How has China’s behaviour in world politics changed? Has it become a new kind of empire? What imperial strategies is it employing, and what effect are they having?

Our ‘Learning Empire: Autonomy, Dependence, and China’s Emerging Imperial Practices’ Research Unit starts from the idea that China changed its international strategy in 2013, when Xi Jinping came to power. Before that, China followed a policy of “keeping a low profile” in global politics. After 2013, Chinese leaders and business elites began moving beyond simply joining the Western-led global order (especially the one shaped by the United States) and started learning how to build global hierarchies centered on China.

To understand and analyze this essential change, our project employs a novel conceptual framework which we adopt acrpss eight sub-projects which each center on four main objectives:

• Understanding policy learning. We examine how and why Chinese decision-makers adapt their goals, policies, and implementation as China acts as a rising power shaping Sinocentric hierarchies. The projects analyze how domestic and international experiences shape learning within China’s bureaucracy and how the party-state seeks coherence across state and business actors, including the partial emergence of “imperial capital.”
• Investigating imperial practices. We explore how Chinese policymakers and state–business–science networks construct a novel form of empire. Projects study practices such as building centrality in transnational economic structures, creating intermediaries, divide-and-rule strategies, ideological binding, and the use or threat of force.
• Analyzing outcomes. We assess the results of these practices in terms of autonomy and dependence. It examines whether the party-state achieves greater autonomy and whether foreign actors become dependent on the PRC.
• Theorizing empire. We further develop the RU’s conceptual and theoretical framework for studying empire. While this work will deepen in the second funding period, the first period already advances concepts such as peripheralization and typologies of imperial practices and peripheries.

The Research Unit (FOR 5913/1), led by Tobias ten Brink of Constructor University, Bremen, is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.