RESEARCH ARTICLE Mainstream IR Theoretical Perspectives and Rising China Vis-À-Vis the West: The Logic of Conquest, Conversion and Socialisation Young Chul Cho 1 & Yih-Jye Hwang 2 # Journal of Chinese Political Science/Association of Chinese Political Studies 2019 Abstract The aim of this article is to critically examine how the mainstream International Relations (IR) theoretical perspectives — realist, liberalist, and constructivist — make sense of the relationships between Self and Others in explaining the rise of China in IR. Our argument is two-fold. First, although mainstream IR perspectives are believed to produce objective, neutral, scientific, and universal knowledge about reality and how the world works, they are not value-free explanations but normative approaches that serve the US/West hege- mony, and Orientalism appears to constitute the hidden normative underpinning of those perspectives. Second, considering mainstream IR perspectives as problem-solving ap- proaches for the hegemonic US/West reveals that the hegemonic Self uses the logic of conquest, conversion, and socialisation to deal with the Other, rising China. Keywords IR theoretical perspectives . Rising China . Self/Other . East Asia . International relations Introduction Since the end of the Cold War, the study of the rise of China has boomed in international relations (IR) studies. IR scholars, along with practitioners and journalists, have tried to understand how China might follow, influence, and revise the current Journal of Chinese Political Science https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-019-09620-3 * Young Chul Cho youngchul.cho@gmail.com Yih-Jye Hwang y.c.huang@luc.leidenuniv.nl 1 The School of International Studies, Chonbuk National University, Rm. 214, Global Leaders Hall, 54896 Jeonju, South Korea 2 Leiden University College, Leiden University, Rm. 4.13, Anna van Buerenplein 301, The Hague 2595, The Netherlands