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Understanding Chinese identity in international relations : a critique of Western approaches.
In international relations in the West, two main approaches to Chinese identity have emerged: the capability and the culture approaches. Though each takes a different view of China, they share common epistemological ground. positivism. This paper provides an overview of these two influential schools of thought and attempts to challenge their positivistic and ethnocentric assumptions about the identities of both China and the West. While they endeavour to make sense of China, particularly in the post-Cold War era, they fail to understand identity as a form of representation. From a critical perspective, both ’China’ and the ‘West’ are social constructs: each in part constitutes the other. The relationship between them is always relational and fluid. Posing Chinese identity in positivist terms is not only misleading analytically, but potentially dangerous in practice. It is important, therefore, that alternative critical approaches to the complexities of Chinese identity be further explored.
History
Journal
Political scienceVolume
51Issue
2Pagination
135 - 148Publisher
Sage PublicationsLocation
London, EnglandPublisher DOI
ISSN
0032-3187eISSN
2041-0611Language
engPublication classification
C1.1 Refereed article in a scholarly journalCopyright notice
1999, Sage PublicationsUsage metrics
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