Chinese Whispers? China and Europe Miscommunicate the Multipolar Partnership Narrative

Richard McMahon and Zhang Yixuan identify what they call the multipolar partner narrative (MPN) as China’s enduring post-Cold War master representation of European integration. It portrays the EU as an important rising power and therefore a natural ally in China’s drive to replace America’s unipolar global hegemony with a multipolar order. Is this MPN a case of flawed transcultural conversation among representations? Does it reflect careful Chinese attention to actual European thinking.or do politicization, complexities, obstructions and wishful thinking in the transcultural translation of political representations distort Chinese understandings of how Europeans represent their own international identity and relationships with China and the US. To answer this question, I break the complex MPN narrative down into its multiple separate assumptions. I ask in turn how realistically the MPN represents European representations of European international identity, the US and China. I find that Europe’s increasing obvious failure to follow its MPN script is leading Chinese discourse to seek new representations, potentially signalling an epochal transformation of China-EU relations. Transcultural misunderstandings and miscommunications among discursive representations may therefore play a crucial role in identity construction, China-EU relations and international relations more broadly.