Contemporary Chinese political theorising and its risks

Chinese political theories are today generally informed by two specific concerns. The first concern is how to address the geopolitical bias in existing theoretical paradigms. The dissatisfaction with these paradigms has generally produced two strategic moves: firstly attempts to improve the explanatory power of IRT through recourse to Chinese concepts, secondly endeavours to reform actual political practice by replacing perceived geopolitical biases with alternative ideologies. In other words, Chinese political theories are located on a continuum of analytical and normative enterprises.

The second concern is the scope of such projects. They range across a spectrum from claims to universality, such as arguments that pertain to politics everywhere and at all times, to claims that seek validity only in a discrete, indigenous context, like the specific sociocultural situation of present-day China. I have mapped these two concerns, that is normative/analytical focus and discrete/universal scope, onto the axes in the diagram below, and have tentatively placed several prominent examples into this figure.Footnote ⁹

Figure 1. Contemporary Chinese political theorising.

In this article, I am concerned with conceptual work that aims to explain and understand IR, and my focus therefore lies with arguments that fall primarily into the lower right quadrant of the diagram.Footnote ¹⁰ This includes in particular the procedural, relational approach, performance-focused ideas, and the concerns of world theory scholars (or ‘worldists’). These approaches do not exist in isolation. They are juxtaposed with the discourse of other political philosophy projects, and consequently need to overcome the shortcomings that these other endeavours face. This includes two particular risks: firstly, the uncritically ahistorical reproduction of concepts, and secondly the implicit or explicit promotion of nationalist political projects.

To illustrate these shortcomings, it is useful to review some of the works that fall into the other quadrants of the diagram, particularly since such approaches are rooted in a long tradition of Chinese historiography. An overarching theme of this tradition is to comment on the past from a contemporary position, and pre-modern works like Sima Qian's Records of the Historian (Shiji 史记) or the various commentaries to the Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu 春秋) are arguably early testament to this practice. It is important to acknowledge this tradition since it partially explains the strong programmatic focus of Chinese political philosophy: attempts to utilise the past are often less preoccupied with the accuracy of historical events than with morally assessing how historical events might serve as templates for contemporary political behaviour.Footnote ¹¹

The diverse heritage of pre-modern Chinese political thought provides a treasure-trove of concepts from often competing ideological schools, dating as far back as the Western Zhou Dynasty (c. 1040–771 BC) and the philosophical currents of the subsequent periods known as Spring-and-Autumn (chunqiu 春秋: 722–481 BC) and Warring States (zhanguo 战国: 403–221 BC).Footnote ¹² Most Chinese scholars draw their material from these periods. Attempts to revive perceived ‘Confucian’ values are particularly en vogue, although most such attempts actually amalgamate ideas from different Confucian sources (particularly the Annalects, the Mengzi, and the Xunzi) with concepts from Daoism and Legalism.Footnote ¹³ Ling et al., for instance, lift the concept of benevolence (ren 仁) from the Mengzi and reinterpret it as ‘sociality’, stressing that benevolence only works through the conduct of one person to another – a sentiment believed to be engrained in the composition of the Chinese character 仁, which combines the signifier for person 人with the signifier for the number two 二.Footnote ¹⁴ In this line of interpretation, benevolence becomes a moral imperative to ‘love all men’ (ai ren 爱人)Footnote ¹⁵ and by extension a form of humanism that enables the world to be in harmony (hexie 和谐) by emphasising human relations.

Another example of scholarly work interested in this period of Chinese history is the volume Thoughts on World Leadership and Implications,Footnote ¹⁶ edited by prominent realist Yan Xuetong 阎学通 and his student Xu Jin 徐进. The editors provide a survey of pre-modern Chinese political thought from a contemporary IR perspective, dedicating chapters to the Guanzi 管子, the Laozi 老子, the various works attributed to Confucius 孔子, the Mozi 墨子, the Mengzi 孟子, the Xunzi 荀子, the Hanfeizi 韩非子, the Commentary of Zuo (Zuozhuan 左传), the Book of Rites (Liji 礼记), the Strategems of the Warring States (Zhanguo ce 战国策), and Lü's Spring and Autumn Annals (Lüshi chunqiu 吕氏春秋). Throughout the book, the common theme is the question of how states can achieve ‘hegemonic rule over all-under-heaven’ (wangba tianxia 王霸天下). To this end, the authors examine original textual materials, attempting to define what concepts such as righteousness (yi 义), benefit (li 利), harmony (he 和), virtue (de 德), power (quan 权), or force (li 力) might mean, and then mapping the relations between these concepts in order to explore how and in what fashion Chinese pre-modern states achieved supremacy rather than suffering annihilation (miewang 灭亡).

