Making sense of a rising China: Perspectives from China and Anglo-America

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Tezin Türü: Doktora

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, İktisadi ve İdari Bilimler Fakültesi, Uluslararası İlişkiler Bölümü, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2019

Tezin Dili: İngilizce

Öğrenci: EMRE DEMİR

Danışman: Derya Göçer Akder

Özet:

China’s rapidly ascending status in the world order has sparked an intense debate among the contributors from diverse disciplines of social sciences from economics to politics. Most of these contributions, including the ones in the field of IR, have focused mainly on a single aspect of China’s transformation rather than analysing it from a number of facets. Furthermore, these studies have analysed China from their respective standpoints originating from their locations in the core-periphery structure of the world order and social sciences and also from their positions in the power-knowledge nexus. Thereby, the locality of the knowledge produced about China and its relations with power structures ought to be taken into consideration while examining the existing literature. This necessity is the point of departure of this thesis. This study is undertaken to scrutinize the heterogeneity of knowledge, the relationship between power and knowledge production and the region-centricity, in particular the Western-centricity, of knowledge production by analysing the discourse on the “(re-) rising” status of China in the world order from thirteen perspectives originating from China and North America. Within this scope, this thesis contributes to the efforts of diversifying intellectual knowledge on China and of decolonizing IR and provides a more comprehensive view on the debate of a “rising” China. This way, this study aims to reveal the influence of power and different weltanschauungen on knowledge production processes.