1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 4 4 4 4 4 4 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 15 Hegemony in Chinese? Ba in Chinese international relations Astrid Nordin Introduction Chinese international relations (IR) is often said to be heavily reliant on Western concepts, in particular the realist conceptualisation of hegemony (see for example Breslin, 2006). Since the 1980s, however, Chinese academic discourse has witnessed increasingly vocal calls to build a theory with ‘Chinese character- istics’. Under President Xi Jinping and his predecessor Hu Jintao, such calls have been bolstered, as the government turned to traditional Chinese thought for discursive resources in its international policy. In these discourses, China’s role in a future world order is formulated in direct relation, and often opposition, to what is portrayed as ‘Western theory’ and ‘Western hegemony’. This chapter examines the tensions of this relation through an exploration of the Chinese concept ba (霸), most commonly translated as ‘hegemony’, as it appears in con- temporary Chinese academic and policy discourse. These typically portray United States ba hegemony as the bad Other to the good Chinese Self. This chapter draws on resources from Chinese politicians and academics to explore how different the Chinese alternatives to ba or hegemony really are. Can thought that draws on Chinese rather than Western traditions imagine a better world leadership, beyond problematic hegemony? The irst section outlines the broad strokes of international debates concerned with the idea of hegemony. It pays speciic attention to the idea of China’s rise as a potential challenge to the current world order. The second section introduces Chinese governmental rhetoric, which has tried to reassure those who fear such a challenge by promising that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) will never seek hegemony. The third section turns to recent Chinese IR scholarship to analyse what such a claim might mean. It examines the use of ba in such accounts, showing how ba is not simply indicative of leadership, but also of immorality. The fourth and inal section examines how ba plays out in the work of prominent IR scholar Yan Xuetong, who has argued that China will constitute a new kind of ‘humane authority’. My central argument is that despite drawing on a Chinese tradition of thought, such visions of world order replicate the problematically hierarchical imagina- tion that they criticise in US/Western hegemony. Both ‘Western’ and ‘Chinese’ 530 15 Politics 15.indd 204 4/8/15 08:05:00