Exclusive Interview With Professor Chengxin Pan: Relational and Quantum Thinking in World Politics

From Current Digest of the Chinese Press, October 11, 2026. Complete text:

EXPERT OPINION

Editors’ Note. – Chengxin Pan is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Macau. His research focuses on critically rethinking dominant frameworks of global politics, particularly through relational approaches that challenge state-centric and binary assumptions. In recent years, he has advanced innovative perspectives by incorporating relational and quantum-inspired thinking into the study of world politics (see his latest article here).

Professor Pan is co-editor of China’s Rise and Rethinking International Relations Theory (Bristol University Press, 2022) and has published in leading journals such as European Journal of International Relations, Review of International Studies, International Theory, The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, and Millennium: Journal of International Studies. His broader research also explores “ontological (in)security” in Australia’s China debate and the role of discourse and “Othering” in global politics.

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Q. – Your research engages with both international relations theory and contemporary global issues, particularly China’s role in world politics. What first drew you to this area of study, and how has your research focus developed over time?

A. – It is difficult to pinpoint what that “first” was, but I remember becoming vaguely aware of world politics through listening to daily radio news after dinner during my primary school years: mostly about wars, like the 1979 China-Vietnam war, the 1982 UK-Argentina war over the Falkland/Malvina Islands, and the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. I was baffled by what those countries were fighting for.

My intellectual entanglement with this field of study has coincided with the period of China’s rise on the world stage and growing scrutiny of China by Western media and academia. So perhaps it was no coincidence that my PhD thesis turned out be about China’s rise, or more precisely, Western discourses about China’s rise. The seeds for this interest were first sown when I spent a year as a visiting scholar at the University of Melbourne, where I could read freely without any pressure whatsoever, certainly without any publication expectations. My roaming in the Baillieu Library exposed me to the so-called Third Debate already raging at the time, which brought me to fascinating postpositivist ideas about the not-so-innocent role of “knowledge” and discourse in the often binary construction of identity and social reality. It was also during that free roaming that I found my future PhD supervisor, Dr. Jim George, at the Australian National University, whose work was integral to that debate.

Q. – You have written extensively on China’s rise and how it is understood in global politics. How does your relational approach offer a different way of interpreting China’s growing role compared to more conventional perspectives?

A. – My PhD research (later revised and published as the book Knowledge, Desire and Power in Global Politics: Western Representations of China’s Rise) critically questioned the dominant discourses of China as either a threat or an opportunity, or both. But what is China’s rise then? Or what should alternative interpretations of China look like? For a while, I didn’t have any coherent answers myself.

Then, during my visit to Beijing in 2016-2017, I stumbled upon the concept of holographic relations, and I realized that China might just be a holographic part of a whole, meaning that it contains the whole (the world) as well as being part of it. So I call China’s rise a kind of holographic transition: it is not only a relational phenomenon, but also a holographically relational one. Consequently, there is no such thing as an independently preexisting China; its being/becoming, for good or ill, has been conditioned by the world from which it constantly emerges and evolves.

For example, if the world is overwhelmingly a realist world of zero-sum power politics, then China might well take on such a quality and be perceived as a threat, but luckily the world is much more than a Hobbesian state of nature. Or if the world is governed by liberal rules, norms, and practices, then China might become deeply socialized into such a world. However, the world has never been purely liberal either, so the hope of transforming China in the Western image is bound to disappoint. In any case, the world is more complex and fluid than what realists and liberals would have us believe. What we see as “China” or what we find in “China” is not China per se, but a microcosm of the changing world.

Q. – In your analysis of US-China relations, you explore how China is often framed as a “threat.” What factors contribute to this perception, and how does it influence the dynamics of US-China relations?

A. – The China threat has been a central theme in US perceptions, even before China’s current rise. One of the most important contributing factors here is the dominant way in which the US imagines itself, as a city upon a hill, manifest destiny, the indispensable nation, the leader of the free world, and so forth. Such narratives have not only helped stabilize a particularly powerful American sense of self, but also profoundly shaped its relationship with other nations. Those nations are expected to follow the lead of the US, thus further reasserting American self-identity and ontological security. And the ultimate confirmation would be if a country as big and culturally different as China could be remade in America’s image. Yet China has repeatedly defied US liberal expectations, and this disillusionment plays into the American perception of the “China threat.” It is mainly a threat to the US’s ontological security and its cherished sense of self.

And conversely, China’s existence as an “intransigent” and formidable challenger can be turned into a negative proof that the US leadership continues to be “indispensable” in order to make the world “safe for democracy.”

Importantly, the powerful US military-industrial complex has been using the China threat as a convenient justification of its own relevance. As a US defense commentator notes, “Without the specter of a rising Chinese military, there would be no rationale for such a large fleet of American nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers, or for a new generation of stealth combat fighters – no rationale for about a quarter of the Pentagon’s budget.”

