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Shih, Chih-yu. (2011) Assigning Role Characteristics to China: The Role State Versus The Ego State. Foreign Policy Analysis, doi: 10.1111/j.1743-8594.2011.00158.x This paper distinguishes and integrates national identity and national image through a deep role analysis. It argues that the meaning of China's rising rests upon the views of those who evaluate China's role playing. This role analysis mediates between international relations and Chinese foreign policy. It also mediates between China watchers and their China. The two dimensions of role-role taking and role making-generate four different discursive approaches to interpreting the rise of China, each in its own way associated with the affects of opportunity and threat. They are 'nation state,''civilization,''Tianxia,' and 'Asianism.' In response to the external view on the rise of China, Chinese narrators often take the Tianxia and nation state approaches as components of their conception of national role. These conceptions mediated by role-making and role-taking, evolve into four possible strategic focuses-national interests, imperialism, sovereignty and center-periphery. While this last strategic focus on role-taking has recently attracted enthusiastic response in China, it has been re-appropriated by social science concepts such as soft power and social capital that assume an egoistic role-making China is on the move. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the interplay between nationalism and foreign policy in China—but with a twist. It seeks to loosen up analytical categories to expand from cultural nationalism to see how civilization constructs identity in national and transnational ways. It examines the limits of Chinese trans/nationalism according to the main Chinese expression of inside/outside—‘civilization/barbarism’—as it constructs Chinese nationalism and Greater China. The purpose is to both critically examine Chinese nationalism and to trace what our focus on the nation-state obscures: namely, transnational politics. Rather than recounting one master narrative of Chinese nationalism, the essay argues that civilization and barbarian define Greater China according to four narratives—nativism, conquest, conversion and diaspora. Hence, the essay does not merely deconstruct the notion of Greater China and Chinese nationalism, but shows how these four grids of meaning can help us to understand identity politics and foreign policy debates in China. Nationalism thus turns from being the Answer about the true intent of China, to being a series of questions which define different terrains of political inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the problem of enlightenment in modern China. The rise of modern nationalism, the unfolding of a rural based revolution, and the quest for a new world view are the distinguishing characteristics of twentieth-century Chinese history. This complex of simultaneous processes makes the Chinese experience a paradigm for much of the Third World. It has also captured the interest of Western social theorists because of the tension between the external imperatives of modernization and the internal prerequisites of social change. Our dimension of that intention, most apparent in the lives and work of critical intellectuals, has been the conflict between jiuguo and qimeng, between national salvation and enlightenment. Beneficiaries of modern education in China and abroad, these intellectuals share their compatriots' commitment to a strong, independent China. They have been integral to the success of the Chinese Revolution while, at the same time, never quite identifying its success with the realization of a new world view. Advocates of enlightenment in twentieth-century China face a problematic quite different from that of their European predecessors. Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Europe was a program for disenchantment. The philosophers had tried to free their societies from theological versions of reality. In the process, they took it upon themselves to assault the religious superstitions of their contemporaries with truths derived from the realm of nature. In twentieth-century China, on the other hand, enlightenment did not have religion as its main target of attack.