East or West, Chinese experience is the best: A social interpretation of the Chinese IR Sino-centric tradition

This article offers a social interpretation of the Sino-centric epistemic tradition in Chinese International Relations (IR). It reconstructs the transfer of knowledge from foreign IR to Chinese IR by examining how trust – structured by familiarity and shared academic norms – has shaped Chinese IR scholars’ engagement with external intellectual resources. Drawing on this model, the article identifies the mechanisms through which Sino-centrism has emerged, persisted and shifted over time. Because academic norms in China and abroad have never fully converged, trust between Chinese IR scholars and their foreign counterparts has remained only partially stable. Consequently, Chinese IR scholarship has long exhibited a propensity to privilege Chinese experience, even though the intensity of this inclination has varied over time and differed from scholar to scholar. It is precisely this fluctuation combined with its continued presence that renders the task of disentangling Chinese IR from the influence of this epistemic tradition a necessarily prolonged and intricate challenge.