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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]

This article divides China watching by the two dimensions of position and purpose. By position, the article asks if a narrator looks at China from an external or an internal perspective. By purpose, it asks if the narrative is to critically provide an evaluative perspective, to objectively represent an authentic China, or to practically discuss a life and identity strategy of Chinese people. Specifically, the complex sensibilities towards China among Taiwanese migrant scholars reify the genuine and yet often-unnoticed agency required to proceed with writing on China. With initially both the Chinese Civil War and later pro-independence politics in Taiwan poisoning relationships with China, the politically divided Taiwanese scholars enter a different environment in Hong Kong, which urges neither total confrontation nor complete loyalty in approaching China. How the Hong Kong circumstances have impacted upon the choices of these Taiwanese intellectuals in their presentation of the subject matter of China, in comparison with their other colleagues in Hong Kong, is the primary goal of the following discussion. [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]