Introduction
Knowledge production in International Relations (IR) has long been plagued by Eurocentrism and Western/US dominance,Footnote 1 which has prompted calls for Global IR.Footnote 2 As its name implies, a distinctive feature of Global IR is its aspiration to make IR more globally representative. For most Global IR advocates, broader ‘geographic representation,’ or the inclusion of more geo-culturally diverse voices and perspectives, seems to be the key to addressing IR’s longstanding Eurocentric problems.Footnote 3 Thus, this Global IR endeavour has witnessed the emergence of many non-Western IR perspectives, including the rise of some notable national schools of IR.Footnote 4 Thanks to these efforts, IR as a discipline has become more culturally and geographically diverse and inclusive than two decades ago.Footnote 5
While celebrating this generally positive development, critics have highlighted a number of problems with Global IR. Three interrelated issues stand out. The first is Global IR’s unreflective and problematic conceptions of ‘the global’ and ‘globalizing,’ especially the version proposed by leading Global IR advocate Amitav Acharya.Footnote 6 Though Acharya and others try to clarify their conceptions of these key concepts, the Global IR scholarship has implicitly treated ‘the global’ and ‘globality’ as largely additive spatial concepts that encompass all geo-cultural areas of the world. This notion of ‘globality’ implies that a truly global discipline can be obtained by adding up those areas. The unstated assumption is that each of those places itself is more or less distinctively local, national, or regional, which is by definition not global. This gives rise to two further issues. One is that this ‘thin form of globalizing’ in Global IR tends to fall prey to the essentialism trap and geo-epistemological labelling of knowledge.Footnote 7 Another issue, often criticized from postcolonial and decolonial perspectives, is the assumed one-world universalism and unquestioned globalisms as well as their implications for power relations and epistemic violence.Footnote 8 Postcolonial and decolonial scholars call for the appreciation of a pluriversal world as opposed to the ‘one-world world’ into which the Global IR project may easily slip back.Footnote 9
We agree with the general ethos of this critical literature, especially its insightful interrogation of the inadequate conception of globality in Global IR. However, in rethinking globality, thus far little attention has been paid to one particular form of existence of globality that we think should be a focus of a reformed Global IR agenda. This form of existence is what we call holographic globality, namely, the kind of globality that exists within each of its localities, as in a hologram where the whole picture of the hologram remains relatively intact in its smaller parts.Footnote 10 In this holographic phenomenon, a part exhibits the dual characteristics of both whole and part, hence whole-part duality. For example, a mobile phone is obviously a tiny part of the world, but at the same time, the world (especially in terms of its relevant global production networks and supply chains, the global mediascape, and the global telecommunication networks) is enfolded into this part, making it something at once local and global. Still, to most of us, it may be inconceivable that ‘globality’ (a whole) could exist within its parts, because this is inconsistent with how whole-part relations are understood in classical mereology and the Newtonian atomistic ontology more broadly. So to better engage the neglected phenomenon of holographic globality, we base our analysis on the post-Newtonian conceptual framework of quantum holography (QH). QH is a particular approach in quantum holism, and its relevance to IR has begun to be noted.Footnote 11 In quantum holism, the parts, instead of existing prior to the whole, emerge from it,Footnote 12 which also emerges from the parts. Parts and whole, therefore, ‘are co-emergent.’Footnote 13
This kind of whole-part relationship, we argue, provides a promising and highly relevant heuristic analytical framework which not only allows us to see how the ‘local’ (part) is always a specific microcosm of the ‘global’ (whole) but also to reinterpret a series of seemingly irreconcilable dilemmas between global and local, one and many, universal and particular, and relational connectedness and geo-cultural difference, dilemmas which continue to complicate the effort of globalizing IR.Footnote 14 The value added of this approach is, above all, its ability to ontologically de-essentialize and holographicize seemingly local geo-epistemological units of knowledge production, so as to avoid being trapped in a binary choice of either universalizing or provincializing them. By treating every region of the globe as a holographic part which also contains the global in varying degrees, we argue that IR (even in its mainstream ‘Western’ context) does not lack ‘international’ or ‘global’ representation per se; rather, it lacks a conceptual framework to properly acknowledge the diverse and global representation already within it. In this way, the article lays down a challenge to the ubiquitous binaries between ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ and between ‘global’ and ‘local,’ which frequently feature in the Global(izing) IR debate.Footnote 15 It raises the fundamental questions about whether a part, such as a ‘national’ or ‘regional’ school of IR, can be distinctively national or regional to begin with, and if not, what it means for the dominant geo-epistemological approach to Global IR, especially as this approach has been the modus operandi of the various efforts to build ‘national schools of IR.’ To the extent that ‘encouraging the development of local schools of IR [under the existing conception of the global] is likely to replicate the same limitations that are sought to be addressed in the first place,’Footnote 16 a QH approach to Global IR may offer a way out of this conundrum. To illustrate, the article uses the Chinese School of IR theory (IRT) as a case study and focuses on how ‘Chineseness’ can be rethought from a quantum holographic perspective.
