The Resurgence of Ideology under Xi Jinping and International Relations Scholarship in China

Abstract This article examines how the increased emphasis on ideology under Xi Jinping has impacted Chinese IR scholarship published in Chinese- and English-language academic journals, as well as research funding awarded by the National Planning Office for Philosophy and Social Sciences. It finds that ideological concepts featured increasingly prominently in awarded research funding and published scholarship the longer Xi Jinping has been in office. Considerable decreases in thematic diversity were noticeable in funding and publications. The article finds that the resurgence of ideology further exacerbated differences between scholars who are relatively close to the state and scholars who are more distant from the state. Close scholars publish more on ideological concepts, but their scholarship is also characterized by a higher degree of thematic diversity than distant scholars’. Drawing on scholars’ biographical data, publicly available data on research funding, and bibliometric data collected from Chinese- and English-language academic journals, this article offers a systematic account of the status quo of the IR discipline in China. In addition, it offers insights into the conditions for social science scholarship under authoritarian rule by proposing a novel conceptualization and measurement of scholars’ proximity to the state, which could also be applied to other authoritarian settings.