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Arguing that studies of China must simultaneously be studies of East Asia, this article offers a philosophically critical reflection on the meaning of Chineseness in lieu of the theme of the special issue—East Asia. The two regions are reciprocally holographical of each other. The latter part of the article will further propose a research agenda of post-Asianness. I hope to convey a message that is hidden but strong: that East Asia is a redundant agenda and yet fungible at the same time. This ontological irony can be likewise applied to both Chineseness and Asianness. Ultimately, China, East Asia and Asia are mainly strategic agendas and identities. The critical reflections outlined in this article are intended to display, facilitate and complicate the pluriversality of all post-identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The post-Western agenda of international relations will not be complete until it has tracked the worlding strategy of the provincialized West. This article examines one important aspect of this strategy, namely the appropriation of non-Western theory by the West as exemplified by the reception of Sun Zi’s The Art of War (or Sunzi Bingfa) in the Anglosphere. It looks at the ways in which Sunzi Bingfa has been translated, interpreted and applied in the field of Strategic Studies. This article identifies three plausible ways in which theory ‘travels’ from the East to the West, namely: (i) a useless resource or outmoded form of thinking, (ii) a useful, if exotic, culturally bound source, and (iii) a body of wisdom with universal value. It contends that most readers in the Anglosphere tend to cross these different routes to varying degrees. This critical examination of the reception of Sunzi Bingfa enables us to see that the academic field of Strategic Studies is rooted in self-other dynamics on the one hand, and characterized by an extreme parochialism on the other. The conclusion makes a normative judgment that the West can better contribute to global IR by conceiving of and relying on non-Western knowledge as an access to universal truth. [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]

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]

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]