The article proceeds in four parts. First, by surveying the debate about Global IR, it discusses how a holographic conception of globality, that is, the existence of globality in locality, has been largely neglected by both the Global IR scholarship and its critics. Second, it introduces the conceptual framework of QH, discusses its implications for the Global IR debate, and justifies our choice of this particular framework over some potential alternatives. Turning to the specific case of Chinese School of IRT and its largely essentialist understanding of Chineseness, the third section looks at how it exemplifies the issues plaguing the Global IR scholarship in general. Joining the existing debate on the Chinese School of IRT, this section applies the quantum holographic framework to rethink ‘Chineseness’ in terms of its global-local duality, with its ‘globality’ defined at two levels: the first level encompassing both ‘China’ and the ‘non-Chinese worlds,’ and the second level consisting of many ‘Chinese worlds.’Footnote 17 Due to the holographic characteristics of ‘Chineseness,’ ‘Chineseness’ can be rescued from the essentialism trap of Global IR, and from the beginning, building the Chinese School of IRT entails globalizing ‘Chinese’ IR on those two levels. In the fourth section, the article concludes with a brief reflection on how the quantum holographic conception of globality can advance the cause of Global IR by discovering the neglected globality in each seemingly local and geo-culturally distinctive site of knowledge production. Globalizing IR is, therefore, not just a matter of adding all essentially local knowledge and theories together and stirringFootnote 18 but also of recognizing the inherently global nature of knowledge production in any particular place, where enfolding knowledge from the whole and stirring has always already been in progress.Footnote 19
A neglected form of globality in Global IR
The important contribution made by the Global IR scholarship has been duly recognized, but its problems have also become increasingly a focus of scholarly contention. The vast and still growing body of critical literature on Global IR is diverse and complex, so at the risk of simplification, we identify three main issues attributed to Global IR. The first issue concerns the ontological conception of the terms ‘global’ and ‘local.’ Leading Global IR scholars Acharya and Barry Buzan argue that ‘global’ consists of two dimensions: the geographic or spatial dimension of ‘relating to the whole world’ and the normative dimension of being ‘universal’ and ‘inclusive.’Footnote 20 Arguably, the normative dimension builds on the spatial dimension. Although Acharya insists that ‘I do not accept global as a priori or as a given,’Footnote 21 critics have noted that Global IR has frequently though perhaps inadvertently treated ‘the world’ ‘as given,’Footnote 22 or ‘treat[ed] the globe as a fact rather than an imaginary.’Footnote 23 It is argued that ‘Acharya presupposes, rather than historicizes, the world of nation-states and regions.’Footnote 24 Consequently, ‘Global IR is mixing a more radical normative agenda with a conventional ontology’ about what the global is, and it has paid inadequate attention to ‘alternative ways of theorizing the global.’Footnote 25
The second issue, following from the first, is epistemological and methodological in nature: What is the proper knowing subject of IR knowledge and how to produce such knowledge? Global IR, which ‘allows us to view the world of IR as a large, overarching canopy with multiple foundations,’Footnote 26 has dramatically widened the scope of IR knowledge to include non-Western and indigenous perspectives. Nonetheless, its largely ‘spatial imaginary of world politics composed of bounded, culture-defined places rather than of constitutive relations’ has led to what Barkawi et al. call ‘geo-epistemology.’Footnote 27 Geo-epistemology believes that knowledge and its production is tied to geography, more specifically to nation-states or geo-cultural sites. Based on the understanding that each state or region can ‘develop concepts and approaches on their own terms,’Footnote 28 Global IR’s pleas for inclusivity, diversity, and pluralism presuppose ‘the existence of sharply bounded national or civilizational traditions.’Footnote 29 In this way, ‘globalizing’ IR effectively means better and more inclusive geographic representation in IR knowledge production. However well-intended, the problem is that such a geo-epistemological assumption may entrench Eurocentrism by unproblematically accepting as given such terms as nation-states and regions, which themselves are considered ‘largely Eurocentric geographic categories with imperial origins.’Footnote 30 It may also fuel geographic essentialism, nativism, methodological nationalism, and ‘cultural and regional inwardness.’Footnote 31 Indeed, Acharya and Buzan themselves have since acknowledged the risk of cultural exceptionalism and parochialism in Global IR.Footnote 32
A third issue of Global IR is its insufficiently critical reflection on the unequal power relations in IR knowledge production and its false promise of neutral universality. Critics argue that the problem with mainstream IR is not just the absence of non-Western IR in this discipline, but also the active epistemic violence of Eurocentric IR against alternative perspectives.Footnote 33 Therefore, it is not enough to merely add more non-Western knowledge without simultaneously interrogating ‘the politics and hierarchies of knowledge that structure what counts as knowledge and theory.’Footnote 34 Global IR’s lack of sufficient reflection on ‘its very own understanding of the global’ not only makes it largely insensitive to the imperial origins of the discipline and hegemonic tendency of Eurocentric IR but also runs the risk of turning itself into ‘yet another “universal knowledge project”,’ which ‘still idealizes the model of one global knowledge canon.’Footnote 35 Such a ‘geo-culturally pluralistic IR’ cannot claim to be universal because there exist many worlds with different cosmologies and multiple universalisms, which ‘cannot be accommodated into a singular, “global” IR.’Footnote 36 Rather than seeing non-Western and indigenous insights as mere different beliefs about the same world, these are better seen as reflective of different worlds or a pluriverse.Footnote 37
Among these highlighted issues, ontology is perhaps the most foundational problem that limits Global IR’s promising potential. To some, Global IR has largely overlooked questions of ontology, while others argue that Global IR operates largely on the basis of a conventional compositional ontology, which has been responsible for ‘a thin form of globalizing.’Footnote 38 It is argued, for example, that
… so long as the local-global benchmark remains time-space bound, the globality of IR is best defined as ‘compression of time-space’ or ‘annihilation of space by time’; but this ‘technologically meditated’ compression/annihilation is not sufficient to enable the (post-)human condition to fully break free from the territorial trap.Footnote 39
Critics have rightly questioned Global IR’s compositional conception of the global (understood as the sum total of separate geocultural units), its inability to imagine globality in pluriversal or ‘many-worlds’ forms, and its insensitivity towards the political and ethical consequences of conceiving of a single world. In problematizing Global IR, critics have also provided many insightful solutions, often under the broad rubric of relational approaches. Some scholars stress the importance of two-way dialogue or global conversations in order to foster a more inclusive and equitable IR discipline.Footnote 40 Others appeal to historical sociology as a method to uncover the historical constitution of theory and knowledge in transnational and inter-societal relations.Footnote 41 Still others, from postcolonial and decolonial perspectives, emphasize the concept of pluriversality, which is an ontological claim about differences at the ‘reality’ level, rather than a mere function of epistemological or cultural divergence on the same world (universe).Footnote 42 They call for the appreciation of a pluriversal world as opposed to the ‘one-world world’ of the Global IR project.Footnote 43
This article builds on this body of critical literature. However, while these criticisms of Global IR’s ontological weaknesses are to the point, a particular blind spot of Global IR concerning the existence of globality within parts or locales has largely escaped attention. This kind of globality exemplifies the holographic nature of the world, space, and time. In a holographic world, parts not only together constitute the whole but also contain the whole (in varying degrees of course). As such, parts take on an inherent duality of being both part and whole-like. To conceptualize the holographic nature of the world and the whole-part duality, we draw on the theoretical framework of QH, to which we now turn.
