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This book presents studies on Chinese intellectuals in Southeast Asia and how they understand China and Chineseness in the 21st century. It posits, through analyses of works and oral histories of a number of Chinese scholars in the region, that the dominant but distinctive approaches adopted by them are those that are rooted in humanism and pragmatism. In doing so, the book explores the significant population, local conditions and strategy of survival among the Southeast Asian Chinese as factors that influence their views and perspectives. Studies presented in the book simultaneously implicate subjectivity, where authors and their readers position themselves among ethnic, national, and civilizational identities. It highlights that while national-level identity necessarily involves dangerous self-interrogation and, at times, politics that is often suppressive and confrontational, intellectual writings on China that stick to the ethnic and civilizational levels provide more sensible exits. With that, the book then goes on to make the argument that in Southeast Asian Chinese studies, the humanities usually prevail over the social sciences at these two alternative levels. Lastly, the book also shows how the humanities can be instrumental to Southeast Asian Chinese scholars' choice of identity strategy which makes pragmatism an important theme. The book will be of interest to students and researchers involved in Southeast Asian and Chinese studies.

The literature on International Relations theory has yet to align relational theory with role theory, despite the fact that these two theories share so much epistemological common ground. This article uses role theory to bridge the gap between the Confucian and Western conceptions of relationality, whose practitioners regard each other as strangers. With the support of role theory, the comparative analysis of relationality in this article has mainly focused on two different types of relations: prior rule-based relations and improvised relations. The differences in the cultural preparation for these two relations partially explain the plurality of the relational universe and the perception of stranger. Role theory is one way to reconnect the seemingly irreconcilable relational universes. To illustrate the value of a composite agenda of relational theory and role theory, the article will use Kim Jong-un of North Korea as its case. Confucian relations propose that, for all nations, the necessity of having a certain role relation is a more important agenda than insisting on exactly what role to take.

The article studies Chinese foreign policy revisionism from the political-thought dimension. It demonstrates that the perception of the China threat was not soley based on materialist facts, a conspiracy rafted by the U.S., or an intended challenge posed by China. It was additionally a derivative of the political thought battle following the Cultural Revolution. Specifically, the critical reflections in various Chinese intellectual circles in response to the perception of Western/ liberal encroachment have led to the unexpected realignment between New-Left Socialism and Neo-Confucianism. The realignment has enabled the construction of revisionism, leading China experts in the West to perceive an existential threat.

The paper reflects upon Shanghai’s incurrence of cheongsam as an identity strategy. It shows how self-romanticizing can be a convenient discourse for a subaltern actor. The first part focuses on how the discussion of cheongsam contributes to the critical reflections on contemporary IR theory, including the post-Western IR, the role theory, and the relational theory. The second part summarizes the ambivalent understanding of Chinese modernity, and it alludes to how the dress of cheongsam may serve political purposes. The third part introduces examples whereby cheongsam appears in the practice of enhancing the self-confidence of Shanghai. The fourth part discusses the metaphor of cheongsam as a city and Shanghai’s unassertive agency for practicing cultural recombination during encounters. The last part engages international relations theory. The paper argues that IR theories have not fully considered gender as a national role, a post-Western site, or a relational strategy.

National interest and security concerns dominate discussions on relations between nation-states. National leaders weaponize civilizational resources-such as religion, language, ethnicity, technology-to compel others to take sides, both internationally and domestically. Such discourses and practices reproduce the images of the nation-state being integral and autonomous but threatened internally by politically incorrect forces and/or externally by suspiciously ill-intended and encroaching others. However, critical reflections of pluriversalism have yet to move beyond a quest for recognition from the statist international relations (IR) that there have already been different cosmologies at different sites. The literature needs much research on how specifically pluriversal international relations are relationally empirical rather than each being distinctively different from the other. Relying on the heuristic method, the article detects various possibilities of coexistence from multi-site field visits, including a Cambodian and Chinese Vietnamese site, a Chinese Indonesian site, and a Mongolian cultural site. It will infer different mechanisms of coexistence and merger, in which civilizational differences enable learning and unlearning. The article presents four relational heuristics of practicing pluriversal international relations on-site: self-consciousness, stability, and avoidance. It also introduces eight mechanisms of pluriversal coexistence: staging consensual practices, mixing cultural skills, shifting contexts and roles, choosing between multiple layers, separating by ethnicity, cycling a life, fanaticizing indigeneity, and enjoying customs.

Drawing on the case of Wuhan, this article considers how nationalist discourses evolved in the Chinese context during the COVID-19 pandemic. It adopts a relational perspective to argue that, just as the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed countries’ vulnerability to diverse forms of nationalism and the danger that this presents, it also reveals an irony: how despite being treated as a ‘solution’ to the pandemic, nationalism can only exist and thrive insofar as its alter or Other—represented by the novel coronavirus itself and, for some countries, the ‘China threat’—also thrives. To prevent this from becoming a vicious cycle, the article contends that nationalism is no solution and that new thinking on coexistence is the vaccine needed for securing the post-COVID-19 world order.

