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Colonial and postcolonial relations have always constituted sites of knowledge production in the Global South. This is particularly noticeable when it comes to the production of knowledge of a Global South self vis-à-vis the West. However, the literature has not seriously attended self-knowledge production in the Global South with regard to non-Western others. The paper compares South and Southeast Asian think tanks to reflect upon a common identity strategy of small nations to become a civilizational bridge between competing major neighbours. Specifically, China experts in these areas host more or less a common wish or even a desire to be a bridge over the difference of China and its potential rival in India, the West, or both. The bridge role is a rare sensibility in the postcolonial critique of the West. Watching China from its Southern Third World neighbourhood incurs such an agenda. Relying on interviews of retired diplomats and think tank experts, the paper also discusses how the above mentioned methodological characteristics affect the enactment of the bridge role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is 'relational theorizing' in International Relations and what can it offer? This article introduces a thematic section that responds to these questions by showing two things. First, relational theorizing is not a doctrine or a method, but a set of analyses that begin with relations rather than the putative essences of constitutively autonomous actors. Second, relational theorizing has emerged from different geo-linguistic traditions, and a relational approach to International Relations (IR) can offer the language and space for increased and productive engagement beyond Anglophone scholarship. This thematic section takes a significant step in this direction by staging a dialogue between Sinophone and Anglophone scholarship on relational IR theorizing. Such an engagement shows points of comparison and contrast, convergence and divergence. In this way, the essays presented here contribute to developing a more 'global' IR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study relies on the social psychological notion of altercasting and the anthropological notion of post-Chineseness to appreciate the identity strategies of the Philippine’s China watchers. Basically, the case study suggests that the attainment of the sympathetic capacity to understand China can enrich the knowledge of those China watchers coming from an external position. However, adhering to an internal position of China watching would disempower ethnic Chinese scholars in the Philippines in fully participating in the indigenous community. Therefore, in the long run, the trend is for all ethnic scholars to establish distance from internal perspectives on China and practice watching China from the outside from time to time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of post-Chineseness is enlisted to analyze Vietnamese Sinology as a comparative agenda. Post-Chineseness refers to the cultural preparation and the political process of mutual acknowledgement among those who consider one another sharing (some kind of) Chineseness, practically defined according to the context and its trajectories, at each time and each site. Chineseness can thus have various, if not entirely irrelevant, meanings. Vietnamese Sinologists have relied on different kinds of post-Chineseness to make sense of their relationship with the encountered Chinese to select and determine the mode of self-understanding, the purpose and a strategy to reconnect, and the normative criterion to assess and manage the relationship. Chinese Vietnamese are significantly less numerous than Chinese Malaysian, Thai, and Indonesians. However, the history of Vietnam is considerably closer to China than are those of Korea and Japan, in terms of length of merger. The post-Chineseness of Vietnamese scholarship therefore complicates its role-identity vis-à-vis China, intellectually as well as practically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term hybridity is losing its critical potential in the study of globalization, both because no one is not hybrid anymore and because awareness of hybridity might encourage violence. Whereas hybridity initially appeared as either cosmopolitanism or post-coloniality, it has however turned into a subversive celebration of unavailing indoctrination of any orthodoxy or canon. It is also the evidence of sited subjectivity or agency, whose unique genealogy cannot be entirely subsumed by simulating the sanctioned orthodox. This paper instead advocates the emergence of post-hybridity, which is different from hybridity in its assumption of multilayeredness, memory, reconnection, and, most importantly, non-synthetic and yet cyclical historiography. It uses the example of Hong Kong, where both dialectical and cyclical modes of existence are central, to clarify post-hybridity. The paper is primarily a pedagogical reminder of, and a remedy to, the problem of the term hybridity for the teachers and students of International Relations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Late Pao-kun Kuo in Singapore and contemporary Denny Yung in Hong Kong have made particular ontological and epistemological choices in their experimental theater in the context of the de-colonization and rise of China. We gather, between the two sites, a possible dichotomy in the representation of China: China as a collective subject to accommodate the changing world and China as an individualized object that emerges in each narrator’s chosen perspective. Kuo intends to prompt the audience to reconnect with something greater than their individuality. For Kuo, the crisis is the loss of cultural subjectivity and the privileging of transcendence over individualized meanings of life. For Yung, cultural subjectivity is no longer a question after the return of Hong Kong to China. Yung painstakingly generates the legitimacy and capacity of individual Hong Kong people to have faith in their own ways of transcending any version of the entirety of China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the scholar in Southeast Asia, Chinese nationalists in Malaysia and Chinese language.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including culture-citizenship, ethnicity and nomadic citizenship-culture.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including historical process of decolonization in Asia and Africa, multiculturalism and phenomena of ethnicity.