QH: an alternative relational approach to (Global) IR
Whole, parts, and their holographic relationship
The concept of QH, which made its IR debut only a few years ago,Footnote 44 is unfamiliar to most IR scholars. Alexander Wendt is perhaps the first IR scholar to have discussed the holographic phenomenon in a quantum context, though he did not use the term ‘QH’ per se.Footnote 45 Beyond IR, the use of QH has a longer history. Nobel laureate Dennis Gabor’s invention of the technique of holography in the 1940s first popularized the term holography, and its fascinating characteristics have since influenced, directly or indirectly, scholars in fields as diverse as quantum mechanics,Footnote 46 philosophy of science,Footnote 47 cognitive science and neuroscience,Footnote 48 philosophy of mind and consciousness studies,Footnote 49 and social sciences.Footnote 50 Sometimes the exact term ‘QH’ was used in those disciplinary settings, though its meaning may differ from what we have in mind here. The somewhat ‘new age’ feel about this term could make many IR colleagues understandably wary of it, and such wariness seems to mirror the generally lukewarm reception of quantum IR more broadly.Footnote 51 Still, the ‘quantum holographic’ nature of many global phenomena and challenges have begun to draw scholarly attention in IR.Footnote 52 Yet with the exception of Kosuke Shimizu,Footnote 53 who briefly discusses its relevance to Global IR, how QH can contribute to the debate of Global IR has yet to be explored.
QH refers to the fundamental assumption that the whole is not only made up of parts and therefore contains those parts but it is also contained within each part, just like in a hologram where the whole picture of the original hologram can be found in its smaller fragments. Some ancient philosophical and religious traditions such as Daoism, Buddhism, and Platonic Ideas contain various expressions of holographic thinking, and traditional Chinese medicine has applied it in practice.Footnote 54 Thus, the holographic phenomenon was not uniquely quantum. Instead, the idea inspired some quantum physicists to study black holes and quantum gravity.Footnote 55 Quantum physicist David Bohm takes the hologram metaphor one step further to understand quantum physics and reality in general, which results in his pilot wave theory of quantum mechanics (also known as the Bohmian interpretation of quantum mechanics). His theory argues that particles (parts) are guided by a quantum potential that acts at a distance and encodes the information about the whole system. This represents what Bohm calls the implicate order, where the whole is implicated or enfolded into parts.Footnote 56 Although the term ‘holography’ was embraced by some quantum physicists largely as a metaphor, Bohm and Hiley insist that the connection between quantum mechanics and the holographic phenomenon is more than an analogy.Footnote 57 The implicate order of holographic relations and undivided wholeness is nothing less than a new quantum order of reality.Footnote 58
In this sense, QH is a particular approach in quantum holism. Conventional holism argues that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, emphasizing the emergent properties in the whole which do not exist in its individual constitutive components. While it challenges reductionism and methodological individualism, conventional holism is often vague about the status or nature of parts. Quantum holism, on the other hand, argues that parts do not exist independently of the whole which they form but rather emerge from it. Like the formation of seeds (parts) of a plant (whole), this emergence involves both the processes of the enfolding of the whole into each region or part (the implicate order) and the unfolding of the implicate order as seemingly separate parts (the explicate order).Footnote 59 While inside each part there exists the implicate order of wholeness, parts cannot be simply equated with the whole per se, nor are all parts of the same whole identical with one another. They take on certain particular or local characteristics because of their contingently different ‘positionalities’ or different spatial and temporal relations with the whole and other such parts.Footnote 60 Thus, parts exhibit the characteristic of whole-part duality,Footnote 61 with the whole and its parts co-emerging from each other. Although some versions of holism also suggest an interactive or mutually influencing relationship between wholes and parts, they do not go so far as to suggest that the whole is in the parts.Footnote 62 From a QH perspective, the whole does not exist simply as a mechanical or spatial aggregate of parts, which would imply that the whole is something external to its parts. Rather, the whole is the very condition for the emergence of its parts and thus is immanent in them.
Such whole-part inseparability can be referred to as ‘holographic relationality.’ With its emphasis on whole-part co-emergence and its reference to processes of enfolding and unfolding, holographic relationality makes it perhaps easier to trace whole-part relations as ongoing historical processes and to explain their asymmetric relations (including potentially unequal power relations). And insofar as parts are not identical and have different local characteristics due to their different positionalities, the concept of holographic relationality also has the capacity to account for varying degrees of wholeness (or globality in the Global IR context) in parts.
QH and its implications for the Global IR debate
The QH approach in general and the concepts of holographic relationality and whole-part duality in particular have important implications for thinking about Global IR and ‘national’ schools of IR. These concepts can acknowledge differences between parts without reifying them into essentialized and independent entities and theorize whole-part relations without invoking fixed and absolute hierarchies. These advantages are useful for dealing with the problems of the essentialism trap and tensions between globality and locality, universality and particularity/pluriversality, one and many, and so forth. In the Newtonian atomistic ontology, parts are often associated with essentialist categories of local, particular, and many. But from a QH perspective, whole-part duality allows us to see their other, albeit more invisible, side, namely, global, universal, and one. And through the QH perspective, being ‘global,’ ‘universal,’ or ‘one,’ by virtue of a dynamic emergence out of parts, takes on less hegemonic or totalizing quality. As a result, the prevalent dichotomous frameworks (e.g., global/local, universal/particular, one/many) in Global IR may be dissolved, and the holographic or wholistic nature of ‘local’ or ‘national’ IR knowledge/theory can be better understood. In this sense, globalizing IR should also mean that we uncover the inherently global dimension of seemingly locally or nationally produced knowledge. The tendency to reify ‘national’ schools of IR as well as ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ IR fails to appreciate the implicated globality or wholistic nature of such IR knowledge.
We understand that mainstream Global IR scholarship’s stress on the ‘local’ nature of knowledge and its geo-cultural boundedness may be strategically necessary, particularly against the backdrop of Eurocentric false claims to universality. Indeed, we acknowledge that some ‘local’ flavour of knowledge does exist. However, limiting knowledge production to its apparently ‘local’ origin has been responsible for the conventional ‘add-and-stir’ approach in mainstream Global IR, and such an approach at best is only a partial effort of globalizing IR, and at worst is ironically anti-global. In contrast to the add-and-stir approach, methodologically our holographic perspective is akin to zooming in on a fractal image which displays self-similar visual patterns at every scale of magnification. As we zoom into ‘local’ knowledge, we see its inherently ‘non-local’ or ‘global’ patterns. Thus ‘local’ knowledge is in a superpositional state of both ‘local’ and ‘global’ (in terms of the knowledge’s emergence from the whole), a state which defies the essentialism trap and geo-epistemology in Global IR.
