ABSTRACT
In general, the Chinese understanding of Western IR theories is still very limited, despite the growing number of Chinese translations of Western works and increasing number of educational exchanges in recent years. There is as yet little scholarly work done comparing China’s international studies with that of the West. When Chinese IR scholars say that they should learn from the west, they do not have a clear idea as to what to learn from or how to pro-ceed. What they have in mind is largely the realist or neo-realist model. Rarely do they refer to structuralist thinking. Little mention is made of the pluralist school … The pluralist school, which grew out of dissatisfaction among scholars with the realist, power, state-centric approach, stresses the importance of the individual as the basic unit of analysis.