This collection of essays has correctly been criticised for conflating ancient Chinese thought with actual historical practice.Footnote ¹⁷ Indeed, it is telling that Yan hopes that his analysis will both ‘contribute to the development of existing IR theories’ and ‘help consummate the strategy of China's rise’.Footnote ¹⁸ Judging by Yan's later writings, the academic motivation seems to take the backseat behind the intention of offering policy advice in the service of China's ‘rise’.Footnote ¹⁹ Yan's use of pre-modern philosophy thus mainly turns into a search for ideas that help legitimise his realist perspective. In the tradition of Chinese historiography, Yan liberally draws from historical discourses to pass moral judgement and, in this case, promote realist foreign policy in the People's Republic of China (PRC).

Realists are not the only scholars mining Chinese intellectual history for useful ideas. A similar theme runs through contemporary neo-Confucianism and ‘worldisms’. A prominent example of the former is the political Confucian scholar Jiang Qing 蒋庆, whose philosophy falls into the upper left quadrant of the diagram provided above: his approach is aimed specifically at improving Chinese domestic politics by reviving the Confucian meritocratic system of rule and Confucian social relations.Footnote ²⁰ Theories of worldism are often grounded in similar Confucian concerns. However, they aim to rethink world order and consequently fall into the upper right quadrant. A central concept in these frameworks is the idea of tianxia 天下. Tianxia, that is, ‘all-under-heaven’, today serves as shorthand for a holistic Chinese view of the world that is conceived of as distinct from other world views. Qin Yaqing 秦亚青 summarises the concept as follows: ‘The Chinese world referred to everything under heaven and on the earth …. It was a complete whole where no dichotomous opposites existed.’Footnote ²¹ This idea of ‘all-under-heaven’ serves its advocates as a framework to study (and possibly revitalise) the institutions and processes of the Western Zhou Dynasty, the legendary Golden Age in which the relatively small state of Zhou was able to govern a large territorial expanse and a significant number of foreign states with allegedly little recourse to military violence.

A driving force behind this interest in ‘all-under-heaven’ has been the political philosopher Zhao Tingyang 赵汀阳, whose aim is to replace the anarchical system of nation-states with a utopian cosmological order in which all relations, whether at the level of the world, the state, or the family, are transitively governed by the same moral rationale. This, according to Zhao, allows for a harmonious world that unites people, nature, and politics as ‘all-under-heaven’, under the benevolent rule of a supreme ‘son of heaven’ (tianzi 天子) – a virtuous ruler, or group of virtuous rulers, who lead by example and consequently inspire loyalty in their subjects.Footnote ²² Callahan has provided a thorough critique of Zhao's arguments, so I will not rehearse them here.Footnote ²³ Suffice to say that Zhao's tianxia system is a deeply conservative political programme that is strongly informed by anti-Western sentiment, nationalist indignation at the Bush administration's ‘American Empire’ (Meiguo diguo 美国帝国), and a strong scepticism towards forms of mass participation.Footnote ²⁴ While Zhao's tone has arguably become more conciliatory in his latest writings, he overall nevertheless retains his opinion that ‘Western’ philosophy is flawed, and that electoral democracy is useless, constructing Chinese traditional order as an alternative.Footnote ²⁵

As Callahan has argued, Zhao's discussion of tianxia, as idiosyncratic as it may be, has placed the concept on the agenda and has effectively set ‘the boundaries of how people think about China's past, present, and future’.Footnote ²⁶ Chinese IR scholarship indeed often conceptualises world order with reference to tianxia, though not always in similarly utopian terms as Zhao Tingyang. One institution that has received particular attention in this context is the tributary system of the Zhou, which was elevated to mythical status in Chinese historiography and was taken as a model for foreign policy throughout most of China's imperial history.Footnote ²⁷ Authors like Qin interpret the tributary system as follows:

Such interpretations are again to some extent politically motivated, since they frame Chinese foreign policy as traditionally benevolent and tolerant. Through its tribute system, so the argument would have it, the Chinese empire not only ‘saw more benefits going from China to the tribute states rather than the other way round’, but also cast the centre in the ‘role of balancer, intervening wherever invasion by one state occurred against another’.Footnote ²⁹ Callahan has criticised such romanticism for its lack of engagement with China's imperial past, and historically-minded scholars like Zhang have stressed that utopian visions of Confucian harmony and order have ‘exercised a greater hold on the Chinese imagination than the actual record of belligerency, discord and enforced unification which are characteristic of many periods of Chinese history’.Footnote ³⁰ It is indeed not hard to see how the Zhou system of ‘world rule’ could fit the current attempts in China to conceptualise a peaceful rise of the PRC to Great Power status and legitimise the ‘harmonious society’ ideology of the political leadership.Footnote ³¹

Callahan is correct to note that such projects to reinterpret pre-modern history and philosophy often play ‘fast and loose’ with their sources.Footnote ³² To give an example, contemporary interpretations that equate the classic use of the character ai 爱 with modern-day ‘love’ bypass the fact that Confucian sources conceptualise ai as hierarchical relationships, governed by strictness – hardly the meaning we would give to the word ‘love’ today.Footnote ³³ Another example is the interpretation of the Chinese character shi 势 as the supposed ‘general tendency’ of international politics to move towards ‘peace, cooperation, and development’Footnote ³⁴ in a teleological fashion, which omits that works like The Art of War or the Strategems of the Warring States deploy the same character to advise leaders how to utilise the potential of a situation to crush their enemies. Similarly, the concept tianxia 天下 (literally ‘under-heaven’) is rarely contextualised in relation to other key geographical terms of the respective sources, such as ‘middle kingdoms’ (zhong guo 中国) or ‘east of the mountains’ (shan dong 山东), but is simply translated as ‘all-under-heaven’, or ‘the world’. Other concepts are distorted beyond recognition, for instance when realist scholar Wang Yiwei 王义桅 interprets ‘the people's heart’ (minxin 民心) as modern-day ‘public opinion’,Footnote ³⁵ without question of whether pre-modern China had such a thing as a ‘public sphere’Footnote ³⁶ and, if so, whether this ‘public’ then functioned the same way during the Zhou era as it does in diverse (post)modern contexts.

This latter example also illustrates how the ahistorical use of pre-modern concepts is at times married to nationalist outlooks. Wang's search for pre-modern validation is fuelled by the idea that ‘America is powerful enough to produce theory’ while other nation-states like China are not.Footnote ³⁷ In such case, theorising becomes a project to promote the national interests of the PRC. Scholars such as Zhao Tingyang, Wang Yiwei, or Yan Xuetong thus repeatedly stress their claims for Chinese uniqueness. In much of their writings, Chinese theorising is not considered valuable because it addresses issues that mainstream ‘Western’ political thought underemphasises, but because it is supposedly distinctly Chinese. In this line of thinking, establishing a national IRT project is imperative because, so the logic goes, ‘China’ needs its own perspective of the world as it takes its rightful place as a Great Power. It should come as no surprise that advocates of such an argument then assure readers in ‘the West’ (or in East Asian countries bordering on PRC territory) that perceptions of a renewed nationalism in China are based on myths (shenhua 神话), misunderstandings (wujie 误解), and unnecessary worry (danxin 担心), all of which are rooted in the so-called ‘China Threat theory’ (Zhongguo weixie lun 中国威胁论). Analyses of nationalism in China then become a domination strategy by ‘the West’ to keep China down, instead of acknowledging that ‘China is still the mother of East Asian civilization’.Footnote ³⁸

Before this backdrop, nationalist writers perceive the establishment of a ‘China School’ of IRT as the solution to the problem, though its supporters struggle with the contradictions of what this political project should exactly achieve. This becomes apparent when Wang simultaneously assures readers that establishing a ‘China School’ of IRT ‘does not mean overthrowing or replacing western IRT, but then immediately asserts that once ‘China represents the development trend of the advanced productive forces of the world, the orientation of advanced culture and the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the world, the Chinese School will replace western IRT as the dominant school of IRT.’Footnote ³⁹