The Eurocentric epistemic violence against excluded or marginalized ‘geo-epistemological’ traditions outside of the West has now been well understood. But failing to pay adequate attention to the innate globality and holographic origins of those traditions may constitute another kind of epistemic violence. For example, it could inadvertently disconnect the production of ‘local’ knowledge from historical and ongoing transnational practices, including (post)colonial practices, which have played an important role in the development of many ‘geo-epistemological traditions.’ Indeed, the violent and unjust practices of colonialism and imperialism have often been integral to ‘non-Western’ attempts to open their eyes to the world and to reconfigure their worldviews. Therefore, to develop a genuinely global IR requires us to see the historical and contemporary presence of globality, for good or ill, in each ‘local’ site of IR knowledge production, rather than see such a site as just a neglected pre-existing pristine component of Global IR. In other words, to truly ‘uncover the biases, parochialisms (sometimes hidden) and ethnocentrism in existing IR theories,’Footnote 63 we need to holographicize each region, each ethnicity, and each ‘local’ or ‘national’ school of IR theory. For example, by holographicizing parts such as Europe, it is possible to reveal the global ‘coloniality of [Europe’s] origins’ in the making of Europe as well as the production of ‘European’ and ‘Western’ IR knowledge.Footnote 64 Fighting against the Eurocentric epistemic violence should not neglect similar epistemic violence against the constitutive role of the global in the emergence of both ‘European/Western’ IR and ‘national schools of IR.’
In this context, our approach aims to reinforce, rather than replace, the existing critique with a different ontological intervention. For example, QH may offer a particular angle to conceptualize the ‘deep-rooted, entangled histories that forge global order’Footnote 65 or to ‘envisage a world which is concurrently “one and many”.’Footnote 66 Indeed, the QH approach to Global IR shares some interesting similarities with the ideas of some Global-IR critics, such as the notions of ‘global all the way down’ and ‘global at birth.’Footnote 67 In particular, if we are not mistaken, the following quote from Karen Smith reflects an implicitly holographic way of thinking:
If one considers the particular as an instance rather than a fragmentation or negation of the universal, then the way to the universal is through the particular. From this perspective, theories may not be as particular as they seem, and instead, all great intellectual achievements can be regarded as the result of encounter. Encounter then becomes the basis of knowledge production, suggesting a very connected rather than a fragmented world.Footnote 68
Despite some similarities, these insights have yet to be explicitly theorized through an ontologically coherent framework. The pluriversal perspective on IR may be an exception here. If, as QH insists, each part contains the whole, then it would resemble a smaller world, and together those parts would amount to many worlds. This bears some resemblance to the idea of the pluriverse, whose influence is evident in our understanding of Chineseness in terms of ‘many Chinese worlds.’ Yet, there are also some important differences between the two approaches. From a holographic perspective, these ‘many (smaller) worlds’ are clearly not parallel worlds, but rather in varying degrees they share a common world, a world which is not singular or universal, but is undivided and always dynamically emerging from the many worlds. This dialectical vision about one and many sets itself apart from pluriversalism in IR.Footnote 69 In challenging notions of one-worldness, singularity, and universality, pluriversal IR stresses difference and indeed ‘radical distinction’Footnote 70 and is committed to ontological pluralism as opposed to the QH ontological commitment to wholeness and undividedness between parts as well as between whole and parts. While ontological pluralism is useful in refuting the false universality of Western colonial experiences, its emphasis on (coexisting) differences makes it potentially susceptible to falling into a similar essentialism trap. This risk may be mitigated by pluriversal IR’s commitment to relationalism, but beyond its argument that relations come before entities, what forms such relationalities exist remains unclear.Footnote 71 According to Kimberly Hutchings, pluriversal IR’s relationality may be understood through William James’s idea of the pluriverse, with the latter arguing that the coexisting pluralistic worlds are externally related to one another, with no one subsuming the others.Footnote 72 This conception of relationality in ‘external’ terms, however, implies the prior existence of those worlds, which runs counter to pluriversal IR’s insistence on relations before entities. This problem is also characteristic of some other relational approaches, whose employment of concepts such as ‘transnational linkages,’ ‘interactions,’ ‘interconnections,’ and ‘exchanges’ between ‘different parts’ implies external relations between parts, not within them.Footnote 73 Consequently, it is unclear how such relational approaches distance themselves from the Newtonian atomistic ontology of things. QH, on the other hand, offers a specific post-Newtonian mechanism for understanding relationality as internal and holographic, not just external. In doing so, this study also speaks to both the relational turn and the quantum turn in IR and highlights the promise of cross-fertilization between these two turns on the one hand and the Global IR turn on the other.
Of course, QH is not the only potentially relevant perspective in the quantum turn. The social wavefunction approach may be another.Footnote 74 This approach may argue that Global IR can be understood as a (universal) wave function, while national IR is such a wave function realized in particular local theories. This may well be another promising approach that could complement the QH approach and is thus worth considering.Footnote 75 Nonetheless, we choose QH instead of a social wavefunction approach for two main reasons. First, if part/locality is a collapsed state of the global wave function, it seems that wholeness/globality would be lost in that definite collapsed state. This is contrary to what we set out to demonstrate here. Second, if ‘global’ is represented as a ‘universal’ wave function of many potentialities, and each local/national school as its particular case, the one-many or universal-particular dichotomy in the current Global IR debate may resurface again. This does not mean that the social wavefunction approach has no potential answers to those questions; rather, exploring such potentials goes beyond the scope and capacity of this article, whereas the promise of the QH perspective, at least as far as this project is concerned, offers a clearer path forward. Against this backdrop, we now turn to an empirical analysis of the holographic origins and nature of ‘Chinese’ School of IRT.
