Emphasizing the need to focus on how we study China might sound like an invitation to walk down an already well-trodden path. After all, IR debates on China's rise (and there are many of them) have devoted considerable time and space to discussions of the relative merits of realist assertions that China simply cannot rise peacefully (Mearscheimer, 2006; Allison, 2017), and liberal expectations that this rise can indeed be accommodated by the existing liberal global order (Ikenberry, 2008). Of course, dig a little deeper and it's not hard to find exceptions, as a range of different theoretical positions have been deployed to try and analyse and understand China, and predict what China's rise means for the future of the world. Nevertheless, if you step back and take a panoramic view of the writings on China's rise as a whole, then the continued dominance of these two major theoretical contenders is rather conspicuous.

There are good reasons for this. These two theoretical positions are not only the most often used in IR scholarship, but have also been the most influential in terms of debating policy options (particularly in the US). Even so, many have found their dominance rather unsatisfying. So unsatisfying, in fact, that some have questioned their efficacy for understanding China at all. Rather than truly being universal international theories, so the argument goes, they are instead culturally and historically specific with realism in particular – but not just realism – built on a study of a European history that has nothing to do with China's or Asia's experiences (Hui, 2004). As they are ‘inductively derived from the European experience of the past four centuries, during which Europe was the locus and generator of war, innovation, and wealth’ (Kang, 2003: 57), why should we expect them to have explanatory power when applied to a very different part of the world with very different experiences of statehood and conflict? Even IR theories that have been developed in opposition to the mainstream tend to do so by building on European history and overwhelmingly were developed by Western theorists (Acharya and Buzan, 2007).