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The literature on exceptionalism is preoccupied with its distinctive national sources and resultantly differing styles. Exceptionalism has thus become almost synonymous with culture and identity, rather than international relations (IRs). The paper instead argues that exceptionalism reveals a relational identity that both informs and is informed by a multilateral relation prior to the emergence of exceptionalism. It also argues that all relational systems seek expansion and coexistence. Based upon a comparative study of Confucian and liberal multilateral relationalities, a similar cycle of engagement, conversion, disengagement, and learning is applicable to both. Two exceptionalisms in multilateral relationality differ, however. American exceptionalism embraces a transcendent identity with which to contrast with the rest, who share the same identity and are expected to follow the same rules. Chinese exceptionalism contrarily envisions a superior, benevolent identity to ensure harmony and peace among all, who share no collective identity. The paper traces how Confucianism diverges from liberalism with regard to what accounts for multilateralism—inclusiveness versus rule-based governance, and benevolent exceptions versus universal rights—and the resulting orientations during encounters with strangers. The last section before the conclusion corresponds to the growing attention in IRs theorising to the factor of emotion. Such rational–emotional connectivity—between exceptionalism and emotion—can further attest to the promise of the relational agenda in explaining pluriversal IRs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional explanations of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) focus on how the BRI will be in China's interest, how it will strengthen China's geopolitical position, or a combination of the two. We argue that such views are limited because they merely interpret the BRI through 'Western' IR lenses. This paper 're-worlds' China by using the BRI as a case study to illustrate how in the discursive field(s) of China's elite, China as a Westphalian nation state, and China as amorphous Tianxia under Confucianism coexist, struggle for recognition, and are interrelated. Consequently, we argue that China, because of the economic miracle it created domestically over the last few decades, is now convinced of its own 'moral superiority', and ready to export its self-perceived 'benevolence' abroad. In this light, we read the BRI to be undergirded by a combination of 'Western' and Confucian values, suggesting a post-Western/post-Chinese form of regionalism. Keywords: Belt and Road, Post-Western, Regionalism, Tianxia, Confucianism Çin'in Kusak-Yol Inisiyatifine (KYI) dair geleneksel açiklamalar, KYI'nin Çin'in çikarlarina nasil hizmet edecegine, Çin'in jeopolitik konumunu nasil güçlendirecegine veya bu ikisine birden odaklanmaktadir. Bu tür görüslerin KYI'yi yalnizca 'Batili' uluslararasi iliskiler merceginden yorumlamalari nedeniyle sinirli olduklarini ileri sürüyoruz. Bu makale, Çinli seçkinlerin söylemsel alan(lar)inda Çin'in Vestfalyen bir ulus devlet ve Konfüçyanizm altinda biçimsiz Tianxia olarak nasil ayni anda var oldugunu, kabul görmek için nasil mücadele ettigini ve bunlarin nasil birbirleriyle iliskili olduklarini açiklamak için KYI'yi bir örnek olay olarak kullanarak Çin'i küresel bütüne yeniden yerlestirmektedir. Sonuç olarak, ülke içerisinde son birkaç on yilda yarattigi ekonomik mucize sebebiyle su anda Çin'in kendi 'ahlaki üstünlügünden' emin ve öz-algisina dayanan 'hayirseverligi' yurt disina ihraç etmeye hazir durumda oldugunu öne sürüyoruz. Bu bakimdan KYI'nin, Batisonrasi/Çin-sonrasi bir bölgeselcilik biçimi öneren, 'Batili' ve Konfüçyüsçü degerlerin bir birlesiminden destek bulan bir okumasini yapiyoruz. Anahtar Kelimeler: Kusak-Yol, Bati Sonrasi, Bölgeselcilik, Tianxia, Konfüçyanizm, Introduction 'The Chinese have shown their capacity to adapt their myths to reality; they may also find that new myths will better serve their purpose' (1) The discourse of the [...]

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. Keywords Chinese studies * Intellectual history * Vietnam * PhanVanCac * Nguyen Huy Quy, In the twenty-first century, Vietnam encountered a series of maritime disputes with China, seemingly damaging the gradual restoration of a relationship that had been completely ruined by war in 1979. [...]

