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This paper complicates the classic security dilemma by considering the notions of ontological security and relational deterrence. It studies how the ontological security dilemma has emerged between the US, China, and Taiwan from the relational perspective and how these spiral chains will further develop in the future. The paper incurs the literature on relational analysis to expound on how different ontological security concerns allude to relational deterrence between the three actors. Taiwan's separatism is more of a threat to China's relational self than to physical security because the separatist does not belong to any already agreed relationship. A geometric model and a few simulations yield three unconventional findings. 1) The less advantaged the US military is over China, the less likely armed unification will occur. 2) The US anti-Chinese tendency is irrelevant in determining the probability of armed unification. 3) What may escalate the spiral are China's anti-Taiwan independence and Taiwan's anti-unification. Case sensitivity indicates the ontological sensibilities of a security dilemma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We rely on the Chinese game of weiqi to conceptualize China's rival role conceptions and self-role conceptions. Since weiqi compels rivals endowed with the culture of harmony to outplay each other, rivals have no role relation between them. We argue the most apparent but least acknowledged practice that they compete on who enhances self-role performance better for the world to emulate. Exactly because the rivals compete intensely, they give an American watcher a reason to believe that they belong to the same strategic kind familiar to a chess player. We explore Sino-US rivalry accordingly. We maintain that, as rival, China has not expected the US to seriously honor any role duties, meaning they are not mutually obliged to any significant extent. Therefore, on the one hand, China is ready to both practice and bear squeezing and harassing as if no role obligation exist between them. On the other hand, China's obligation being a rival is to enhance the recognition of China in the world as always being more beneficial than the US is, hence the balance of role relations. This beneficial role conception necessitates China's pursuit of strategic partnership all over the world, which subdues the US influences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Southeast Asian studies of Chinese humanities are intertwined with the changing discourses and practices of Chineseness of indigenous Chinese residents. However, scholars rarely encounter this subject. Humanity and pragmatism are two distinctive features of how intellectuals of Southeast Asia understand China and Chineseness in the twenty-first century. These features emerge because descendants of Chinese historical migrants comprise a significant portion of the population in Southeast Asian countries. The strategy of survival and development of the descendants, along with their evolving self-understanding, inevitably affects the perspectives on China and Chinese studies in their countries. These studies simultaneously implicate subjectivity, which pertains to how authors and their readers position themselves among ethnic, national, and civilizational identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The intellectual paths of two Vietnamese sinologists, Nguyen Huy Quy and Phan Van Cac, tell a distinctive history of Confucian scholarship in Vietnam. Through their intellectual growth, we hope to show how humanities have survived political upheavals of and between the two countries and returned in the process of national reform. The perseverance of humanist concerns demonstrates the relevance of individual determination in the evolution of Vietnamese scholarship on China, indicating an epistemological agency to transcend politics. Three particular aspects emerge as critical in the evolution of their scholarship: family, travelling, and determination. The mechanisms of historical cycles, strategic silencing, self-learning, and human judgment connect the individual paths to the larger historical context of Vietnamese sinology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]