The present study traces the cultural and political contexts within which Beijing considers global governance. They include: (1) Confucian dispositions toward non-interventionism and self-governance; (2) the socialist collectivist ethics that stress persuasion instead of unilateralism; (3) a lingering sense of inferiority arising from underdevelopment that harms self-confidence; and (4) the repugnant experiences with the United Nations (UN) and the United States that have dominated most international organizations since World War II. The consequential Chinese style of global governance is reactive rather than proactive, problem-solving rather than goal-driven, and attentive to obligation and reform more in other major countries than in failing states. That said, China could still assert global leadership by acting as a model of self-governance for other major countries and by intervening in failing states only through closed-door persuasion and exemplification as opposed to open sanctioning. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper discusses the meaning of 'the West' in Chinese and Japanese political discourse. It argues that for Japanese and Chinese political thinkers, the West does not exist in the West. Rather, the West is sometimes at the periphery and, at other times, at the centre. For them, 'the Chinese' is about the epistemology of all-under-heaven. There is no such concept as 'Other' in this epistemology. As a result, modern Western thinkers depend on opposing the concrete, historical, yet backward Other to pretend to be universal, while Chinese and Japanese thinkers concentrate on self-rectification to compete for the best representative of 'the Chinese' in world politics. 'The Chinese' is no more than an epistemological frame that divides the world into the centre and the periphery. In modern times, the Japanese have accepted Japan as being at the periphery of world politics, while the West is at the centre. To practise self-rectification is to simulate the West. The West is therefore not the geographical West, but at the centre of Japanese selfhood. Self-knowledge produced through Othering and that through self-rectification are so different that the universal West could not make sense of the all-under-heaven way of conceptualizing the West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues against the popular impression that the rise of Taiwan's national consciousness is a result of democratization. Instead, it looks to the world timing of Taiwan becoming an independent reference point internationally for explanation of the changing identity in contemporary politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses how an incorporated ethnic community has gradually lost its agency for change or subjectivity to face the state. Contrary to what a postcolonial writer wants to see, in the diasporic Shui community of Yizhou (a city in China's Guangxi Autonomous District) there is a lack of agency for change or self-empowerment. The paper reports how the Shui identity is reduced to a by-product of ancestor worship within each family. The loss of agency for change and willing acculturation do not necessarily confirm the state-promoted modernization theory's linear historiography. What the Shui example proves is that the agency for change cannot be taken for granted. Although the hybrid component in the Shui ethnicity is not felt today, the chances that some revived ethnic consciousness can reinvent cultural customs should not be ruled out, as long as the Shui communities continue to carry the name of Shui. The invention of ‘The Shui people grabbing the flower lamp’, and the interpretation of keeping old trunks in the ancestors’ place are two such possible starting points. However, hybridity of this sort is reinvented from, and not embedded in, their identity. Nevertheless, the quest for being different from the larger community is both a matter of internal need and an external construction. This is why the simple name of Shui cannot guarantee itself as a basis for revival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I examine the lack of attention given to ethnicity in Yongshun County in Tujia-Miao Autonomous Prefecture of Western Hunan. Contrary to most other papers on Chinese ethnic politics, my discussion is on the lack of ethnicity. The aim of this paper is to serve as a reminder that, in a case like Yongshun, ethnic identification means more to a visitor than to the locals. Yongshun's Tujia and Miao people do indeed form one community, but it is because of clan Confucianism not ethnicity. Modernisation is yet to replace local conventions, and villagers who advance most quickly in the market willingly make sacrifices for siblings and children. The government and the Party assume the leadership role to meet the locals' mentality of dependency. The lesson of my four visits to Yongshun is the following: while everyone seems to agree that Yongshun's residents are ethnically Tujia and Miao and they have seen some degree of modernisation, neither ethnicity nor modernisation has a clear meaning to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the case of Muslims in Litong, China in order to shed light on the process of becoming a citizen in modern China, with particular emphasis on the relationships between ethnic identity and state identity. Religious identity; Muslim policy; Market economy; Differences and similarities with the Hans.

Focuses on the postcolonial legacy which the notion of sovereignty in China carries. Why the notion of sovereignty was adopted in China; Detailed information on China's sovereign status; Explanation of China's harsh policy towards Taiwan.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses reports within the issue including the ethnos and ethnicity concepts, personality of Russian Scholar Shirokogoroff, and indigenous Russian population and scholarship.