Interstate Relations and China’s Unification in 221 BCE: A Lesson for Modern International Relations Theory

Dingxin Zhao of the University of Chicago will present a talk on how the nature of the interstate relation in China's history help us understand what international relations would look like according to neorealism principles.

Dingxin Zhao, Associate Professor, Sociology, University of Chicago

Date:      Friday, April 10, 2009
Time:     4:00 PM to 6:00 PM
Place:    IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor

In comparison with the nature of the international relations in early modern Europe, the interstate politics during Spring Autumn and Warring States China (770-221 BCE) lacked three related ideas-cum-institutions to construct a European-like international order: sovereignty, international law and international society. The lack of the regulative power of these norms, in conjunction with early China’s highly successful state-empowering Legalistic reforms, facilitated the rise of an interstate order that highly resembled an international order understood by the modern neorealist international relations scholars. This interstate order pushed every state to behave as an egoistic entity, undermined any sustainable counterbalancing attempts toward aggressors, and facilitated the unification of China under the Qin Empire. This nature of the interstate relation and its outcomes provide an ideal “controlled experiment” case for us to understand what international relations would look like once they are understood and organized according to the neorealism principles, which in turn shows the limitation of neorealism international theories and the importance of norms in international politics.