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China dreams : 20 visions of the future
After celebrating their country's three decades of fantastic economic success, many Chinese are now asking, \"What comes next?\" How can China convert its growing economic power into political and cultural influence around the globe? William Callahan's China Dreams gives voice to China's many different futures by exploring the grand aspirations and deep anxieties of a broad group of public intellectuals. Stepping outside narrow politics of officials vs. dissidents, Callahan examines what a third group - \"citizen intellectuals\" - think about China's future. China Dreams eavesdrops on fascinating conversations between officials, scholars, soldiers, bloggers, novelists, film-makers and artists to see how they describe China's different political, strategic, economic, social and cultural futures. Callahan also examines how the PRC's new generation of twenty- and thirty-somethings is creatively questioning \"The China Model\" of economic development. The personal stories of these citizen intellectuals illustrate China's zeitgeist and a complicated mix of hopes and fears about \"The Chinese Century\", providing a clearer sense of how the PRC's dramatic economic and cultural transitions will affect the rest of the world. China Dreams explores the transnational connections between American and Chinese people, providing a new approach to Sino-American relations. While many assume that 21st century global politics will be a battle of Confucian China vs. the democratic west, Callahan weaves Chinese and American ideals together to describe a new \"Chimerican dream\". Explores the thinking of a new generation of China's young leaders and intellectuals ; Presents diverse sets of information from government documents, academic scholarship, blogs, film, and visual art ; Opens a window into China's own public debates about its future.--Publisher's website.
Book
Chinese Visions of World Order: Post-hegemonic or a New Hegemony?
Lately, there has been increasing interest among international relations (IR) scholars in Chinese thought, both as an alternative to Eurocentric IR, and because the PRC as an emerging power will soon have the institutional power to promote its view of the world. Rather than look for suitable Chinese parallels to \"international,\" \"security,\" or other mainstream concepts, this article will examine the concept of \"Tianxia All-under-Heaven\" to understand Chinese visions of world order. Tianxia is interesting both because it was key to the governance and self-understanding of over two millennia of Chinese empire, and also because discussion of Tianxia is becoming popular again in the twenty-first century as a Chinese model of world order that is universally valid. After outlining a popular discussion of the \"magnanimous\" and all-inclusive Tianxia system, the article will examine some of the theoretical problems raised by this reading of Tianxia, in particular how its approach to \"Otherness\" encourages a conversion of difference, if not a conquest of it. It will conclude that Tianxia's most important impact will not be on the world stage, but in China's domestic politics, where it blurs the conceptual boundaries between empire and globalism, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism. Hence rather than guide us toward a post-hegemonic world order, Tianxia presents a new hegemony where imperial China's hierarchical governance is updated for the twenty-first century.
Journal Article
Chinese Global Orders: Socialism, Tradition, and Nation in China-Russia Relations
While many use rational IR theory to explain Chinese foreign policy behavior, this paper follows global IR to employ interpretivist theory to examine how Chinese elites understand their country's role in the world. In particular, it explores the Chinese global order ideas of socialism, tradition, and nation through a comparative analysis of how they work in China-Russia relations, especially after China's 20th Communist Party Congress in 2022. The first section presents a critical analysis of the realist understanding of the China-Russia-U.S. strategic triangle. It argues that the socialist concept of ＂united front work＂ better explains Chinese (and Russian) policy in terms of short-term ＂tactical triangles.＂ To probe China's long-term global order ideas, the second section explores narratives of tradition to examine the concentric circles model of global order seen in Chinese tianxia and Russian Eurasianism. To understand these competing Russocentric and Sinocentric global orders, the third section explores how each country's official historiography highlights narratives of the nation and especially how national rejuvenation requires correcting the ＂national humiliation＂ of lost territories. Rather than see these narratives in a linear chronological history - i.e., from tradition to socialism to nationalism - this paper considers how they overlap in socialism, tradition, and nation, a non-linear dynamic triad of global order ideas. It concludes first that further research is necessary to examine the interrelation of these three narratives: while nation and tradition are often employed to support the overarching narrative of socialism in recent years, this could certainly change. The conclusion then argues that while these narratives may be coherent theoretically, they have not been very successful in achieving Beijing and Moscow's foreign policy objectives.
Journal Article
China: The Pessoptimist Nation
The rise of China presents a long-term challenge to the world not only economically, but politically and culturally. Callahan meets this challenge in China: The Pessoptimist Nation by using new Chinese sources and innovative analysis to see how Chinese people understand their new place in the world. To chart the trajectory of its rise, the book shifts from examining China's national interests to exploring its national aesthetic. Rather than answering the standard social science question \"what is China?\" with statistics of economic and military power, this book asks \"when, where, and who is China?\" to explore the soft power dynamics of China's identity politics. China: The Pessoptimist Nation shows how the heart of Chinese foreign policy is not a security dilemma, but an identity dilemma. Through careful analysis, Callahan charts how Chinese identity emerges through the interplay of positive and negative feelings in a dynamic that intertwines China's domestic and international politics. China thus is the pessoptimist nation where national security is closely linked to nationalist insecurities. Callahan concludes that this interactive view of China's pessoptimist identity means that we need to rethink the role of the state and public opinion in Beijing's foreign policy-making.
