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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]

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]

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]

This article attempts to create a theory of relations and balances ( RaB) in order to understand the systemic stability of democracy. It draws on Confucianism and compares Confucian self-restraint with liberal self-restraint. Empirical evidence suggests that on the one hand a Confucian constituency dislikes challenges to the authorities for the sake of systemic stability, but on the other it disapproves of authoritarian control in order to maintain a harmonious system. Evidence likewise suggests that if the systemic identity is weak, the constituency of RaB shows higher support for inclusive, not enforcive, leadership to restore governability. The RaB support for systemic inclusiveness can be mistaken as liberalism. Coupled with the idea of civic nationalism, contemporary constitutionalism of checks and balances neglects systemic stability and fails to explain the spread of illiberal democracy. The RaB theory provides an explanation on a systemic level of how a democracy can maintain or lose stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]