What about the dragon in the room? Incorporating China into international political economy (IPE) teaching

Abstract

In recent years, IPE research has increasingly tried to better understand the nature and implications of China’s rise in a changing global landscape. However, in IPE teaching, China is often treated as an afterthought to a familiar transatlantic story. IPE students thereby are not adequately prepared to explain important developments in the 21st-century global economy, their underlying causes, mechanisms and particularities. This article provides a roadmap for rethinking the IPE curriculum. In an initial step, we suggest incorporating more comparative political economy into the teaching of IPE theories to create an analytical sensitivity for understanding (Chinese) state-market relationships that significantly diverge from Western-centric narratives. In a second step, these conceptual frameworks should be taken into account when teaching core IPE issue areas such as finance, development, production and trade, in which we argue China must be treated as an integral part rather than an outlier of IPE teaching. Such a revised curriculum, we argue, equips students with the conceptual tools and empirical knowledge for understanding diverging domestic institutional configurations of different economies, and thereby enables students to analyze, compare and critically evaluate fundamental assumptions and arguments about how the global economy functions in the context of a rising China.