Chinese thinkers are right to criticise mainstream IR theory for being ‘Western’-centric. Nevertheless, the critique at times moves in the wrong direction, ironically duplicating many of the biased assumptions that it set out to counter. This is apparent in the many comments that ‘Westerners’ think and behave in this or that way, whereas ‘the Chinese’ are different – and possibly in ways that cannot be bridged. Such attempts to frame IR theorising in terms of Chinese uniqueness or entitlement betray not only a highly problematic understanding of what nationalism is and how it works, but also the wish to co-opt the works of diverse thinkers for the purpose of creating a unified ‘imagined community’.Footnote ⁴⁰ As will become clear from the case study below, popular nationalism in China is not at all a myth,Footnote ⁴¹ and nationalist attempts to theorise politics risk facilitating such sentiments and the problems they pose. Needless to say that I reject any such attempts to turn academic work into national projects, and that I agree with Shih Chih-yu 石之瑜 that ‘a plausible Chinese IR that has universal implications cannot emerge from the confrontational assumption of China being unique’.Footnote ⁴²

Conceptual concerns in contemporary Chinese IR theorising

Quotes like these demonstrate that not all scholarship that draws from China's history of ideas is nationalist. Similarly, scholars who take a wordlist position may take an ahistorical perspective, but for some this is not an uncritical matter of course but a strategic move. The intention of many such projects is explicitly to not view pre-modern concepts ‘as set and fixed, evolved from millennia of “orthodoxy” despite internal debates, contestations, and reformulations’, but to instead ‘draw on their defining elements and integrate them with contemporary insights derived from Marxist, postcolonial, and feminist studies and practice to contest hegemonic assertions about modernity, ontology, subjectivity, and world history’.Footnote ⁴³ It would be unfair to criticise such a deployment of pre-modern ideas for its lack of historical reflection. With this poststructuralist argument in mind, allow me to turn to attempts that conceptualise international politics from Chinese perspectives.

As outlined above, the theoretical approaches I am interested in here are the ones that aim to contribute to the understanding of IR. While such approaches differ in their specific focus, as well as in the degree to which they are willing to derive normative claims from their explanations, they each speak to three overarching themes. These are a general scepticism towards state-centric theories, a focus on performative behaviour and identity construction, and an attention to relations and processes. I will review these themes in turn.

A central charge of worldists’ critique is that mainstream IRT, along with the practices it arguably informs and legitimises, is grounded in a reductionist and misleading focus on the politics of nation-states. Agathangelou and Ling explain that the aim of worldism is to prioritise ‘a different locus of enunciation and existence that does not impose European Enlightenment's understanding of “modernity” with its contingent systems of organization: that is, the Westphalian inter-state system and its teleological understanding of development and change’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Such concerns are thus similar to those of globalisation scholars such as Beck, who challenge the ‘methodological nationalism’ endemic to social science research.Footnote ⁴⁵

Other Taiwanese and Chinese scholarship at times follows this logic. Shih, for instance, stresses the importance that domestic processes play in international politics when he outlines how citizens, intellectuals, and officials construct ‘Chinese identity’ by negotiating the meaning of nationalism outside of state institutional boundaries.Footnote ⁴⁶ Qin and Wei, who are generally interested in state behaviour, similarly acknowledge that domestic factors such as economic and social developments influence how collective Chinese identity evolves.Footnote ⁴⁷ That these processes have an important transnational dimension that falls outside of traditional International Relations becomes clear from Shih's argument that Chinese foreign policy is the outcome of complex role-making and role-taking processes that are influenced both by domestic actors as well as actors abroad, for instance International Relations scholars and so-called China watchers trying to make sense of their relationship with ‘China’.Footnote ⁴⁸

The move away from state-centric theories is intricately linked to the attempts of these scholars to reconceptualise national identity. Qin and Wei, for instance, criticise mainstream social constructivism á la Wendt for its structuralist approach to culture and identity: to the authors, such an approach assumes that culture is an exogenous systemic structure that forms the identity of actors, ‘overlooking the constitutive effect of the agent on the structure and of each on the other’.Footnote ⁴⁹ For Qin, Wendt's concept of identity creates the paradox that an actor ‘A’ can never be ‘non-A’, or in other words that identities are discrete and generally unchanging, even though the political world is in constant flux.Footnote ⁵⁰

