The Online Colloquium of the summer term 2026 by the Research Training Group GRK 2833 “East Asian Futures” will start off with a lecture by Dr. Sinan CHU. You are cordially invited to attend.

Dr. Sinan CHU (German Institute for Global and Area Studies)
“Back to the Future: Alternative Visions for World Politics from China and Their Challenge to Knowledge Decolonization”
Tuesday, April 7, 2026, 6–8 pm (Central European Summer Time)

Abstract
The People’s Republic of China has emerged as an important actor in 21st-century world politics. Many scholars, journalists, and analysts have looked to China, particularly its historical and contemporary experience, for inspiration in addressing present and future challenges in domestic and international politics. Critical discussions of Eurocentrism and knowledge decolonization across the social sciences and humanities offer further incentives to appreciate the value of counter-discourses from non-Western sites, such as China, that contest Western academic paradigms. For its part, both the Chinese party-state and the academic community have been actively promoting various visions of national and global governance, which, according to their proponents, are not only different from but also superior to those of the “West.” Yet critics are quick to point out the often implicit Sinocentrism, self-Orientalism, and binary thinking (China vs. West) in those visions, as well as their tendency to legitimize the party-state’s domestic and foreign policy interests. How should we continue the task of decolonizing knowledge production without surrendering the possibility of critically engaging with those alternative visions that could be instrumentalized to support equally problematic practices and ideas of non-Western actors, such as China? In this talk, I will first survey various alternative visions for world politics offered by Chinese state and non-state actors. I will then situate these ideas and discourses within the broad context of knowledge production in contemporary China and the global academic discussion to assess their value and limitations. In the third and final step, I will focus on the challenges these alternative visions pose to ongoing efforts to critique Eurocentrism and decolonize knowledge in the social sciences and humanities.

Bio
Dr. Sinan CHU is a research fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA), Institute for Asian Studies, specialising in legitimacy in global governance, nationalism and ethnicity in China, and global international relations. He holds a doctoral degree in political science from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, New York and is an editor of the Journal of Current Chinese Affairs. Since 2025, he is a principal investigator of the DFG project “Intellectual Contestation over China’s Multiethnic Regime”. His recent publications include “Legitimation Dynamics of Emerging Power-Led Global Governance Institutions: The Case of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank” (in The Chinese Journal of International Politics 18(4), 2025, with Heike HOLBIG), and “The Chinese IR Trio and Good International Citizenship” (in edited volume Good International Citizenship and Non-Western International Relations, 2025).

Organizer
Research Training Group 2833 “East Asian Futures: Visions and Realizations on National, Transregional and Global Scales”, Ruhr University Bochum and University of Duisburg-Essen.

Access to the meeting
https://ruhr-uni-bochum.zoom-x.de/j/66094433723?pwd=R1PCp520vqQziv21IBvgVXID7cZt7q.1
Meeting ID: 660 9443 3723 | Password: 150661