Boundary, complementarity, and language : the making of a 'Rising China'

This thesis explores complementarity and its potential as an analytical tool for the social sciences. Defined by mutual exclusivity and joint completeness, complementarity remains underexplored in the recent quantum turn in International Relations (IR). Through a critical engagement with quantum complementarity, developed by Niels Bohr, and Daoist complementarity, one of the key theoretical strands of classical Daoist philosophy, and with Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action as a bridge, this thesis develops the analytical framework of boundary-making. This framework advances two propositions. First, the boundary is understood as the holism of the actualisation of certain pairs of complementarity and the certain polarity within that pair. Second, the agency of boundary-making derives from nothingness, which functions both as the ontological complementarity of presence and non-presence and as the contextually complementary void through which a relational whole is constituted. The framework shows that seemingly concrete, discrete, and determinate entities in the social sciences, especially IR, are inevitably endowed with the quantum properties of indeterminacy and invisibility, observable only by deconstructing and reconstructing their complementary traces. The thesis then turns to the measurement of boundary through a theoretical diffraction between complementarity and language. Drawing on Bohr’s notion of embodied concepts and the Daoist heuristic of the useless language, it proposes the grammar of complementarity as an analytical cut to discourse analysis. To examine this framework, the thesis analyses the phenomenon of China’s rise through two experiments, the Belt and Road Initiative and China’s Covid-19 policy, in order to reveal the dynamics of complementary properties whose mutual exclusion and transformation illuminate Chineseness-in-the-making. Situated at the intersection of the relational turn, the quantum turn, and Global IR (the Chinese School), this thesis offers a thought experiment on the ontological balance between relationality and individuality, reimagining a world suspended between determinacy and indeterminacy.