Identity, according to Qin, should instead be understood as a continuous process of assemblage that ‘must be examined and understood in social networks, which are the combination of all sorts of relations’.Footnote ⁵¹ Actors are born into distinct socio-temporal environments, which then define their identities. If we follow Qin's argument, then we should not conceptualise social actors as complete and distinct units, but as flexible entities that are in the process of continuously becoming: ‘identity is, by nature, multifold, interactive, and changeable along with practice’.Footnote ⁵² To understand how identity works, the focus should be on how actors are embedded in relational networks, and how these networks are nested in other networks. In Qin's words:

Like other Chinese thinkers, Qin is here invoking the yin-yang imagery: the circle with black and white halves, entwined in an organic fashion, and each containing part of the other. This metaphor is a powerful heuristic device that forces theorists to rethink whether the dualisms and contradictions they set up as part of their theories are actually as rigid as they conceive them to be. Chinese IR theory may thus argue that contradiction lies in the eye of the beholder. For instance, ‘A’ may be true to someone and non-true to someone else. Such ontological relativism is a useful point of intersection with poststructuralist theories of how meanings and identities are shaped through social practice.

This is also a theme in Shih's work, which critically draws from the ‘all-under-heaven’ system and its tributary logic to emphasise the performative elements in foreign policy. Shih argues that we should analyse International Relations as a form of role-playing:

Shih thus evokes the imagery of ‘face’ (mianzi 面子) to argue that IRT should distinguish between identity (self-perception) and image (how the self is perceived by others), and should explore how actors construct identity through complex processes of role-taking and role-making.Footnote ⁵⁵ Such a rationale opens up the opportunity to connect with elements of early (pre-mainstream) constructivism and its intersecting disciplines: performative sociology, speech-act theory, and discourse theory. It also shifts the focus from static actors to relationships (guanxi 关系) and processes (guocheng 过程), another central theme in this line of theorising.

In Qin's ‘procedural constructivism’ (guocheng jiangou zhuyi 过程建构主义) relationality and process are the core concerns. Qin asserts that ‘one of the basic features of Chinese society is its relational orientation, which means “relations” are the most significant content of social life and the hub of all social activities’.Footnote ⁵⁶ His goal is to rethink how relations work, hoping that ‘if we could conceptualize the logic of “relationality”, it should be different from the Western logic of causation in its way of thinking and theoretical construction’.Footnote ⁵⁷ To this end, Qin focuses on the idea of process, arguing that ‘process is of itself’, that social dynamics are self-perpetuating.Footnote ⁵⁸ His definition in full:

It is within these processes, Qin argues, that actors develop their identity. By focusing on change (bian 变), Qin emphasises how identities shift, depending on the situation. Referencing the sociologist Mustafa Emirbayer, Qin proposes that ‘in relational sociology, rather than being independent, discrete, and rational, an actor should be social, which means her social relations are given even before her existence’.Footnote ⁶⁰

The main achievement of Qin's procedural constructivism is that it conceptualises the changeable identity of group actors, such as states. For Qin, a Chinese dialectic perspective allows an entity ‘A’ to become ‘non-A’ through process. The essence of ‘A’ is relational, situational, and consequently flexible. For instance, if I am sitting by the beach in Norway at 11pm, in late June, it may be both day and night for me at the same time. If I perceive this as a paradox, then only because I am confused by diverging definitions of what ‘night’ means: (1) the period between 10pm and 6am, for instance; or (2) the time of day when the sun has set. In essence, the non-paradox assumption is powerful in cases like these, because it demonstrates that something we perceived as a paradox is either a paradox of our own making, or not actually a paradox at all.

In summary, the theoretical endeavours reviewed in this section all share a common dissatisfaction with mainstream IRT that echoes many of the concerns that poststructuralist scholars have similarly raised. Chinese and Taiwanese attempts to overcome these perceived limitations of existing theories draw from the rich Chinese tradition of political philosophy to stress three related aspects of international politics that established IRT underemphasises: (1) the importance that domestic and transnational processes play in the formation of international politics; (2) the relevance of relational processes and interactions, and (3) the changing, situational nature of (collective) identities and self-images. The question remains to what degree a focus on these additional dimensions can contribute to the understanding of International Relations.

