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Abstract: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.

Abstract The manuscript compares the World History Standpoint promoted by the Kyoto School of Philosophy with two other competitors--post-Western reworlding and the Chinese balance of relationships--in their shared campaign for [...]

This paper addresses a lacuna in the literature concerning how a ruler’s ideas shape their attitudes toward the world and others through their personality. It examines the political ideas of Chinese President Xi Jinping as his references to the self-in-relation rather than his schema to assess and treat alters-in-relation. In addition to allowing political actors to assess the world and engage in policymaking, personality may inspire them to use ideas conversely to prepare themselves for the acceptance of their perceived constituencies. In terms of Xi Jinping’s evolving personality, an initial need to overcome his individual vulnerability by becoming one with the masses has grown into a quest for transcendence that is informed by the following elements: (1) Buddhism while practicing the Party self; (2) the notion of Confucian harmony for the self-cultivation of Party cadres while practicing the national self; and (3) a socialist sensitivity to the material needs of the disadvantaged while practicing the international self. This has been demonstrated through programs that include his anti-corruption campaigns, his Chinese dream of anti-poverty, and his notion of a shared future of humankind. This paper compares the Kyoto School’s use of Buddhism, Mao’s use of Confucianism, and Pol Pot’s use of Maoism. It also discusses how an autocracy can suffer from involution.

Oz Bu makale, Kyoto Felsefe Okulu tarafindan ortaya atilan Dunya Tarihi Yaklasimi ile iki rakibini - Bati-sonrasi Re-Worlding ve Cinli iliskiler dengesini- alternatif bir uluslararasi iliskiler teorisi olusturma cabalari yonunden [...]

Abstract:This study seeks to explain how a weaker party could decide on its own to confront a stronger party. The weaker party relies on relational turn in international relations to provide an alternative to the realist view. On the basis of relational turn, which stresses the importance of discovering the processual mechanisms of behavior instead of the structure or corelationship among variables, this study offers an empirically based speculation of the plausible psychological mechanisms that enable a weaker party in Taiwan to resort to confrontation against a stronger party in China. These psychological mechanisms are arguably necessary processes that lead to confrontational policy. This study argues that a small party is epistemologically equal to its stronger counterpart in relational coupling. This assumption is based on prior understandings that constitute the identities of both parties. The former exerts agency for confrontation when acting upon the senses of efficacy, determination, and/or legitimacy that are embedded in relational coupling.

Due to the challenge of defining Chineseness, various disciplines can contribute to the subject without a single authority having a monopoly over its scope. Post-Chineseness is an evolving movement that aims to reduce the embarrassment of China scholars at their failure to exchange the methodologies and scopes of their subjects, often rendering them strangers to one another. Recognition is particularly relevant to the study of post-Chineseness. Chineseness is mutually recognized and denied in a variety of ways among both Chinese communities and individuals and in both self-regarded and other-regarded identities. Divergent approaches have created complex behavioral implications and a massive agenda for social science research. An agenda for post-Chineseness can examine these crises in the contemporary social sciences and humanities and has the potential to offer sophistication, recombination, and reconstruction for Chineseness in different contexts. This case study of several Chinese Indonesian intellectuals who have described their identity and connection with China illustrates how an agenda of post-Chineseness can simultaneously explain and deconstruct.

The teleology of transition to capitalism in general and China’s turn to capitalism in particular prescribe for observers of China an academic agenda preoccupied with the conditions of establishing capitalism. Studies of transition in China have up to this point lacked bottom-up, past-oriented, and inside-out perspectives that would allow the formation of discourse for the masses, presumably driven by the force of transition to respond from their indigenous positions. To find what possible stories there could be if such perspectives that are not intellectually intelligible from the transition point of view are to be translated into transition narratives is the purpose of this paper. Epistemologically speaking, interpreting the case at hand as an anomaly could be a useful methodology to ameliorate the deterministic and teleological proclivity in the current literature on transition. In this way, agents of transition are more than agents. They gain subjectivity through acquiring micro-perspectives on transition that are not allowed in the teleology toward liberalism. Agents of transition could participate in transition research by articulating, consciously as well as subconsciously, how they have strategically practiced transition, reducing researchers of macro-transition to equal partners in transition.

Steven Cheung, Will China Go Capitalist? An Economic Analysis of Property Rights and Institutional Change, Hobart Paper 94 (London: The Institute of Economic Affairs, 1982).Yasheng Huang, Inflation and Investment Controls in China: The Political Economy of Central-Local Relations during the Reform Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).Yushan Wu, Comparative Economic Transformations: Mainland China, Hungary, the Soviet Union and Taiwan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994).Dali Yang, Calamity and Reform in China: State, Rural Society and Institutional Change Since the Great Leap Forward (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996).