Chinese IR Sino-centrism tradition and its influence on the Chinese School Movement

The Chinese School Movement, which aims to create a Chinese theory of international relations, has developed over the last 30 years. It is usually portrayed as an ongoing effort by Chinese scholars to provide a theory that accounts for anomalies within Western IR theories. Despite its academic potential, the movement has made extremely slow progress in theory building. This slow progress is attributed to the prevalence of the Sino-centrism in Chinese IR which assumes the superiority of Chinese international experience in knowledge making and evaluation. This epistemological tradition rises, falls, and resurges in Chinese IR disciplinary history and finds its latest expression in the Chinese School Movement, which turns it into a pseudo-scientific enterprise. Under its influence, the Chinese School Movement is constantly applauded by Chinese IR scholars despite the difficulty in yielding scientific output. The most urgent task for Chinese scholars is therefore not to further strengthen the Sino-centrism tradition by searching for a unique Chinese understanding of international relations but to deconstruct it for better communication between Chinese and Western IR scholars.