Relationality, process, and performance in the East China Sea

To explore this question, I now turn to a contemporary issue in the international politics of East Asia that has arguably posed a puzzle for mainstream IR theories such as neorealism, neoliberalism, and social constructivism: the East China Sea territorial dispute between the governments of the PRC, Japan, and the Republic of China on Taiwan (ROC). The conflict is over a group of uninhabitable islands, called Diaoyu 钓鱼 in Chinese and Senkaku 尖閣諸 in Japanese (in the following: Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands), which are situated between the islands of Taiwan and Okinawa. Sovereign control over the island formation is hotly contested by the three parties, and has repeatedly led to conflicts ever since the US government effectively transferred administrative control to the Japanese authorities in 1971.Footnote ⁶¹ Most recently, the issue flared up after the Japanese government bought several of the islands from a private Japanese owner in 2012, leading to popular protests in all three countries and diplomatic tensions that have continued throughout 2013.Footnote ⁶²

Realist accounts of the conflict focus on the geopolitical concerns in the region, stressing the relevance of the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands as fishing grounds and as potential sources of oil and gas, as well as their strategic relevance for the various states to project naval power in the Asia Pacific.Footnote ⁶³ As Hagström outlines in his critique of such approaches, realist theorists conceptualise these issues in terms of relative gains: the regional tensions are then explained as a consequence of China's perceived ‘rise’, the resulting assertiveness of the Chinese leadership in matters of international politics, and the inability of other actors such as Japan or the US to balance the PRC's power.Footnote ⁶⁴ According to Koo, such explanations ignore the restraint that the various parties regularly display and thus ‘cannot fully capture the continuing pattern of rise and fall of conflict’ over the islands.Footnote ⁶⁵

Liberal authors like Koo or Chung thus focus on the economic ties between the actors, arguing that trade relations ‘have repeatedly fostered the de-escalation of Sino-Japanese conflict over territorial and maritime rights’, and that in the post-Cold-War era ‘both countries suddenly discovered that trade was too mutually advantageous to be held hostage to pieces of disputed rocks’.Footnote ⁶⁶ However, the faith that these authors place in economic ties as a force for peace contradicts much of their own data: Koo, for instance, shows how economic relations have intensified over time, but then has to concede that for instance ‘the 1996 flare-up turned out to be far more serious in terms of its political salience and its level of hostility than were its predecessors’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Similarly, when confronted with the increase of such flare-ups throughout the 2000s, Koo is forced to sustain his theories by only applying them to cases of de-escalation while drawing selectively from the very approaches he criticises when it comes to explaining escalation.Footnote ⁶⁸ The assumed causal link between economic cooperation and conflict resolution thus remains tenuous, leading critics like Blanchard to question ‘whether economic ties alone will be sufficient to constrain the two states from escalating their conflict in the future’.Footnote ⁶⁹

Conventional social constructivist explanations of East China Sea disputes face a similar challenge as when confronted with other regional issues in East Asia: if states are socialised by an already existing international culture that constructs their identities and interests, then what happens in a region where ‘there is no obvious structure of ideas’?Footnote ⁷⁰ Similarly, the mainstream constructivist assumption that nation-states enter an interaction with pre-formed behavioural tendencies and habits remains problematic: in the case of the East China Sea, such a model would suggest that the history of war between China and Japan, and in particular their respective inability to critically revisit this past, will cause history to repeat itself.Footnote ⁷¹ These arguments at the very least raise doubts whether mainstream constructivism, with its static view of relations and its practice of treating states like persons, has the tools to explain the Diaoyu/Senkaku Island dispute.Footnote ⁷²

If mainstream IRT is ill-equipped to explain the repeated cycles of escalation and de-escalation in the East China Sea, how would the theoretical considerations of Chinese and Taiwanese scholars fare in the same context? The recent developments are characterised not only by complex dynamic interactions, but also by highly symbolic behaviour across different political tires. This suggests that non-state-centric, procedural interpretation that focuses on situational identities and self-images might indeed be well suited to the task. I will again consider these three aspects in turn.

