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Introduction – IPE with China’s characteristics
Gregory Chin,1 Margaret M. Pearson2 and Wang Yong3
1Department of Political Science, York University, Toronto, Canada
2Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland, College Park, USA
3School of International Studies, Peking University, Beijing, China
ABSTRACT
This article serves as an introduction to the five articles submitted for the special issue on IPE in China. In addition to summarizing the special issue articles on key themes in IPE, we outline the genesis of IPE as a field of study inside China, detail the core characteristics of Chinese IPE, as seen in this special issue, and consider the limits of the development of Chinese IPE to date. Finally, we provide a road map for the development of the IPE field in China, and identify the potential contributions which the Chinese scholarship could make to knowledge creation in IPE, and to the global conversation, in the future.
This collection on international political economy (IPE) in China starts from three premises. First, the study of IPE, globally, is changing continually, in terms of ‘what is IPE?’ and ‘how do we study it?’ These shifts reflect the evolving world in which knowledge is created and transformed. Second, the global rise of China in particular (as well as other ‘emerging’ nations), and the steady maturation of IPE inside China give cause to reevaluate the so-called ‘consensus’ that has emerged during the past 20 years around general positivist theories, methods, analytical frameworks and important questions (described by Frieden and Martin, 2003: 19), or what some call, Open Economy Politics (Keohane, 2009; Lake, 2009). Third, it is worthwhile to strive to better understand multiple versions of IPE, and there is something important to be gained from conscious bridge building across distinct national and cultural spheres of IPE. In the global spread of IPE, China is one of, if not ‘the’ major growth area for IPE in the world (Cohen, forthcoming). China is potentially the most potent source of knowledge creation, moving forward. This volume strives to see what that source brings to the global conversation.
Following from these premises, this collection attempts to add to our understanding by analyzing how IPE is studied in China, and how scholars in China, ‘by virtue of geography, intellectual history, personal training and socialization’, think about IPE and write about the subject matter (Blyth, 2009: 2). Each piece is co-authored by a prominent PRC scholar residing in China and a ‘foreign’ IPE scholar, some of whom specialize on China. Together each pair outlines what they think are the core Chinese concerns of one key issue or area of substance in IPE, and indicate what this understanding adds to the global conversation.
What Chinese IPE scholars are writing about inside China is usually of most direct interest to China specialists. However the comparisons between Chinese IPE and IPE in the Anglosphere, and the analysis of broader implications ought to register with a general IPE audience. To paraphrase Cohen, such comparison allows us to appreciate IPE as a ‘mental construct,’ and better understand where a field’s ideas come from – how they originated, and how they develop over time (2008: 2). It also helps us to think through why, among IPE scholars situated in China, some ideas have gained traction and influence, and the differences and similarities with IPE in the West.
In this special issue, we examine the evolving boundaries and internal content of IPE as studied in China, and compare Chinese IPE to the foundational ideas of the West. We seek to expand the discussion beyond the focus on the ‘transatlantic divide’ of British and American IPE (started by Benjamin Cohen, 2007, 2008; Phillips and Weaver, 2011). Early efforts to expand geographically include, most recently, the chapters on ‘IPE in Asia’ in Blyth’s Handbook of IPE, (Arrighi, 2009; Bello, 2009; Yeung, 2009).1 While these pieces are a useful start, we suspect that there is dramatic variation in the IPE experience between differing national contexts in Asia, and that further disaggregation is needed, i.e. that the concept of ‘Asian IPE’ is too broad. The broad references to ‘Asian’ IPE can lead to over-generalization such as:
…what American scholars celebrate as hegemony as leadership (see Gilpin, 1987; Mandelbaum, 2005), and British scholars question as hegemony à la critical perspectives (see Cox, 1987), Asian scholars tend to see as (neo) imperialism (Bello, 2005). (Blyth, 2009: 5)
In contrast, the articles by Wang Yong and Louis Pauly, and by Qingxin K. Wang and Mark Blyth in this special issue show that, even just for China, the narrative on hegemony is not quite so straightforward. Indeed, looking within China we see considerable diversity of views. In these articles, we see that scholarly conceptualization of ‘hegemony’ inside Chinese IR and IPE has evolved steadily during the past 30 years, starting from the critical view of world hegemony as ‘imperialism’, with initial roots in Marxist thought; toward the power-politics conception of hegemony of IR realism by the late 1990s; and more recently, to Kindelberger-type ‘hegemonic stability’.2 Wang and Pauly (in this issue) see convergence in the mainstream of Chinese IPE toward American traditions, and yet they also notice a return, of sorts, to some concepts of Confucianism, such as ‘tributary system’ and ‘equilibrium analysis,’ and the re-conceptualization of power as ‘harmony’ in the global realm, from scholars searching for indigenous sources of innovation.
In this introduction, we also inquire as to source of ideas and ideational innovation in Chinese IPE. The strong influence of Western IPE shows throughout the essays in this issue. We also note, however, that ideas in the Chinese literature exist as a result of the need inside China to respond to changes in official policy, and the norms of the governing Chinese Communist Party (CCP). To be explicit, ideational patterns in Chinese IPE are strongly influenced by political power, particularly the role of the CCP in encouraging and steering ideational and normative innovation, and defining the parameters of policy debate – to paraphrase Fewsmith (2003), in determining where ‘correct ideas’ come from. The other determining factor is the dramatic change in material conditions that China has experienced in the past three decades. Especially pertinent has been China’s increasing integration into world trade and investment flows, and more recently, the country’s rise as an international creditor and growing international monetary influence (see the contributions by Wang Xin and Gregory Chin, and Wang and Blyth in this special issue).