Given the ontological and institutional underpinnings of the “China threat,” this specter will likely haunt US-China relations for years to come.

Q. – Your work also looks at cases such as Australia–China relations and developments in the South Pacific. What do these examples reveal about how different countries perceive and respond to China’s rise in practice?

A. – Like the US, Australia has its own longstanding self-imagination that has shaped how it perceives China. Its proclaimed identity as a Western (if no longer white) liberal democratic country located on the edge of a populous Asian neighborhood has given rise to constant fear and anxiety about a potential Asian/Chinese invasion. Thus, Australia shares the China threat imagery with the US, and its relationship with China has been defined by this Self/Other logic.

On the other hand, China’s presence in the South Pacific goes back centuries, and the historical, economic, and cultural links between the two sides have allowed Pacific Islands countries, with some exceptions, to develop a more pragmatic view of China, which is evident in their growing bilateral and multilateral ties with this rising power. This, however, plays right into Australia’s longstanding fear of Chinese influence in its own “backyard,” a throwback to the colonial era when Australia acted as a sub-imperialist power in that region.

Q. – In your work, you often challenge familiar distinctions such as self and other, or hard and soft power. What do you see as the key limitations of these frameworks, and why is it important to move beyond them?

A. – Binary categories have a tight grip on our worldview. They are commonplace and almost irresistible because they provide much-prized clarity and certainty in an otherwise inherently uncertain and complex world. Self and Other, us and them, modernity and tradition, human and nature, civilization and barbarism, order and disorder, good and evil, democracy and autocracy, soft power and hard power (or sharp power), among other dichotomies, have provided some “stable” and reassuring hierarchical structures of meaning for people to anchor “themselves” ontologically.

The limitations of such structures relate precisely to their perceived usefulness: clarity and certainty in sense-making, and reliability as an intellectual and moral guide for policymaking. Instead of objectively reflecting reality, these dichotomous frameworks are particular ways of constructing it, with often unquestioned but highly problematic consequences. Their common agenda is to divide the world into fundamentally separate, self-contained units and entities, whose inherent connections with each other are obscured. The only relationship left is a hierarchical one, with the implication that one is better than, and hence should dominate and control, the other. When human society is conceptualized in such ways, war, colonialism, imperialism, genocide, exploitation, repression, and discrimination are too easily justified or tolerated.

The problems go deeper. Such violence and injustice often tragically reinforce the original binary ways of thinking, making moving beyond them extremely difficult. Yet this self-fulfilling potential is what makes it imperative that we question and transcend them. The world’s common and inseparable future depends on it.

Q. – Some of your research brings in ideas such as relationality and even concepts inspired by quantum theory. How do these perspectives help us better understand real-world international interactions and dynamics?

A. – For a discipline with “relations” in its name, until recently IR has paradoxically not taken “relations” very seriously. It is true that this discipline focuses on relations such as conflict, cooperation, war, diplomacy, and trade, but it treats relations as ontologically secondary to things, entities, or substances (e.g., states and other actors). This reflects the enduring influence of a substantialist or Newtonian ontology. To challenge and move beyond the binaries that have dominated mainstream IR theory and practice, I think we need to replace the substantialist/Newtonian ontology with some relational, post-Newtonian ontology. As a direct challenge to Newtonian or classical physics, quantum mechanics offers a logical alternative. While quantum mechanics is mostly concerned with the subatomic world, it has far-reaching metaphysical implications for how we understand the macroscopic world, such as international relations.

There are now a small but vibrant community of quantum IR scholars who embrace the metaphysical promise of quantum theory. Inspired and encouraged by their pioneering research, my own work focuses on understanding a particular approach, quantum holography, which draws primarily on the ideas of quantum physicist David Bohm, but also on some ancient holistic and holographic ideas about the relationship between the whole and parts. I find such ideas compelling and highly relevant to addressing many contemporary global challenges, such as great power relations, climate change, and global governance. The intractability of these challenges, I believe, lies fundamentally in our inability to see how within each part, such as a state, exists the whole, be it the regional neighborhood, the global economy, or the planetary ecosystem. The global is not simply a sum total of different parts or locales, but it is always enfolded and embedded in the latter, to varying degrees of course. The wellbeing of the whole and other parts is fundamentally entangled with that of any individual part. This holographic relational approach may hold the promise of helping overcome both the binary way of thinking and the collective action problem in IR.

It is heartening to see an increasing interest in quantum IR research, especially among some younger scholars. There remain skepticisms and criticisms about the relational and particularly quantum turns in IR. In many cases, such skepticisms and criticisms are healthy and constructive, forcing quantum IR scholars to clarify their concepts, assumptions, and methodologies, and to demonstrate how their often highly metaphysical approaches can be applied to empirical research or real-world issues. Addressing these largely legitimate concerns while experimenting quantum thought on IR will have to be a collective and ongoing effort, and I hope my research would make a small contribution to this exciting and always challenging endeavor.