Constructing Global Order with Chinese Characteristics: Yan Xuetong and the Pre-Qin Response to International Anarchy
China’s rise as a great power has promoted a great deal of soul searching among Chinese scholars, and concern about whether China’s contribution to the world of International Relations scholarship lags behind its rise as an important shaper of the international system. There is a common understanding that China cannot escape addressing the role of theoretical discourse in directing Chinese foreign policy and framing its understanding of China’s role in the world. A perception of China as suffering from a dependent relationship to International Relations (IR) theory, and a desire to transform the role of Chinese scholars from consumers of theory to its producers inspires a debate over the formation of a distinctive ‘Chinese school’. The leading figures in China’s IR were mostly schooled in other fields and came to IR scholarship after completing their undergraduate education. Some, like Yan Xuetong and Qin Yaqing, took postgraduate programmes in the West before entering China’s academia. Others switched from fields like ideology, philosophy, or history, including diplomatic history. Others still worked as practitioners and diplomats before taking up a life of scholarship, and may never have been exposed to systematic training in modern international relations theory. The emergent generation of Chinese-trained international relations specialists possesses varying degrees of linguistic competence in Western languages. Their overall coherence to the debate is shaped by the perceived need for China to project onto the world stage a vision of the contours of its preferred world order, and to adequately engage foreign scholars and diplomats over the impact of China’s growing material power within the international system. General Secretary Hu Jintao’s call