, the empirical study of the relationship between China and the United States, and the empirical study of China's own historical international relations. The consensus view that has emerged among both Western and even Chinese international relations scholars is that the best place for Chinese scholars to focus their energies is on applying universal theories that originate mainly in the United States and UK to Chinese data. And the idea is that Chinese scholars have, for linguistic reasons and for geographical reasons, Chinese scholars have a built-in advantage in studying Chinese data, so they should take Western ideas, but primarily Anglo-American ideas, and apply them to China's own historical data. However, within China and among the Chinese diaspora, a new approach is now emerging, the development of a distinctive Chinese school of international relations theory. That Chinese school of international relations theory would instead apply Chinese developed theories to universal data. The idea is that the ideas can be inspired by Chinese history, but they don't have to be applied to Chinese data. That's the exact reverse of the hegemonic approach. The hegemonic approach is take American ideas and apply them to Chinese data. The new Chinese school approach is take Chinese ideas and apply them anywhere in the world. Lessons from Chinese intellectual traditions, and in particular from Confucianism, can be used to inform the development of new theories based on the Chinese experience, and these new theories can then be applied anywhere, not just to Chinese data. Now, right now, Chinese school research is being executed at a relatively low level of professionalism, but I think it's potentially very intellectually exciting. The big three of Chinese IR theory universally recognized as such are Yan Shui Tong, Qin Ya Qing, and Zhao Ting Yang. All three of them regularly make reference to Chinese history in developing their own ideas. Yan Shui Tong is at Tsinghua University, Qin Ya Qing at the Foreign Affairs University in Beijing, and Zhao Ting Yang at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Note they were all born almost exactly in the same time, and they've all come to maturity in the post-1990 era in China. Starting with Yan Shui Tong, Yan Shui Tong is probably the most famous of Chinese international relations theorists in the West. He does publish, well, he publishes regularly in English. He's a died-in-the-wool American style realist who promotes the idea of universal theory, and he actually opposes any notion that there even could be a Chinese school of international relations theory. He's a universalist, so he doesn't see the potential in Chinese thought to give different kind of theory from American thought. Yan is largely considered the leading IR methodologist in China, but if you read his work, he really applies a garden variety empirical positivism with a very direct focus on predictive power of models. So while he may be the leading methodologist in China, he's really just importing basic textbook methodology from North America into the Chinese context. He's also considered the lead theorist behind Xi Jinping's SVA, Striving for Achievement, the policy pivot that Xi has made away from Deng Xiaoping's Keep a Low Profile approach to foreign policy. So China's more aggressive, more assertive foreign policy can be traced to Xi Jinping and through Xi Jinping to some extent to Yan Shui Tong. Yan is also closely associated with the Canadian international relations theorist Daniel Bell, who is somewhat infamous as being a modern Confucianist political thinker, suggesting that Chinese style governance may be in the end more effective than North American style democracy. Yan's best known book in English is Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power. This is not a written monograph, instead it's an edited collection of old and new material, and even with some material from other authors pulled together in a collection for English-speaking audiences by Princeton University Press. The second of our Chinese school scholars, Qin Yaqing, is a scholar of international society and really the most prominent advocate of the development of a distinctive Chinese school of international relations theory. One of his most famous articles is here on the right. Why is there no Chinese international relations theory? And if you look up that article, you'll see his arguments as to why it hasn't happened yet, but why it's likely to happen in the near future. Qin sees the integration of China into broader international society as the main problem facing Chinese IR theory. And he contrasts what he sees as a Chinese Confucian approach of relational governance in international society with a Western rules-based approach to governance. So Qin is at the forefront of Chinese thinking that says that the international system does not sufficiently accommodate China and thinking that the international system should take cognizance of China's historical experience and China's contemporary needs in redeveloping intergovernmental and other international institutions. Yan's theoretical vision for the Chinese school of IR theory is that it would focus on developing the concept of Confucian relationality, the idea that the strong have responsibilities to protect the weak, and that the weak have a responsibility to obey, or if not obey at least to take on board the desires of the strong. He's somewhat of an advocate of a parent-child more than a brother-sister model of the international system of states. Our third Chinese school theorist, Zhao Tingyan, is also a Confucian relationalist, but uses Chinese history and philosophy to support a worldist view to the problem of world society. So he doesn't write so much on the international system of states or on international society of