China is no longer rising, it has risen. This research project critically examines the evolving global order in an era marked by the decline of unipolar dominance and the rise of inter-imperial competition.

Specifically, we seek to better understand and explain China’s changing global practices. Our aim is to conceptualize China as a learning empire. It delves into China’s pursuit of economic, political, and technological autonomy as it seeks to insulate itself from external pressures and reshape its domestic landscape. At the same time, the project investigates how these efforts inadvertently generate new dependencies in global trade, finance, or technology networks.

In contrast to some historical empires, including aspects of China’s past imperial dynasties, the novel Chinese empire is less about territorial conquest and more about informal influence in the domestic spheres of other states and over value chains and a range of infrastructures abroad. We will investigate empire within China’s large and expanding network of peripheries created by means of a number of imperial practices. These differ from the practices attributed to US “hegemony” during and especially after the Cold War, where relations are seen as characterized by consensual leadership, shared norms, and multilateralism.

We investigate five imperial practices to address the question of how Chinese policymakers and associated state-business and other networks are creating a novel empire:
● Control over economic structures, i.e., establishing control over, or centrality within, infrastructure and value chains largely outside Western economies;
● Intermediary creation, i.e., cultivating foreign partners who support the imperial center in exercising influence;
● Divide and rule, i.e., the segmentation of a variety of foreign elite actors through heterogeneous contracting;
● Ideational binding, i.e., propagating ideas and cultivating acceptance among others in the process of becoming a center of knowledge production;
● Threats and use of force, i.e., using threatening signals and various types of violence to secure the party-state.

While China is not pursuing a “grand strategy” to achieve global supremacy and displace the “American” order, many of its emerging practices have an imperial quality, i.e., they produce center-periphery relations that contribute to safeguarding the autonomy and security of the party-state. By integrating both theoretical insights and empirical evidence, this research project aims to unravel the complex interplay between China’s drive for self-sufficiency and the emerging interdependencies that characterize China’s changing international practices and their impact on global order.

We explore this in the areas of science (Anna Ahlers), space (Nadine Godehardt), digital (Maximilian Mayer), green technology (Tobias ten Brink), AI/semiconductors (Gunther Schubert), ideology (Matthew Stephen), resources (Wiebke Rabe) and finance (myself).

As part of this project, Wiebke Rabe, Tobias ten Brink and I are organising a special issue on China’s changing role in global order.

Check out the CfP for our workshop here: