Mirroring Hegemony: China’s discursive contestation of the ‘Liberal International Order’

Solomon, Dani

Abstract

Contemporary analyses of the crisis of the ‘liberal international order’, and the threat posed to it by China, are deficient. These accounts are based on a particular understanding of the international, and an assumption that China’s contestation of existing power relations is necessarily ‘disordering’. At the same time, the combination of compliance and contestation in China’s international practices is interpreted as ‘paradoxical’. This thesis argues that there is no paradox: China complies with the fundamental rules and institutions of international order, and its contestation is reserved for the power relations which structure Western-led liberal hegemony. The concept of the ‘liberal international order’, with its assumption that liberal hegemony and international order are coterminous, is, this thesis argues, an ideological construct, discursively fusing two different concepts with productive effects: it implies that liberal domination is essential to international order, and that opposition to this domination is necessarily illiberal, and self-evidently disordering. Furthermore, in granting authorial agency for the production of international order to Western actors, the role of the global South in co-producing international order, and the centrality of the South to the liberal hegemonic project, is effaced. This thesis uses this apparent ‘paradox’ in China’s practices as a lens to disarticulate the concept of the ‘liberal international order’, and to reveal, as through a mirror, certain features of liberal hegemony which are missing from accounts of the ‘liberal international order’. This highlights the role of discursive power within hegemony, as well as the central role of the global South within both the liberal hegemonic project, and the Chinese counterhegemonic project. The thesis further observes that, while China represents itself as an entirely different type of international actor from the West, its counterhegemonic discourses and practices take the form of ‘mirroring’ those discourses and logics which are fundamental to liberal hegemony: this raises important questions about how we can understand China’s counterhegemonic project.

Citation

Solomon, D. Mirroring Hegemony: China’s discursive contestation of the ‘Liberal International Order’. (Thesis). SOAS University of London

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Jun 20, 2025
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 20, 2025
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.25501/SOAS.00506376
• Additional Information: 358 pages
• Award Date: 2025