Norms, Storytelling and International Institutions in China: The Imperative to Narrate

This book is a political ethnography of norm diffusion and storytelling through international institutions in China. It is driven by intellectual puzzles as well as realpolitik questions: are we converging or diverging on values? Do emerging powers reinforce or reshape the existing international order? Are international institutions socialising emerging powers or are they being used to promote alternative norms? This book addresses these questions through fieldwork-based research over the period of three years at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) office in China, the first international development agency to enter post-reform China in 1979. It provides a crucial case to study the everyday practices of norm diffusion in the context of emerging powers, and highlights the central role of storytelling in translating and contesting normative scripts. The book selects norms in the areas of human rights, rule of law and development cooperation to analyse how translators and brokers innovatively use personal and country-specific stories to advocate, at the same time absorbing cultural and ideological elements. Showing how normative stories move back-and-forth between spaces and orders, this book provides a new perspective on norm diffusion as a process that disrupts and redefines local-global boundaries.