The relational turn of IR stresses the processual constitution of the state. The indigenous theory of Chinese IR adopts the relational turn but contends that the Chinese experiences are distinctive. Relying on the case of Singapore-Taiwan relationship, this paper argues that the Chinese relationality attests to a bilateral sensibility that does not confront the relational turn in general, which is multilateral. The case further contributes to the relational turn in showing non-security and affirmative components of relationality to the extent that the studies of the relational turn have remained embedded in the security concerns. The case applies the theory of \"balance of relationship,\" in which nations can practice self-restraint not in response to unilateral strategic calculus or multilateral rule making, but to bilateral reciprocity. The balance of relationship of the two proceeds at both the statist and the personal levels, introducing the affect of passion to the relational turn.

Confucian friendship adds to the literature on friendship distance sensibilities and aims to maintain and even reinforce the Confucian ethical order, whereas contemporary international politics fails to provide any clear ethical order. The use of friendship and the concomitant creation of a friendly role by China indicate an intended move away from the improper order, including the tributary system, the Cold War, imperialism, and socialism. Confucian friendship continues to constitute contemporary Chinese diplomacy under the circumstance of indeterminate distance sensibilities. It highlights the relevance of the prior relations that are perceived to have constituted friendship. This article explores several illustrative practices of a Confucian typology of friendly international relations, divided into four kinds of friendship, according to (1) the strength of prior relations and (2) the asymmetry of capacity, including the policies toward Russia, North Korea, and Vietnam, among others. Such a Confucian friendship framework additionally alludes to foreign policy analysis in general. The US policies for China and North Korea are examples that indicate this wide scope of application.

Conventional explanations of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) focus on how the BRI will be in China's interest, how it will strengthen China's geopolitical position, or a combination of the two. We argue that such views are limited because they merely interpret the BRI through 'Western' IR lenses. This paper 're-worlds' China by using the BRI as a case study to illustrate how in the discursive field(s) of China's elite, China as a Westphalian nation state, and China as amorphous Tianxia under Confucianism coexist, struggle for recognition, and are interrelated. Consequently, we argue that China, because of the economic miracle it created domestically over the last few decades, is now convinced of its own 'moral superiority', and ready to export its self-perceived 'benevolence' abroad. In this light, we read the BRI to be undergirded by a combination of 'Western' and Confucian values, suggesting a post-Western/post-Chinese form of regionalism. Çin'in Kuşak-Yol İnisiyatifine (KYİ) dair geleneksel açıklamalar, KYİ'nin Çin'in çıkarlarına nasıl hizmet edeceğine, Çin'in jeopolitik konumunu nasıl güçlendireceğine veya bu ikisine birden odaklanmaktadır. Bu tür görüşlerin KYİ'yi yalnızca \"Batılı\" uluslararası ilişkiler merceğinden yorumlamaları nedeniyle sınırlı olduklarını ileri sürüyoruz. Bu makale, Çinli seçkinlerin söylemsel alan(lar)ında Çin'in Vestfalyen bir ulus devlet ve Konfüçyanizm altında biçimsiz Tianxia olarak nasıl aynı anda var olduğunu, kabul görmek için nasıl mücadele ettiğini ve bunların nasıl birbirleriyle ilişkili olduklarını açıklamak için KYİ'yi bir örnek olay olarak kullanarak Çin'i küresel bütüne yeniden yerleştirmektedir. Sonuç olarak, ülke içerisinde son birkaç on yılda yarattığı ekonomik mucize sebebiyle şu anda Çin'in kendi 'ahlaki üstünlüğünden' emin ve öz-algısına dayanan 'hayırseverliği' yurt dışına ihraç etmeye hazır durumda olduğunu öne sürüyoruz. Bu bakımdan KYİ'nin, Batı-sonrası/Çin-sonrası bir bölgeselcilik biçimi öneren, 'Batılı' ve Konfüçyüsçü değerlerin bir birleşiminden destek bulan bir okumasını yapıyoruz.

The disappearance of references to \"Yadong,\" Asia's East or Asiatic East, as opposed to East Asia, in Taiwan's post-World War II (WWII) political history presaged the impracticality of decolonization in Taiwan. The Cold War, pertaining especially to the American intellectual intervention in the conceptualization of the world through the fault line of its containment policy, contributed greatly to the substitution of East Asia for Yadong. I argue that Yadong is a geocultural lens, while East Asia connotes strategic purposes of various kinds. The latter concept echoed the discourse of the \"Great East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere,\" which colonial Japan relied on before and during WWII to justify colonialism as well as expansion. The familiar discourse of decolonization embedded in \"strategic essentialism,\" i.e. deliberate use of some fundamentalism for the occasion of resistance, reproduces the colonizing/colonized binary. I re-theorize decolonization as a relational project. Empirically the intellectual demise of Yadong as a relational discourse accompanied the evolution of the Cold War. Yadong's disappearance indirectly testifies to the fate of decolonization in Taiwan.