Discovering globality in ‘Chineseness’: Chinese IR theory in holographic relationality
The Global IR project has grown in tandem with the trend to establish ‘national schools’ of IRT, with the Chinese School (CS) of IRT being a prominent example of the latter.Footnote 76 This trend resonates with Global IR’s commitment to a geographically inclusive approach. Consequently, the problems suffered by Global IR (the ‘whole’) are also manifested in the Chinese School (a ‘part’), particularly in its largely essentialist assumption of Chineseness as both the source and the objective of the CS endeavour. It is assumed that there is such a thing with some inherently ‘Chinese’ characteristics, whether in terms of history, cultural tradition, philosophy, or political experience.Footnote 77 Those characteristics, we are told, would naturally serve as the basis for formulating a ‘Chinese’ IRT. Ironically, however, this assumption about the cultural, historical, and even ethnic characteristics of the CS has thus far been predicated on a territorially based Westphalian framework, a ‘Western’ social construct that is arguably alien to traditional ‘Chinese’ practice but nonetheless serves to determine what counts as part of the CS.Footnote 78
This paradox highlights the problem of uncritically tying knowledge production to geographic spaces, such as a nation-state like China. To address this issue, sympathetic critics have often turned to relational terms, such as ‘transcultural’Footnote 79 or ‘post-Chineseness,’Footnote 80 to reformulate Chinese IRT. However, these terms are not without their limitations. Relationalism is often used in a ‘thin sense,’Footnote 81 where relations are conceptualized as something external to pre-existing entities, which are still considered ontologically prior and distinctive. Such a thin form of relationalism pays little attention to relations within (not just between) entities in the first place. To remedy such limitations, we turn to the approach of QH, which emphasizes whole-part duality and holographic relationality and offers a more thoroughgoing relational ontological basis for de-essentializing ‘local’ geo-epistemological units of knowledge. QH allows for a rethinking of individual entities, such as China (and its Chineseness), as both entities and relations. In the case of Chinese IRT, instead of reifying its Chineseness, QH helps discover its holographic nature, namely, the presence of the whole inside this apparently distinctive part. In other words, what is ‘Chinese’ cannot be fully understood in separation from its inherent ‘globality.’ In what follows, the article will first examine how the essentialized notion of Chineseness plagues the Chinese School and even its critiques. By noting this essentialism problem with some dominant and unreflective conceptions of Chineseness, we do not mean to essentialize the Chinese School as a whole. Quite the contrary, as will be discussed in the second and third subsections below, a QH reading of the actual knowledge-production practices of Chinese IRT reveals its inherent (albeit largely unconscious) global-local duality. This intervention opens up the existing opportunity and further possibility of treating the development of Chinese IRT as simultaneously an inherently globalizing process of knowledge production.
Essentialized Chinese IR theory and its unquestioned ‘Chineseness’
The enterprise of contemporary Chinese IRT can be traced back to the 1980s, when some scholars called for building ‘IR theory with Chinese characteristics.’Footnote 82 Since 2000, the proposition has evolved into a debate on the necessity, desirability, and possibility of building a ‘Chinese School of IRT.’Footnote 83 In recent years, the debate has further shifted from whether a Chinese IRT is possible to how to construct it.Footnote 84 This has resulted in the emergence of a cluster of representative theories, including Yan Xuetong’s ‘moral realism,’Footnote 85 Qin Yaqing’s ‘relational theory of world politics,’Footnote 86 Zhao Tingyang’s ‘tianxia system,’Footnote 87 and the gongsheng (symbiosis) theory developed by some Shanghai-based scholars.Footnote 88 These theories centre, respectively, on such traditional ‘Chinese’ concepts as ‘humane authority’ (wangdao), ‘relationship’ (guanxi), ‘all under heaven’ (tianxia), and ‘symbiosis’ (gongsheng).Footnote 89 Therefore, from the outset, the search for ‘Chineseness’ has been a key objective and catalyst for this intellectual pursuit in two aspects. The first is theoretical. Long dissatisfied with merely consuming imported ‘Western/American’ knowledge, Chinese scholars stress ‘Chineseness’ in an attempt to ‘resist the American style of IR theory and de-Americanize their research.’Footnote 90 They believe that by drawing from China’s historical experiences and rich traditional culture, they can establish an independent and distinctive IR knowledge system. The other is empirical and practical. China’s rise and its identity in international society have spurred interest in developing a Chinese style of IRT. This entails designing new research questions and seeking ‘Chinese answers’ and ‘Chinese-style solutions.’
Despite the central focus on ‘Chinese,’ its meaning in the label ‘Chinese School’ is rarely openly debated. Instead, it is routinely assumed as a territorially based category, referring to whatever occurs within China’s borders, which reflects a similar tendency among some Chinese scholars to territorialize the English School.Footnote 91 Even when many Chinese scholars highlight the significance of transnational factors such as culture and philosophy in shaping Chinese IRT, they often restrict their interpretation of these elements within the geographical boundaries of China as a civilizational state. This reflects an influential mindset in mainland Chinese academia that views ‘Chinese history as characterized by unified politics, culture, and tradition.’Footnote 92 To be sure, Yan Xuetong and some of his disciples have questioned the use of the ‘Chinese’ label, which they see as incompatible with the scientific nature and universal validity of IR theories.Footnote 93 Such a viewpoint was contested by Qin Yaqing, who insists that a Chinse school of IRT is not only possible but also inevitable.Footnote 94 According to Qin, as each social science theory has its distinct geo-cultural birthmark, a Chinese IRT is no exception.Footnote 95 Although these two perspectives may seem at odds, both conceive of Chineseness as fundamentally local and particular. As one critic observes, an underlying narrative throughout Yan Xuetong’s work on moral realism is that China’s, and the world’s, future is distinctively Chinese.Footnote 96
However, when Chineseness is understood without its inherent dimension of globality, attempts to define these theories’ contributions often face a dilemma between ‘Chineseness’ and ‘universality.’ While keenly interested in Chinese IR theorists’ recent contributions, Western (or Western-based) IR scholars have taken note of their Chinese counterparts’ vagueness when it comes to distinguishing the sources, concepts, approaches, and worldviews of ‘Chinese’ IR theories from those developed in ‘Western’ theories. Yih-Jye Hwang argues that the traditional Chinese concepts of human authority, the tianxia system, and relationality, which were to be reinvigorated in the three most representative theories of the CS, in fact mimic, respectively, a realist notion of power, a liberal logic of cosmopolitanism, and a constructivist idea of relationality.Footnote 97 This argument aligns with Acharya’s earlier classification of Chinese IR theories into ‘cultural idealism’ (including Qin’s relational theory and Zhao’s tianxia system) and ‘moral realism’ (exemplified by Yan’s moral realism).Footnote 98 According to Katzenstein, with few exceptions, Chinese IR scholars generally share with their American and European colleagues a humanist Newtonian worldview.Footnote 99 In this vein, Katzenstein argues that ‘the questions moving China and Chinese scholars are distinctive, but the answers Chinese scholars offer are not,’ and that the so-called Chinese theories may, in fact, serve to ‘deepen Western concepts and approaches.’Footnote 100 In their critical attempt to differentiate Chinese from Western IR theories, many Western researchers follow the same dichotomous logic of Chinese vs. Western and share with their Chinese colleagues a similar belief in essentialized Chineseness.
