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Abstract
In international relations in the West, two main approaches to Chinese identity have emerged: the capability and the culture approaches. Though each takes a different view of China, they share common epistemological ground. positivism. This paper provides an overview of these two influential schools of thought and attempts to challenge their positivistic and ethnocentric assumptions about the identities of both China and the West. While they endeavour to make sense of China, particularly in the post-Cold War era, they fail to understand identity as a form of representation. From a critical perspective, both ‘China’ and the ‘West’ are social constructs: each in part constitutes the other. The relationship between them is always relational and fluid. Posing Chinese identity in positivist terms is not only misleading analytically, but potentially dangerous in practice. It is important, therefore, that alternative critical approaches to the complexities of Chinese identity be further explored.
Notes
1 I am grateful to Jim George and the reviewers and editors of this journal for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this article. An earlier version was presented at the Sixth Biennial Conference of the Chinese Studies Association of Australia at Murdoch University, Australia, July 1999. I wish to thank the Department of Political Science at the Australian National University for financing my trip to this conference.