Southeast Asian studies of Chinese humanities are intertwined with the changing discourses and practices of Chineseness of indigenous Chinese residents. However, scholars rarely encounter this subject. Humanity and pragmatism are two distinctive features of how intellectuals of Southeast Asia understand China and Chineseness in the twenty-first century. These features emerge because descendants of Chinese historical migrants comprise a significant portion of the population in Southeast Asian countries. The strategy of survival and development of the descendants, along with their evolving self-understanding, inevitably affects the perspectives on China and Chinese studies in their countries. These studies simultaneously implicate subjectivity, which pertains to how authors and their readers position themselves among ethnic, national, and civilizational identities. Keywords Southeast Asia * Chinese studies * China studies * Humanism * Civilizational identity * Anthropology of knowledge, Humanity and pragmatism are two distinctive features of how intellectuals of Southeast Asia understand China and Chineseness in the twenty-first century. These features emerge because descendants of Chinese historical migrants [...]

The article tackles a conceptual topic of postcolonial feminism—self-feminization. Specifically, the article explores the femininity of Taiwanese professionals' bridging role between the head and branch offices of multinational firms in Taiwan, as well as between an allegedly universal ethos in science, market, and the globalization on the one hand and the humanist concerns for emotion, relation, and nuance on the other. The femininity of financial office as well as other local capacities demonstrates how they can improvise relationships for mutually estranging actors. Then, the article extends the discussion to allude to international relations, divided by an allegedly universal (usually conversional) and indigenous (usually resistant) force in terms of value, institution, relation, or identity. I use the local branch office qua the indigenous, the head office qua the universal, and the professionals who bridge between them as metaphors for China, the West or the global forces, and Taiwan, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rationale behind the rise of the image of a successful state is examined, at the same time explaining the reason behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks that further exacerbated democratic failure in Taiwan. Thus it is argued that a widely considered success story is actually composed of failures when viewed in terms of liberal democracy.

Confucian friendship adds to the literature on friendship distance sensibilities and aims to maintain and even reinforce the Confucian ethical order, whereas contemporary international politics fails to provide any clear ethical order. The use of friendship and the concomitant creation of a friendly role by China indicate an intended move away from the improper order, including the tributary system, the Cold War, imperialism, and socialism. Confucian friendship continues to constitute contemporary Chinese diplomacy under the circumstance of indeterminate distance sensibilities. It highlights the relevance of the prior relations that are perceived to have constituted friendship. This article explores several illustrative practices of a Confucian typology of friendly international relations, divided into four kinds of friendship, according to (1) the strength of prior relations and (2) the asymmetry of capacity, including the policies toward Russia, North Korea, and Vietnam, among others. Such a Confucian friendship framework additionally alludes to foreign policy analysis in general. The US policies for China and North Korea are examples that indicate this wide scope of application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We rely on the Chinese game of weiqi to conceptualize China's rival role conceptions and self-role conceptions. Since weiqi compels rivals endowed with the culture of harmony to outplay each other, rivals have no role relation between them. We argue the most apparent but least acknowledged practice that they compete on who enhances self-role performance better for the world to emulate. Exactly because the rivals compete intensely, they give an American watcher a reason to believe that they belong to the same strategic kind familiar to a chess player. We explore Sino-US rivalry accordingly. We maintain that, as rival, China has not expected the US to seriously honor any role duties, meaning they are not mutually obliged to any significant extent. Therefore, on the one hand, China is ready to both practice and bear squeezing and harassing as if no role obligation exist between them. On the other hand, China's obligation being a rival is to enhance the recognition of China in the world as always being more beneficial than the US is, hence the balance of role relations. This beneficial role conception necessitates China's pursuit of strategic partnership all over the world, which subdues the US influences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 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]

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.

Why and how can historical cases support different assessments of China rising with respect to the possibility of its becoming China threat? Rationalists and strategic culture analysts, who predominantly look at China from an external position, debate the influence of power, strategic cultures, and identities in explaining this highly controversial question. We, however, develop an internal view from the standpoint of a China looking out, which argues that different sources of Chinese self-role concepts could yield different policy behaviour. We analyse two discourses on Chinese foreign policy that have emerged in the 21st century—core national interest and harmonious world. We then introduce the dialectic approach of harmonious realism wherein indecisiveness is the essential characteristic. It is failure to decide on the specific purpose of Chinese foreign policy that creates China’s self-role conflict. Harmonious disciplining, balance, racism, and intervention are the practical forms of China’s harmonious realism through which the contemporary case analysis explains the forms, actual policy, and behavioural consequences of China’s self-role conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]