This problematic search for essential Chineseness has prompted others to advocate for a non-essentialized notion of Chineseness by exploring its transcultural originsFootnote 101 or by tapping into the ‘relational turn’ in recent critical IR scholarship.Footnote 102 Notably, Chih-yu Shih proposes the concept of ‘post-Chineseness,’ which he describes as ‘the on-going process of becoming differently Chinese through self as well as mutual de/recognition.’Footnote 103 These interventions offer insightful possibilities to loosen up the widely assumed essentialness of ‘Chineseness.’ However, in critically rethinking Chineseness transculturally or relationally, the current debates have yet to pay attention to the holographic relationality of globality within Chineseness. Thus understood, Chinese IRT has the dual properties of both a wholistic (e.g., global and/or regional) nature and apparent ‘local Chinese’ characteristics. These two dimensions, rather than contradicting each other, are always intertwined and complementary. Relevant here is the Bohrian complementarity principle, which argues that a full description of a quantum system needs to be expressed in terms of complementary pairs of variables or models, because an accurate description of only one variable or model would come at the expense of an accurate understanding of the other.Footnote 104 Likewise, Chinese IRT needs to be described and pursued in both global and Chinese terms. If we neglect either, the meaning of Chineseness would be incomplete.
Discovering the globality of Chineseness (I): the non-Chinese worlds inside Chinese IRT
The QH perspective gives IR a stronger ontological commitment to the whole and its implication in parts. In a literal sense, the whole in the IR context may refer to the totality of the all-encompassing space-time in the world: societies, cultures, religions, knowledge, emotions, natural phenomena, and the implicate relations embedded within them and the explicate relations between them.Footnote 105 Meanwhile, wholes are also relative and nested, not something absolute or transcendental. For instance, a person may be a part of a family as the whole, which in turn may be a part of a still larger whole like a village or a country. For IR theories, the whole can be understood as the totality of the material, ideational, and practical aspects of what we call international relations or world politics. As such, an IR theory is not merely a self-contained analytical tool independent of the world it purports to explain or understand or detached from other theories, ideas, and practices, as well as their material conditions. Rather, it participates in the process of how the wider worlds of realities and knowledges evolve and is thus always interwoven with other theories and practices, even though at a pragmatic level it may be considered a discrete entity or school. Moreover, given the existence of holographic relations in both spatial and temporal terms, a theory is not only part of its multiple wholes in a spatial sense but also part of its temporal wholes, which may consist of the past, present, and future. Failing to recognize this temporal dimension of wholeness may result in ahistorical analysis.
Adopting the QH approach to the development of Chinese IRT can reveal the holographic nature of its so-called Chineseness. Thus far, Chinese IRT has been stuck in a bind: broadening its scope to include transcultural origins has been faulted for diluting its Chinese distinctiveness, while focusing solely on its uniqueness invites accusations of essentialism and lack of universal applicability. However, under QH, this bind turns out to be a false dichotomy. Instead of dismissing the seemingly non-Chinese aspects as irrelevant to Chinese IRT, QH helps to illustrate the very holographic condition of possibility for Chinese IRT, thus rescuing Chinese IRT from the dilemma between ‘Chineseness’ and ‘universality’ (or between ‘locality’ and ‘globality’).
From the QH perspective, the Chineseness of Chinese IRT does not possess any static or fixed essence but rather dynamically embodies its spatiotemporal environments – many wholes that do not exist in parallel with radical distinction, as stressed by pluriversal IR, but instead share an undivided common world from which Chineseness has and continues to emerge or unfold. One immediate whole for Chinese IRT is obviously ‘China.’ Yet, if taking a look at the three sources often cited for building a Chinese School, namely, the tianxia worldview and the tributary system, Marxism and Chinese revolutions, and neoliberal reformist thinking and China’s deepening connectivity with the global economy, we will find that during none of these transformative phases was China confined to, or merely defined by, ‘itself.’ From the outset, world histories and ongoing global processes have been implicated in the unfolding of seemingly local Chinese history and unique tradition. In particular, China’s opening up since 1978 and its increasing engagement with the wider world, whether economically, diplomatically, or intellectually, significantly laid the material, ideational, and practical foundation for the emergence of contemporary Chinese IR discipline as a ‘distinctive’ academic field in China. The rapid professionalization of Chinese IR has coincided with China’s intensified internationalization, or what Pan calls China’s holographic transition.Footnote 106 Indeed, Qin Yaqing acknowledges that ‘the emergence of a Chinese School of IR theory’ has much to do with the rise of ‘China’s identity dilemma through its interactions with the international society.’Footnote 107 Therefore, designed to help China make sense of the world, Chinese IRT itself cannot but be profoundly shaped by China’s engagement with that world. Without such engagement, Chinese IRT (given that the ‘I’ in IRT refers to ‘international’ or ‘world’) would have lost its raison d’être. From the very beginning, ‘Chineseness’ and ‘the world’ have been holographically intertwined (though the pace and degree often vary), and their existence as apparently separate entities does not exist before such connection but rather precisely because of it.
Another significant, though seemingly unlikely, whole for Chinese IRT is the ‘West.’ The modern Chinese IR discipline is largely a product of the Eurocentric world in which contemporary China has emerged as a Westphalian nation-state. It is no exaggeration to say that from the outset, ‘Chinese’ has been constructed in relation to ‘Western.’ The growing awareness of Chineseness itself has stemmed from Western influence, including the diffusion of Western IR norms such as Westphalian sovereignty. Historically, there was no clear distinction between the Middle Kingdom and outer realms inhabited by non-Chinese. The modern concept of territorial sovereignty was imported to China with the Western imperialist invasions since the 1840sFootnote 108 and then progressively internalized and institutionalized as the solution to China’s weakness from its century of humiliation.Footnote 109 It has also fuelled the rise of Chinese nationalism both broadly and more specifically in the realm of knowledge production as evidenced by the desire for developing IRT with ‘Chinese’ characteristics.Footnote 110
Thus, ‘Chineseness’ and ‘Westernness’ go hand in hand when it comes to the development of ‘Chinese’ IRT, which started from the introduction of ‘Western’ IR theories (e.g., game theory, classical realism, and neorealism) into China by scholars like Chen Lemin and Ni Shixiong.Footnote 111 In the 1990s, more ‘Western’ IR theories like constructivism were imported.Footnote 112 In the 2000s, it was the English School that served as an inspiring model for building a Chinese School.Footnote 113 Therefore, the history and development of contemporary Chinese IR shows that it is precisely through Chinese scholars’ exposure to Western IR knowledge that they have come to realize the mismatch between Western (and particularly American) IR theory and China’s historical experiences and contemporary practices. More importantly, partly as a result of their engagement with ‘Western’ theory, they have become much better equipped to construct knowledge in their own way, so to speak. This path has been exalted by Chinese scholars themselves. As Wang Yizhou noted, ‘it is imperative to study thoroughly intellectual fruit produced in other countries, the advanced European countries and the United States in particular, for the aim of establishing an international political theory with Chinese characteristics.’Footnote 114
It is, therefore, not surprising that a large ‘Western shadow’ is cast over ‘Chinese’ IRT, given that the intellectual landscape of its ‘whole’ consists largely of ‘Western’ ideas such as realism, liberalism, Marxism, and constructivism. Indeed, the resemblance between Chinese and mainstream Western IR theories speaks more to such holographic relations than to any supposed inability of Chinese later-comers to produce genuinely novel paradigms.Footnote 115 Qin Yaqing draws on Western constructivist and relationalist scholarship. His relational theory of world politics, in contrast with Western Hegelian dialectics, applies the Confucian dialectic of the Doctrine of the Mean to elaborate a conception of relational rationality for addressing contemporary international conflicts. Yan Xuetong’s moral realism combines the ancient Chinese political norm of wangdao with Western realist IR theory, attributing the rise or decline of great powers to political leadership and defining political leadership on the basis of morality. Critiquing the nation-state system for generating many problems in world politics, Zhao Tingyang draws on Zhou dynasty’s tianxia practices, and his tianxia-system theory offers solutions that treat the world as the primary political unit. Some of these theorists, such as Yan Xuetong and Qin Yaqing, received their PhD training in the United States. However, rather than simply labelling them as ‘socialized products of American graduate schools,’Footnote 116 it is more appropriate to recognize how such experiences deepen the globalization of knowledge production. While many Chinese scholars construe the ‘Chinese School’ in essentialist terms, the work and experience of these theorists reveals its inescapably global character: their ideas engage with, whether in opposition or as sources of inspiration, various intellectual currents from their spatial and temporal wholes.
