CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Tang, Jiawei |
|---|---|
| Title | The Chinese Discourse of International Order: A Genealogy of Chinese Post-Cold War Hegemonic State Project |
| Summary | The apparent contradictions in the Chinese state’s post-Cold War strategies towards the globalisation of the Liberal International Order (LIO), oscillating between state-centric security paranoia towards the West and liberalisation into the global economy, present a puzzle that existing literature fails to resolve. Dominant approaches either view the Chinese state’s actions as coherent and unitary or as evidence of fragmented governance, overlooking the polyvalent nature of Chinese state formation. This thesis addresses the critical gap in understanding how the Chinese state reconciles these seemingly opposing strategies through the rationalisation of its relationship with the post-Cold War international order. The central research question is: How was the Chinese hegemonic state project of international order configured to align divergent governmental rationalities such as geopolitical security and liberalisation? Drawing on Bob Jessop’s critical state theory, Laclau and Mouffe’s concept of hegemonic articulation, and Foucault’s studies of governmentality, this thesis conceptualises the hegemonic state project as a flexible policy paradigm that maintains a balance between disciplinary power and governmental management. It used thematic analysis of over 400 Chinese policy texts from the 1960s to the 1990s to trace the genealogy of China’s hegemonic state project of international order. The analysis demonstrates how the international order functioned as an indeterminate nodal point to relocate Maoist articulations of the people’s revolutionary passion and vitalism into the disciplinary rationality of geopolitics and governmental management of liberalisation. The findings suggest that the Chinese state’s articulations of geopolitical antagonism toward the West are not a straightforward challenge to the LIO but a passive revolution that reconfigured Maoist hegemony in relation to the emerging post-Cold War LIO. This reinterpretation challenges the conventional integration-challenge dichotomy in understanding contender states and highlights the polyvalence of hegemonic state projects to align heterogeneous governmental rationalities. |
| Supervisor | Merlingen, Michael |
| Department | International Relations MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/tang_jiawei.pdf |
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