Policy Press
This book shows how engaging China’s history can contribute to our search for global foundations of international thought. It examines international thought in ancient China, Chinese international relations in deep world history, and the evolution of contemporary Chinese academic IR as intellectual history.

A rich and enlightening study of Chinese international relations, this book shows how engaging China’s history can contribute to our search for global foundations of international thought. It examines international thought in ancient China, Chinese international relations in deep world history, and the evolution of contemporary Chinese academic IR as intellectual history.

Offering a distinctive English School perspective, this volume is a call to put studies of Chinese international relations in their proper historical context, arguing that such an approach leads to a better understanding of Chinese ideas and statecraft and contributes to a fruitful pursuit of IR knowledge production in the construction of global IR.

“The best book on China in International Relations because in rethinking its long history in a non-Eurocentric global context, it also tells us new things about the international system today.” John M. Hobson, University of Sheffield

Yongjin Zhang is Professor of International Politics at the University of Bristol.

Introduction

Part 1: International Thought in Ancient China

1. The Idea of Order in Ancient Chinese Political Thought

2. World Ordering in Confucian Moralpolitik

Part 2: Chinese World Ordering before the West

3. System, Empire, and State in Chinese World Ordering

4. The Tribute System as International Society

5. Europeans in Pax Sinica, 1513–1793

6. China in European Worlding, 1500–1800

Part 3: Chinese World Ordering as Intellectual History

7. Chinese World Ordering as History of Ideas

8. The ‘International Turn’ in Chinese Intellectual History

Epilogue: Reimagining the International