This DFG-funded research unit, ‘Learning Empire: Autonomy, Dependence, and China’s Emerging Imperial Practices’, is organised into eight sub-projects centred on three main objectives and one additional objective that connects the first and second funding periods.

• 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.” Methods such as process tracing and discourse analysis are used to assess policy change and adaptation over time.

• 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. Through plausibility probes, the RU generates new empirical evidence and indicators to identify and assess these imperial practices.

• 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. The projects also analyze which actors and spaces are peripheralized and whether these relationships are predatory or productive.

• 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. A shared “Cooperation and Synthesis” work package supports collaboration and integrates findings across projects, enabling both comparative insights and theory development.