Firstly, the events in 2012 demonstrate that a successful explanation of the dispute needs to incorporate both state and non-state actors. State-actors demonstrably play an important role in the conflict: a major factor in the recent dispute has been the Japanese government's purchase of several of the disputed islands, as well as the diplomatic row that followed both the original announcement of those plans in August and the final transaction in September.Footnote ⁷³ However, the state-level alone does not tell the whole story. Citizens of the PRC, the ROC, Japan, and also Hong Kong have repeatedly played an instrumental role in shaping the dynamics of the conflict. In many of the past disputes, groups of civilians have exacerbated inter-state tensions by travelling to the disputed waters and attempting (with varying degrees of success) to reach the islands. This was also the case on 15 August 2012, the day that marks the end of the Second World War in East Asia, when five Hong Kong activists swam to the islands after their boat had been stopped by the Japan Coast Guard.Footnote ⁷⁴ Three days later, Japanese right-wing activists similarly swam to shore, raising Japanese flags and commemorating perceived Japanese war heroes.Footnote ⁷⁵ The news of these activities quickly spread, generating heated online discussions across the region. In China, for instance, web forums and social media networks were awash with indignation at the deportation of the Hong Kong activists and the tenacity of the Japanese right-wingers.Footnote ⁷⁶

It should be clear from these developments that the call to open up the ‘black box’ of state-centric International Relations has merit. It guides the analysis towards data that other approaches would ignore. However, attention to the actions of domestic non-state actors has been a theme in both liberal and poststructuralist scholarship on the Diaoyu/Senkaku Island dispute.Footnote ⁷⁷ What is more, it is not yet an explanation in its own right. The question remains what a procedural, situational interpretation of this expanded selection of data can contribute.

If we follow Qin's approach, then the process that unfolds between the Japanese and Chinese governments should develop its own rationale and should shape the identities of the different actors. In an analysis of China-ASEAN relations, Qin and Wei argue that the informal process of the ‘ASEAN way’ has succeeded at transforming the role structure between the actors from a hostile to a non-hostile one, has produced norms that all sides internalise, and has prompted the actors to sustain the process even when this has not served their national interest.Footnote ⁷⁸ If we accept Qin and Wei's reasoning that process generally leads to such outcomes, can similar patterns then also be observed in the conflict-laden relation between China and Japan in the East China Sea?

At first sight, the argument that the interaction process between the governments produces norms and sustains non-hostile relations seems to be confirmed by the official statements on both the Japanese and the PRC side. Despite the long history of animosities between these parties and the repeated eruption of the Diaoyu/Senkaku conflict, both sides keep reiterating their commitment to the interaction itself, even after the recent spike in tensions. On the Japanese side, this has included foreign ministry press releases and op-eds emphasising that ‘Japan is committed to continue dealing with the current situation in a calm manner from a broad perspective’ and that the government ‘stands ready to stabilize relations with China’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Chinese Communist Party general secretary Xi Jinping has similarly emphasised most recently that his administration ‘wants to promote the strategic relationship of mutual benefit with Japan from broad perspectives’.Footnote ⁸⁰ In addition, the interaction has provided each government with the opportunity to construct a collective identity – in the Japanese case ‘a responsible and democratic country in the Asia-Pacific region’, and in the case of the PRC ‘a peace-loving Chinese nation’.Footnote ⁸¹

However, can we conclude from such statements that the interaction constitutes a self-sustaining process that leads to order and harmony in the region? Several points make this an unlikely explanation. Firstly, the argument that process automatically leads from hostility to cooperation to friendship confronts Qin's procedural constructivism with the same problem that liberal teleologies face: if the relationship between China and Japan is on track towards harmony, then why does the Diaoyu/Senkaku Island conflict keep flaring up? Also, if processes have such a teleological rationale, then how precisely does this rationale work? The burden of persuasively answering these questions lies with the procedural constructivists. Secondly, the argument does not fit all of the evidence. While I have cited quotes that indeed substantiate Qin's argument, the documents also contain strong claims to national sovereignty and territorial integrity, and none of these claims seems to weaken over time. In this regard, at least, the process has either no transformative effect, or it possibly entrenches the norms of sovereignty and non-intervention. Thirdly, it is not clear that the process indeed leads the actors to behave in contradiction with their ‘national interests’. Not only am I sceptical of Qin's previous attempts to identify such interests for the Chinese case, I am also curious why he seems to imply that such interests remain largely stable throughout a sustained interaction.Footnote ⁸² If we take the axioms of procedural constructivism serious, then I would assume that the process radically reshapes ‘national interests’ along with identities, norms, and values – but that is not what the evidence in this case suggests. Finally, I am not convinced by Qin's argument that processes of identification develop and sustain their own intrinsic logic. Considering Qin's critique of the mainstream constructivist assumption that ideational structures exist a priori and detached from actors, his attempt to similarly divorce processes from the actors and treat them as phenomena that are ‘un-owned’ and ‘of themselves’ seems inconsistent.Footnote ⁸³ The effect is that such a move deletes any agency from processes and no longer ask what roles governments, businesses, interest groups, and so on (whether Chinese or otherwise) play in bringing processes about.

