The rise of China/East Asia and the perceived decline of the US/West pose an emerging question about how International Relations (IR) Theory should respond to this change. Increasingly, there have been heated discussions within the Chinese IR academia over a desirable Chinese contribution to IR Theory, particularly the possibility of building a distinctive Chinese IR Theory. Inevitably, this drive towards theorizing from Chinese perspectives also creates backlash among not only Western but also other Chinese scholars as they question the 'nationalistic' if not 'hegemonic' discourse of the scholarship. Drawing on the sociology of scientific knowledge framework, this article examines the linkages between the vibrant dynamics of the Chinese theoretical debates and the actual practices of Chinese scholars in realizing their claims. It suggests that this investigation can serve as a springboard into a better appreciation of the theory-practice and powerknowledge relationships in the context of Chinese IR.

In this paper we consider the problem of small time local attainability (STLA) for nonlinear finite-dimensional time-continuous control systems in presence of state constraints. More precisely, given a nonlinear control system subjected to state constraints and a closed set S, we provide sufficient conditions to steer to S every point of a suitable neighborhood of S along admissible trajectories of the system, respecting the constraints, and giving also an upper estimate of the minimum time needed for each point to reach the target. Methods of nonsmooth analysis are used.

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