eBook
Understanding South Korean Middle Power Diplomacy Discourses Through the Concept of Sadae (Serving the Great)
This study aims to examine South Korean middle power diplomacy discourses using premodern Korea's diplomatic thinking-cum-practice of sadae (serving the great) as a heuristic device. It is argued that current discourses of South Korea as a middle power resonate with sadae because they strive to secure the existing liberal international order led by the West and the United States. It also argues that it is both necessary and healthy for South Korean middle power diplomacy studies to denaturalize its self-evident faith in the existing liberal international order-a not universal but particular order among several possible others in history-with South Korea celebrating and appropriating liberal values. This would prepare South Korean middle power diplomacy research to tackle uncertainty, difference, and pluralism in global politics while producing more responsible and responsive scholarship in international relations.
Journal Article
National Insecurities: Humiliation, Salvation, and Chinese Nationalism
The centrality of humiliation to the development of Chinese nationalism is investigated. After identifying a strong connection between nationalism & national insecurities in 20th century Chinese society, the popular tendency to delineate humiliation as a form of irrational political thought is challenged. Rather, the analysis of various Chinese nationalist texts reveals that national humiliation discourse permitted Chinese political & cultural actors to perform a self-critique of Chinese national identity. After asserting that national humiliation discourse is neither globally prevalent nor endemic to Chinese culture, it is demonstrated that Chinese political leaders blamed Russian imperialism for national humiliation discourse's introduction to Chinese culture. The evolution of national humiliation discourse in Chinese society throughout the 20th century is then detailed, indicating how understandings of \"national\" & \"humiliation\" have changed over time & across geographic locations. The contemporary emergence of a critical discourse on national humiliation within the People's Republic of China is also addressed. J. W. Parker
Journal Article
The politics of walls: Barriers, flows, and the sublime
As Donald Trump’s presidential campaign showed, walls are a hot topic. While ‘globalisation’, with its free flow of capital and goods, characterised world politics after the end of the Cold War, the twenty-first century has witnessed a reassertion of cultural, legal, and physical barriers. It is common to criticise such post-Cold War walls, especially the US-Mexico Barrier and Israel’s West Bank Barrier, as ineffective and immoral. This article problematises such critical discourse by using unlikely juxtapositions (the Great Wall of China) and new conceptual frameworks (gaps, critical aesthetics) to explore: (1) how walls can be a rational security policy; (2) how they are not simply barriers, but can be complex sites of flows; and (3) how walls are not simply texts waiting to be decoded: they are also sites of non-narrative affective experience that can even excite the sublime. This critical juxtaposition of walls first explores what they can tell us about the politics of borders, identity, and foreign policy, and then considers how walls, as concrete visual artefacts, can be examples not simply of ideology, but also of affect. The article aims to understand walls in a different register as active embodiments of political debate – and of political resistance.
Journal Article
Sino-speak: Chinese Exceptionalism and the Politics of History
This article examines how recent books by academics and public intellectuals are reshaping the discourse of the rise of China. While earlier trends argued that China was being socialized into the norms of international society, many texts now proclaim that due to its unique civilization, China will follow its own path to modernity. Such books thus look to the past—China's imperial history—for clues to not only China's future, but also the world's future. This discourse, which could be called “Sino-speak,” presents an essentialized Chinese civilization that is culturally determined to rule Asia, if not the world. The article notes that nuanced readings of China's historical relations with its East Asian neighbors provide a critical entry into a more sophisticated analysis of popular declarations of “Chinese exceptionalism.” But it concludes that this critical analysis is largely overwhelmed by the wave of Sino-speak.
Journal Article
Cultivating Power: Gardens in the Global Politics of Diplomacy, War, and Peace
Although gardens are typically appreciated as peaceful spaces of apolitical serenity, this article highlights how gardens can provide new sites and sensibilities that complicate our understanding of diplomacy, war, and peace. While gardens are a popular location for diplomatic performances—for example, the Treaty of Versailles—the global politics of gardens remains underresearched in international relations (IR). To address this gap, the article follows the “aesthetic turn” in IR to examine gardens as contingent social constructions of social-ordering and world-ordering, which both shape and participate in global politics. In particular, it develops a framework to examine how peace-war becomes intelligible in gardens through contingent conceptual dynamics such as “civility/martiality.” It then employs the framework to explore how two key national memorial sites—the Nanjing Massacre Memorial in China and the Yasukuni Shrine in Japan—work as gardens to creatively perform civility and martiality in unexpected ways. Such an oblique intervention underlines how war memorials, gardens, and other odd IR sites are not stable containers of meaning but need to be actively (re)interpreted as performances of cultural governance and resistance. Garden-building here is theory-building: by producing new sites and sensibilities of global politics, it creatively shapes our understanding of IR.
Journal Article
China’s Strategic Futures
This essay examines how China’s “harmonious world” foreign policy has unintentionally created opportunities for citizens to challenge elite discussions of foreign policy. Although they are relative outsiders, the essay argues that citizen intellectuals are a growing influence as a source of ideas about China’s future—and the world’s.
Journal Article