Narrating mellowness? Political soundness of “Chinese schools” of international relations

Abstract

The rise of China has sparked growing scholarly interest in its political and philosophical thought, including the “Chinese schools” of international relations (IR). With this article, we add to the scholarship by asking two questions: which of these schools are mobilised in Chinese elite political narratives, and what explains their discursive visibility? We analyse the presence of relational theory, moral realism, tianxia, and gongsheng in Chinese political communication. Drawing on Chinese narratives of the United States between 2013 and 2024, we show that motifs associated with all four schools appear in official discourse, yet gongsheng is invoked more consistently and coherently than the others. To explain this patterned selectivity, we refine and operationalise the concept of political soundness as a framework for assessing the viability of narratives in politically constrained environments. We argue that gongsheng exhibits comparatively high political soundness, which accounts for its greater portability and resilience in the face of diplomatic contestation. With this article, we contribute both an empirical mapping of school-specific motifs in elite discourse and a transferable analytical tool for studying the uptake of IR theories in politically bounded settings.