The concept behind this book is compelling, if not entirely original: “to question the notion of a rising Chinese nation by deconstructing the possibility of looking at China in its entirety” (p. 1). Although by now well-worn ground in literary and historical circles, the idea of a multiply sited “China” is not prevalent among international relations (IR) scholars who advance threat-based, realist models of China's rising. It is these models to which Shih attempts to provide an alternative, which he calls “Sinicized IR.” Shih never explicitly defines sinicization. However, it is clear that he does not use the term in the typical historian's sense, to refer to the cultural assimilation of non-Han peoples by Chinese. Rather, Shih follows Peter Katzenstein in taking sinicization to mean something like the ongoing adaptation and interaction of China's civilizational identity with new global processes, on the part of a variety of actors and communities. To sinicize IR, as the book's title promises, thus means to engage in “a process of breaking the monopoly of European and North American IR and Chinese counter-IR,” which brings Chinese civilization into IR and “opens up endless opportunities for civilizational learning as well as individualized self-searching” (p. 6).

The attempt to mark and analyze these processes in a variety of sites and from diverse perspectives—from China's foreign policy in Africa, to the tension-ridden subject identities of overseas China scholars and “subalterns” in China's cities and villages—makes Shih's book a potentially valuable addition to international relations studies. Chapter 1 is one of the strongest in the book; it introduces the concept of “harmonious realism” to describe Chinese foreign policy, emphasizing the way in which its contradictory tensions between civilizational pride and nation-state- and territory-based realism create a “self-role conflict” whose essence is “undecidability” (p. 25). This concept is fleshed out with a short analysis of China's soft power politics in Africa in chapter 2, in which Shih argues that harmonious realism functions differently from traditional colonialism. The next two sections of the book purport to provide analysis of perspectives “beyond” and “below” China, by examining the ways in which intellectuals and urban/village Chinese respectively negotiate or give rise to images of China that trouble the monolithic narratives of nationalism or IR realism. The final section attempts to “world” East Asia through China.

To be successful in achieving its aim of “sinicizing IR,” the book must provide the kind of texture and detail adequate to convince skeptical readers not only that these interactive, civilizational processes are taking place, but also that their diversity has implications for significant matters of concern to IR scholars and China scholars more broadly. Unfortunately, not all of the chapters deliver on this promise, and many end up reinforcing the very kind of exclusions that Shih hopes to avoid. For example, in chapter 6, “Village Chinese: Anomaly as a Method of Chinese Transition,” Shih hopes to trouble the widespread teleological belief that China is “transitioning” to a liberal, capitalist state by providing “bottom-up, past-oriented, and inside-out perspectives that would allow the formation of discourse for the village masses,” which he identifies as the agents of transition in China (p. 98). In ten pages, Shih presents ten different “micro-processes” of transition, ranging from “quasi-transition” to “pseudo-transition,” and at the end of each explanation offers one short paragraph-length example of each. Oddly, many of the examples have nothing to do with village Chinese, and some mention village conditions only in passing. More importantly, none of these schematic examples present the voices or actions of these “subalterns” themselves, or explain how translating those (absent) voices into the alien academic metaphor of “transition” can avoid their further subalternization. This same hastiness of analysis, paired with disjointed content, is found in other chapters. Chapter 8, “Korean Asian: The Sinic Tribute System of China and Its Equals,” focuses primarily on Mizoguchi Yuzo's concept of Sinic kitai (essence) and draws in Korean discussions only briefly, spending nearly as much time on Mongolian and Southeast Asian examples. As in many chapters, there is often little direct presentation of primary evidence; the author tends to provide summaries or confident gestures (often toward his own previously published work) rather than direct exegesis of events, utterances, or strategies. It is therefore difficult at times to assess the author's claims about the phenomena under scrutiny: in his chapter on “Global Asian,” when Shih discusses the perspectives of four different overseas China scholars, it is impossible to distinguish between the claims these subjects made in interviews and the analysis of Shih himself. Unfortunately, these discrepancies mar the potential of the book to offer a much-needed, nuanced counter-argument to the easy stereotype of a “rising China.”