Geopolitical Triangle: How China’s European Studies Scholars Represent the EU

Academic EU Studies (EUS) is both a single transnational community and an assembly of separate national communities, each with different preoccupations, traditions and representations of European integration. This chapter examines how Chinese EUS represents European integration, based on interviews with leading scholars and a systematic study of the most cited English and Chinese-language articles. Drawing on sociology of knowledge and science studies work on the social sciences, the chapter contextualises these representations within the material conditions and historical development of Chinese EUS as a network of scholars and institutions. Two findings are particularly interesting. First, EUS scholarship in China resembles Western EUS in important ways. Like Western counterparts, Chinese EUS scholars focus on EU politics and policy, relegating China-EU relations and EU issues with a particular impact on China to a secondary interest. The Chinese scholars also share the general normative bias in EUS towards representing European integration in a positive light, especially if they co-author with Western scholars. Second, in response to challenges such as populism, institutional reform and the EU’s multiple crises, Chinese EUS scholars have moved away from the remarkable optimism about the long-term prospects of European integration that used to distinguish them from Western colleagues.