states, but instead he focuses on the world as being a single political entity full of seven billion citizens of the world. He is by profession a philosopher and much more of a dreamer than the other two. He's also the only one of the big three Chinese school theorists who was educated in China, not in the US, and thus does not take US-based ideas as the inspiration for his work. He's very much inspired by Chinese philosophy, not by US or Western theoretical constructs. Zhao's Tiansha system is a moral theory for a peaceful world society. You see the book here on the right side of the screen. There is no English translation of the Tiansha system, but there is an extensive English language review of it, and Zhao himself has two papers that are easy to find if you search for Zhao Tingyang and Tiansha online, two papers that summarize the idea of the Tiansha system. In Zhao's telling, the Tiansha system is a hierarchical system with a powerful central state that provides leadership for the rest of the system. And he gives the example of the Zhou dynasty in which the state of Zhou was the central state of the system, but in which other states surrounding it while acceding to its leadership nonetheless had their own independence. In his work, he does talk about instrumental rationality, the instrumental rationality of hegemonism, that countries will obey the leader because they have to, and he contrasts that with the expressive rationality of social solidarity, of countries falling into line because they understand each other and each other's needs. Now, Qin and Zhao's idea about Confucian relationalism have been developing to a highly professional empirical study by Feng Zhang of ANU. Zhang is Chinese-born but British-educated and is a scholar at Australian National University. His Chinese hegemony book is a study of the imperial rescripts of the early Ming dynasty. Now I can't resist quoting from some of these because to me they're just so funny. So I'll give two quotes first. Quote, it is a common rule of propriety that culturally inferior foreign peoples should respect the central kingdom. That's the Hung Wemper to one of the shoguns in Japan. And then another rescript to Japan actually opened with you stupid eastern peoples. And went on to say why Japan couldn't understand the way the system should work. But these are just fun examples from his book. His book has translations of dozens of imperial rescripts, and he uses them to study the idea of relationality in international relations. He characterizes relationality as quote, the dynamic process of connections and transactions among actors in structured social relationships. Now he studied the predominance of relationality in international relations during this period of what some might call Chinese hegemony. But even though he's really interested in the concept of expressive hierarchy, that China would express an understanding of the needs of smaller countries and smaller countries would express an understanding of the needs of China as a kind of regional hegemon. In fact, in most of the cases, 80% of the cases he studied, he found an instrumental rationality behind the rescripts and their replies. So even though the book was there to try to find a relationality in China's relationships with other countries, in fact what he did find was a lot of instrumental rationality or a lot of evidence for the realist case. Now, ethnically, Chinese scholars outside of China and the Southeast Asian diaspora have been particularly sensitive to emerging trends in Chinese. I'll often give two examples from NUS, National University of Singapore, Wang Gongwu, the historian who has written a book, Renewal, that focuses on the Tianxia concept and its history throughout Chinese international relations and into the current day. And Yuan Fengkong, also at NUS, who has a fantastic article on the American tributary system, which is strengthening the Ming-Chinese international relations studied by Feng, comparing those to the American system of today. And Chinese school ideas are even having an impact with people unconnected with China. People in the West, including David Kang, whose fantastic book, East Asia Before the West, focuses on Ming and Qing dynasty international relations. And my own book, American Tianxia, which pulls on Zhao's Tianxia concept, again to apply it to the international relations of the United States with the rest of the world today. I think as Western scholars come to realize that realist anarchy and English school international society are not really adequate for describing the 21st century world order, they may turn to one Chinese concept in particular. And that's the concept of Zhongguo, Zhongguo meaning literally the central state. Of course, it is also the name for China in Chinese, usually translated as the Middle Kingdom. But the idea of a central state, a system that has one central state and many other states in a constellation around it, I think very well encapsulates today's world. The United States is not a global empire. It may not even be a global hegemon, but it's certainly the central state of the world today. And even China's recent international relations, so the One Belt One Road policy can be seen as an effort to reorient the world around China as a central state. But as One Belt One Road is not really hegemonic, is not really imperialist, really what it is is an attempt to reorient the system around China instead of around the United States. My own view is that effort will not succeed, but you can read more about that in my own work, particularly American Tianxia, Chinese money, American power and the end of history. If you'd like to find the book or anything else about me, go to my website, it's salvatorbonus.com, or you can also sign up for my monthly Global Asian newsletter. Thanks for listening.