R6 USC KS vs. Emory GK
usc ks
Grace Kessler
On Sat, Oct 17, 2020 at 4:52 PM usc ks <usck...@gmail.com> wrote:
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Eugenia Giampetruzzi
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usc ks
China rise claims are epistemologically flawed and violent.
Pan 18 – Chengxin Pan, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin University, 75 Pigdons Road, Waurn Ponds, (Australia Toward a new relational ontology in global politics: China’s rise as holographic transition International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, Volume 18, Issue 3, September 2018, Pages 339–367, https://doi.org/10.1093/irap/lcy010)
1 Introduction
The rise of China has posed a number of pressing questions: Can it rise peacefully? What does it mean for global governance and the rules-based liberal order? Will it seek regional or even global dominance? And can it avoid the so-called Thucydides Trap? In the ongoing debate, at one level is an influential perspective informed by realism, and particularly by offensive realism (Mearsheimer, 2001, 2010) and power transition theory (Organski, 1961; Organski and Kugler, 1980). It argues that the tragic consequences of previous power transitions, from the Peloponnesian War to the two World Wars, do not bode well for China’s rise in the 21st century (Tammen and Kugler, 2006; Lai, 2011). A second perspective, following (neo)liberal institutionalism, social constructivism, and/or the English School, argues that China’s rise, taking place in a liberal international order, is subject to socialization into international society. As a result, there is a high probability of its peaceful rise and status-quo orientation (Johnston, 2003; Zheng, 2005; Kang, 2007; Ikenberry, 2008; Johnston, 2008; Zhu, 2008; Buzan, 2010; Clark, 2014).
These, of course, are just two broad perspectives within an extremely diverse and still-growing body of literature. At this juncture, one wonders what else can be added to the debate on China’s rise. To some, the debate should now focus on more rigorous empirical testing of existing competing perspectives (Kang, 2003/2004; Chen, 2012, 71). But to others, the rise of China precisely demands the search for a new vocabulary (Kavalski, 2014) as well as the development of international relations (IR) theories, particularly from Chinese perspectives (Zhao, 2009; Qin, 2009; Qin, 2010). While such empirical and theoretical emphases have merit, in this article I argue that we need to probe deeper by rethinking the ontological foundation upon which the China debate and indeed much of mainstream IR theorizing have been based.
The existing ontological foundation rests on a classical Cartesian/Newtonian worldview, which has not only heavily shaped the development of modern science, but also influenced the ways social scientists understand human society. In the IR context, this ontology assumes that the international system is made up of largely self-contained (though possibly interdependent and/or potentially socializable) units such as sovereign states, each possessing certain essential and distinctive identity and occupying a more or less clearly demarcated territorial space. With the China debate so far largely silent on the issue of ontology (with the possible exception of Zhao Tingyang’s and Qin Yaqing’s works, e.g., Zhao, 2006; Qin, 2009), China’s rise has been framed primarily within this conventional ontological thinking.
Yet, the ‘rise of China’ provides both a good opportunity to question this dominant ontological metanarrative and an empirical case for exploring the promises of what I call a ‘holographic relational ontology’. Building on but going further than the relational turn’s emphasis on relations and relationality, the holographic relational ontology identifies a particular type of relationality between parts and whole. Drawing on the holographic principles in quantum physics that each part contains information about the whole, this holographic ontology in the IR context sees the world as a hologram in which each state is a situated holographic microcosm of that world. This insight allows us to see ‘China’ in a different yet more dynamic and less singular light.