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China's Political Worldview and Chinese Exceptionalism Benjamin Ho Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 264 pp. €106.00 ISBN 978-94-6372-514-9
Observers of China's party-state will have noticed the increasing references to discourses of exceptionalism under Xi Jinping: China's institutional superiority versus the West; China's peaceful DNA; China's whole-process democracy as a new form of political civilization. While all nations are exceptional, Xi's effort to shore up the Party's ideological resilience emphasizes that China is more exceptional than most.
In China's Political Worldview and Chinese Exceptionalism, Benjamin Ho conducts a timely and in-depth study of the role of exceptionalism – being good and different from the West – in forming the worldview of Chinese political elite. Ho argues that only by incorporating China's desire for exceptionalism can we truly understand China's behaviour on the global stage. Using discourse analysis and expert interviews, each chapter unpacks how exceptionalism manifests itself in various aspects of China's worldview and political practice.
Chapter two deals with three prominent “Chinese” international relations (IR) theories: Yan Xuetong's moral realism, Qin Yaqing and Feng Zhang's constructivist relationality, and Zhao Tingyang's tianxia. What cuts through these various attempts at indigenizing IR theory is the effort to present China's approach to global politics as both unique and superior to Western thinking. However, compartmentalizing national forms of thinking is undercut by what the Polish-born sociologist Zygmunt Bauman calls “liquid modernity,” a condition of impermanence and fluidity of identity in the modern world. As Ho argues...