Despite such strong Western influence, the rise of Chinese IRT certainly is not reducible to a mere outcome of Westernization. After all, historically China defined its world in terms of tianxia. Hence, the relative wholes for Chinese IRT further encompass ‘non-Western’ worlds and other worlds such as one shaped by the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The five principles of peaceful coexistence, for instance, was a major part of Chinese IR theory and practice, but its development was shaped also by India and Myanmar, with its legitimacy solidified at the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia.Footnote 117 In this sense, the production of ‘Chinese’ IR theory and practice has never simply taken place within China; Chinese IRT is a holographic part of its various wholes and thus reflects those wholes.
While the above analysis has dissected several relative wholes for Chinese IRT, we should not consider them separate from one another. They all belong to a still larger whole of the world, in both spatial and temporal terms. And the temporal dimension of the whole reminds us that a deeper understanding of how Chinese IRT is a holographic part of the whole requires attention to its encounters with the world across different temporal periods. In this sense, the wholistic sources of Chinese IRT are not limited to classical Chinese texts from the past; they also include what is happening today and into the future. For example, the ongoing practices of China’s BRI, which itself is inextricably linked back to the global histories of the ancient Silk Roads, should be seen as an important aspect of the temporal whole from which ‘Chinese’ IR knowledge as a dynamic part of the whole may continue to evolve.Footnote 118
Discovering the globality of Chineseness (II): multiple Chinese worlds as the whole
When we say that ‘Chinese’ IRT is never purely ‘Chinese’ and that the very ‘Chineseness’ has been developed in the context of China’s spatial and temporal enfoldment of the world, here we do not mean that Chineseness is synonymous with globality per se. Rather, Chinese IRT still retains certain important ‘local’ characteristics different from other ‘local’ or ‘national’ IRTs. This is because they happen to occupy different spatial and temporal ‘positionalities’ in the wholes (or the global), and as such, they cannot be identical, even as they are all holographic part of the same or overlapping wholes.
At the same time, when we zoom into the ‘local Chineseness’ of Chinese IRT, it is not a monolithic, transcendental trait of something called ‘China’ either. Rather, it should be seen as a shorthand for another level of globality within Chinese IRT that is constituted by many spatiotemporal ‘Chinese worlds,’ such as historical China, cultural China, the modern Chinese nation-state, and worlds of Chinese diasporas and ethnic groups. Even if we could detach ‘Chineseness’ from the influence of ideas and practices of ‘non-Chinese worlds,’ Chineseness itself remains a complex global construct in this second sense, reflecting the dynamic ‘globality’ of the many Chinese worlds, which neither coincide with the modern Chinese nation-state as we know it nor are sharply demarcated in any singular terms. Inside each of those ‘Chinese’ worlds are intersecting and traversing ‘patterns’ of gender, class, nationality, geography, language, faith, and ethnicity. There is no exception even at the ‘core’ of the Chinese worlds, the Han Chinese ethnic group, which, continuously absorbing ethnic minorities over a long time, is itself a mixture of various ethnicities.Footnote 119 And between different Chinese worlds are interconnections and overlaps through crisscrossed ties such as language, capital, trade, media, marriage, and migration. Not surprisingly, among the many Chinese worlds, the meanings of Chineseness have been variously imagined, appropriated, reconfigured, contested, and even resisted. To reflect the spirit of globalizing IR in the true sense of the term, the Chinese School of IRT cannot be reduced to a search for a hegemonic, essentialized sense of Chineseness centred on a reified Chinese nation-state; it has to be understood and consciously constructed on both levels of globality. Nor can globalizing Chineseness in Chinese IRT be done by simply adding different articulations of Chineseness in those Chinese worlds, because there are no stable, essentialized micro-versions of Chineseness that can be readily assembled together to begin with.
In critiquing Global IR, Blaney and Tickner have noted a similar problem of neglecting ontological differences among ‘multiple-world realities’ in IR theories due to the ‘one-world world’ imaginary that only recognizes epistemological differences across perspectives on yet a single world.Footnote 120 They argue that ‘performing a pluriverse requires undoing the world worked up by monistic universalism.’Footnote 121 This problem of reifying globalism and preserving a way of ‘one-world’ thinking is also reflected in the dominant understanding of Chineseness in Chinese IRT. Many Chinese theorists assume a single world of Chineseness, united by some ‘essentially Chinese’ ideas of relationality, tianxia, humane authority, and so forth. As such, Chinese IR theory, like Global IR, may still aspire to produce another universal body of knowledge authentically representing China, say, vis-à-vis Africa.Footnote 122 The danger with this particular way of doing Chinese IRT is its potentially hegemonic or hierarchical implications for dealing with difference and opposition both within China and without. One author argues that the new world order Yan Xuetong envisioned is ‘one whereby peace and harmony must be cultivated or actively constructed in a manner that precludes opposition and subsumes difference into sameness.’Footnote 123 Another author elaborates on how Zhao Tingyang’s tianxia system may include but marginalize Otherness:
Zhao’s most important argument, then, is that Chinese thought and the Tianxia system provide a productive form of self/Other relations that does not exclude difference… although exclusion certainly is an important issue, it is also important to examine how self/Other relations work to include difference in hierarchical ways. Thus although Zhao’s all-inclusive Tianxia system may not have an outside, its institutionally-backed ‘self’ utilizes both absolute exclusion and hierarchical inclusion to marginalize three social groups: the West, the people, and other nations along China’s frontier.Footnote 124
These criticisms point out some ontological, epistemological, and practical complications in current Chinese IRT’s assumption of a singular, essentialized Chinese world, an assumption which is in fact contradicted by the actual practices of Chinese IRT knowledge production as noted above. Here, QH helps challenge the notion of an imagined single Chinese world and instead views ‘Chineseness’ as ontologically inseparable from multiple and interconnected worlds of Chineseness (as well as with ‘non-Chinese worlds’ as noted above). Due to such interconnectedness, Chineseness can never be subsumed into sameness; rather, it is manifested in diverse, pluralistic, and dynamic ways. While this view seems to echo the pluriversal approach to Global IR, it does not treat ‘many Chinese worlds’ as only externally related with one another. Despite their differences, they are holographically connected as well: within each Chinese world exist many (often overlapping) Chinese worlds. This perspective encourages us to rethink the varied and complex phenomenon of Chineseness across different spatiotemporal levels and contexts and its challenging implications for Chinese IRT. For example, an ambiguous and often-overlooked Chinese world is the IR scholarship produced outside the borders of mainland China or the political centre commonly designated as the People’s Republic of China (PRC), but based on ideas derived from ‘Chinese’ resources. If the core feature of Chinese IRT is one of ‘being grounded in China’s historical experiences and traditional culture,’Footnote 125 then overseas Chinese scholars (along with those in Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan), such as Lily Ling, Chih-yu Shih, Yongjin Zhang, Steve Chan, and even foreign scholars who engage with Chinese IRT in this way, may also be considered part and parcel of the Chinese IRT worlds. This Chinese world, which itself is diverse and amorphous, may be part of the second or third universe of Tu Wei-ming’s ‘cultural China.’Footnote 126 Yet, we do not fully subscribe to the framework of cultural China that assumes a concentric universe of Chineseness, with a culturally ‘authentic’ centre surrounded by gradually distant outer edges. Rather, as being simultaneously unfolded in each of the universes, Chineseness can neither be generalized into some homogeneous form, nor dichotomized as centre versus periphery, because, as Leo Lee illustrates, political ‘peripheries’ could be culturally richer than the ‘centre.’Footnote 127
Even within each universe, Chineseness is also manifested in diverse ways. In this sense, each universe represents one world while simultaneously enfolding its many worlds around it. Take the Chinese diaspora outside of China for example. On the whole it seems to differ from the Chinese within PRC. Yet, just as Wang Gungwu has questioned the existence of ‘a single Chinese diaspora,’ the presence of ethnic migrant communities in various places and their interactions with local and global cultures lead to their respective unfolding as different groups that can never be bracketed into the same category.Footnote 128 The case of Chinese diaspora also bespeaks how the globe is necessarily enfolded into particular groups of people through their varied boundary-crossing social, economic, and cultural practices. Such temporally and spatially specific enfolding processes make themselves ‘global’ in their own ways and give rise to the unfolding of different ‘Chinese worlds.’
As such, Chinese IRT, as conventionally construed, is not well-equipped to accommodate the inherent Chinese-global duality of Chineseness at both the global (i.e., ‘non-Chinese worlds’) and Chinese-worlds levels. It is more appropriate to understand Chinese IRT as potentially originating and emerging from various Chinese worlds, each interconnected with their respective wholes and ultimately with some larger common wholes. These Chinese worlds and their wholes extend far beyond the nation-state of China. This is not to empty the term Chineseness of any meaning; rather, it is to restore its rightful holographic meaning. Chinese IR theory which cannot understand the holographic complexity of Chineseness would have failed on its own terms and would be ill-equipped to inform China’s global policy. Yan Xuetong is right in asserting that IR theory cannot be categorized by nationality. But this is because it is neither productive nor feasible to confine knowledge production, including Chinese IR theory, within a Westphalian national framework of geo-epistemology, not because, as Yan claims, theory can be universally applicable to all nation-states within a Westphalian international system.
Conclusion
This article has explored how QH as a particular variant of quantum social theory can contribute to rethinking Global IR, transitioning from the conventional approach of globalizing IR to uncovering globality in each site of knowledge production, a holographic form of globality that has largely been overlooked by current alternative approaches to addressing Global IR’s problems of essentialism and geo-epistemology. Through a case study of the Chinese School of IRT, the article employs the QH approach to problematizing its often essentialized conception of Chineseness. We argue that this geo-culturally essentialist approach to Chinese IRT has not only obscured the contribution of ideas and practices from ‘non-Chinese worlds’ but also downplayed the implications of the ‘globality’ of many Chinese worlds for the construction of Chinese IRT. A truly Chinese School of IRT, therefore, must self-consciously reflect the ‘globality within’ at both levels. Only in doing so can the building of Chinese IRT be also a more self-aware instance of globalizing IR.
This study has significant implications for other ‘national’ schools of IR theory as well as for Global IR as a whole, although we should add that applying this approach to different parts of the world with different spatial settings and historical experiences may reveal different patterns and shades of global-local duality. A ‘proper Global IR’Footnote 129 cannot be done through an ‘add and stir strategy,’Footnote 130 namely, simply bringing together otherwise separate and geo-culturally essentialist ‘national,’ ‘regional,’ ‘local,’ or ‘indigenous’ perspectives. Rather, it has to be achieved by each of its parts, for example, its ‘national’ or ‘local’ components, seeking to discover and appreciate the ‘globality within’ as a result of their holographic enfolding of their respective wholes, because each part is always already a manifestation of Global IR on a smaller scale, as the example of Chinese IRT can attest. This, we suggest, could be an important part of the next phase of Global IR.
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and to the Editors of International Theory for their valuable feedback on earlier versions of this article. The usual disclaimer applies. Chengxin Pan acknowledges financial support from a University of Macau research grant (Reference Number SRG2022-00007-FSS). Nahui Chen acknowledges financial support from the National Social Science Fund of China (Grant Number 22BGJ002).
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