The role of political power in shaping Chinese IPE can be seen in the evolving way that the term ‘globalization’ was handled in the scholarship. ‘Globalization’ started to feature in the lexicon of the Chinese academy only in the late 1990s (discussed by Yu Keping, 2004: 1), and came after the term first appeared in the speeches of foreign minister Qian Qichen at the UN in 1996, and General Secretary Jiang Zemin at the 15th Party Congress in 1997. Prior to this quasi-official sanctioning, many academics shied away from referring to globalization as it was synonymous, ideologically, with world capitalism. It took the Party until October 2002 to spell out what it meant, officially, by ‘economic globalization’, and in the Communiqué of the 15th CPC Central Committee Plenum (9–11 October 2002).3 But once the term came into official use, it set the tone inside Chinese IR and IPE, as more scholars began focusing on the opportunities and challenges presented by the ‘inevitable force’ of economic globalization. We anticipate a similar dynamic for use of the term ‘hegemony’ if or when it is recast in the Party’s official foreign policy. Such a conceptual shift will be more difficult for the CPP to orchestrate given that ‘hegemony’ has such a strong stigma in Maoist theory because of its association with ‘superpower bullying’ of the third world. Nonetheless, as mentioned above, we can see the beginnings of such a conceptual shift in the analysis of Chinese IPE scholars.
Wang and Blyth (in this issue) identify two ways in which the Party and state authorities have played the pivotal role as the source of ideational change and defining of norms. They show how China’s ‘neoliberal economic turn’ during the 1990s was preceded by the ‘triumph of neoliberal’ policy ideas that were championed by technocratic elites around Premier Zhu Rongji. At the same time, Wang and Blyth also suggest that Marxism remains the defining ideological underpinning for Chinese IPE. They suggest that this unique hybrid is the guiding logic for China’s foreign policy and diplomacy. Wang and Chin show that Chinese IPE scholars have tended to stick to the official policy line when analyzing the source of global macro-imbalances. They also observe that after China’s monetary policy elites issued their calls for global reserve currency reform (Zhou Xiaochuan, 2009), the scholars subsequently shifted their attention onto international monetary system reforms. As mentioned above, the neo-Confucian turn in Chinese IR/IPE (addressed in Wang and Pauly, and in the article by Pang Zhongying and Hongying Wang) has followed in the wake of the CCP’s own return to Confucian thinking, that started in the late 1990s when those around then Party General Secretary Jiang Zemin were searching for indigenous ideas for reviving the official state doctrine.
We notice that conceptual shifts in IPE inside the universities tend to follow changes in China’s official policy, and its international positioning, and often emanate from ‘establishment’ think tanks and policy research centers. Some of the noteworthy conceptual shifts mentioned above have been preconditioned by changes in the research agenda of influential policy enclaves such as key Party and state policy organs. For example, in the realm of grand strategy and the theorization of the balance of power, the precursors of evolution in IPE stem from places such as the Institute of International Strategy of the Central Party School, or the China Institutes for Contemporary International Relations, when, for example, during the last decade, the discussion on international order and great power relations moved beyond power-balancing, to the possibilities for concert-type cooperation.4 For the study of the politics of the world economy, we see similar trend-setting shifts in academic IPE emanating from the leading think tanks for economic policy such as the Policy Research Office of the Chinese Communist Party, the Policy Research Office of the State Council, and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, or for sector-specific research, from the research agenda of the People’s Bank of China, Ministry of Finance or Ministry of Commerce. At issue here, then, are questions of both ontology and epistemology: on the hand, the basic units of reality, and the relationships (dynamics) between the constituent units; and, on the other hand, the methods and grounds of, and purposes for, knowledge creation in Chinese IPE.
GENESIS OF THE FIELD
The origins of IPE inside China trace back to the visits of American scholars in the mid 1980s, who introduced IPE readings in their guest teaching in China. US Fulbright scholar Leo Chang, a professor of political science at Regis College, introduced books such as Joan Spero’s IPE textbook The Politics of International Economic Relations and Hans Morganthau’s Politics Among Nations, to the students at Peking University in 1986 and 1987. The Center for Chinese and American Studies jointly run by Nanjing University and Johns Hopkins University (School of Advanced International Studies) was one of the first institutions inside China to offer IPE training within its courses. American scholar George T. Crane taught a course on IPE at the Nanjing-Hopkins Center in 1988–1989.5
The earliest signs of indigenous Chinese IPE thinking inside China emerged in the late 1980s. Wu Kaicheng and Professor Sang Yucheng6 (1987) at Fudan University (Shanghai) wrote a “review of IPE”, one of the first articles to introduce the concepts of interdependence, the politics of the international economy, and post-hegemony cooperation. They argued that these new conceptualizations reflected fundamental changes in the nature of international relations, and unprecedented linkages between politics and economy, that albeit ultimately worked in the service of “monopoly capital”. Chen Dezhao (1988), a research fellow at the China Institute of International Studies (a think tank under the foreign ministry) added to the nascent Chinese IPE narrative by describing how IPE had became a new discipline in the United States, and suggesting that China should pay more attention to the development of this field.
In 1988, Professor Yuan Ming, a respected scholar at Peking University, invited three IPE scholars from the University of California, San Diego – John Ruggie, Peter Gourevitch and Miles Kahler – to lecture to graduate students for one month. Wang Yong, then a graduate student at Peking University, interviewed Kahler during the visit, leading to one of the earliest Chinese pieces on the study of IPE in the United States. Kahler discussed the general path, history, and major methodologies and approaches of IP...