The reference to ‘un-owned’ teleological process thus seems unhelpful in explaining territorial disputes such as those in the East China Sea, where the interaction oscillates between hostile and conciliatory actions. A more promising line of inquiry is Shih's argument that interactions consist of open-ended performances in which actors attribute and adopt different roles. In fact, if we allow for the idea that such performative behaviour transgresses borders as well as the categories of ‘state’ and ‘non-state’, then we are left with an interpretive framework that might explain why the actors in the Diaoyu/Senkaku Island dispute seem to be both ‘A’ and ‘non-A’, that is, both hostile and cooperative. The key questions in such an approach are how actors adopt and perform certain roles in certain interactions, and what happens when these interactions challenge an actor's self-image, causing a loss of ‘face’. A full analysis along these lines would arguably require additional empirical work that I am not in a position to provide here, for instance qualitative interviews with actors, participant observation, and detailed process tracing based on archival work.Footnote ⁸⁴ Nevertheless, the available information from official and media sources on the 2012 dispute allows at least a tentative step in this direction.

In a framework that examines performative behaviour, the agents enact their roles in dynamic relations with a diverse range of other agents. For instance, citizens in the PRC, the ROC, or Hong Kong perform their nationalist attitudes vis-á-vis a foreign other (‘the Japanese’) on online stages in front of an audience of their peers, thereby pledging their commitment to this imagined ‘in-group’. Any offensive action by a member of the perceived ‘out-group’ then necessitates renewed commitment in the form of additional nationalist gestures, such as additional online comments, public protest, or activism. Meanwhile, intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and other public figures use the opportunity to promote their often diverging agendas in relation to the on-going protests. Such interactions have domestic ramifications, since they prompt government officials to adjust their own behaviour in line with or opposition to the rapidly shifting public discourse. They also have transnational ramifications, eliciting a parallel dynamic of performances in Japan. This shifting terrain of social practices and discursive statements provides a dynamic network of meanings, in which official agents have to locate their own role. This includes the staff of the Japan Coast Guard and Chinese PLA, who have to develop ‘appropriate’ behaviour in the face of the respective other as well as their peers. It also includes the actions of civilian officials, such as foreign ministry staff and ultimately state leaders, who navigate these dynamic interactions in search of performative solutions that make them appear credible to the various players while remaining true to their own conception of self.

In such a complex assemblage, it is not surprising if the performance of one actor clashes with the expectations of other actors, all of whom are waiting for certain cues to sustain their role-play. Confounded expectations can thus lead to very real tears in the ‘structures of feeling’ that the various actors have collectively knit.Footnote ⁸⁵ This is how the indignation of nationalists can shift from the foreign other to compatriots who do not play according to the script, for instance by driving Japanese cars, calling for tolerance, or emphasising dialogue. The statements that official actors produce during such interactions, for instance policy documents, press releases, white books, etc., consequently consist of different templates, each drawing from a different script, and each stencilling its individual pattern into the resulting discourse. The outcomes are documents with seemingly contradictory statements, for instance advocating both stern opposition against violations of territorial sovereignty and collaboration to diffuse the situation.Footnote ⁸⁶ However, these inconsistencies are not contradictions to those who know how to decode the various patterns and apply the appropriate script to the relationship.

An interactionist model that emphasises the situatedness of agents and their actions thus seems like a fruitful approach to understand complex, conflict-laden processes. A prerequisite for such endeavour is, however, that theorists abandon their commitment to teleological grand-narratives. The brief discussion of the Diaoyu/Senkaku Island conflict has shown that the processes that characterise this complex interaction have no intrinsic quality that exists outside of the actors and their performances. In other words, the processes are neither good nor bad in their own right, but receive these qualities through the judgements of those involved in them.