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This paper complicates the classic security dilemma by considering the notions of ontological security and relational deterrence. It studies how the ontological security dilemma has emerged between the US, China, and Taiwan from the relational perspective and how these spiral chains will further develop in the future. The paper incurs the literature on relational analysis to expound on how different ontological security concerns allude to relational deterrence between the three actors. Taiwan's separatism is more of a threat to China's relational self than to physical security because the separatist does not belong to any already agreed relationship. A geometric model and a few simulations yield three unconventional findings. 1) The less advantaged the US military is over China, the less likely armed unification will occur. 2) The US anti-Chinese tendency is irrelevant in determining the probability of armed unification. 3) What may escalate the spiral are China's anti-Taiwan independence and Taiwan's anti-unification. Case sensitivity indicates the ontological sensibilities of a security dilemma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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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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]

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]

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]

This paper discusses how an incorporated ethnic community has gradually lost its agency for change or subjectivity to face the state. Contrary to what a postcolonial writer wants to see, in the diasporic Shui community of Yizhou (a city in China's Guangxi Autonomous District) there is a lack of agency for change or self-empowerment. The paper reports how the Shui identity is reduced to a by-product of ancestor worship within each family. The loss of agency for change and willing acculturation do not necessarily confirm the state-promoted modernization theory's linear historiography. What the Shui example proves is that the agency for change cannot be taken for granted. Although the hybrid component in the Shui ethnicity is not felt today, the chances that some revived ethnic consciousness can reinvent cultural customs should not be ruled out, as long as the Shui communities continue to carry the name of Shui. The invention of ‘The Shui people grabbing the flower lamp’, and the interpretation of keeping old trunks in the ancestors’ place are two such possible starting points. However, hybridity of this sort is reinvented from, and not embedded in, their identity. Nevertheless, the quest for being different from the larger community is both a matter of internal need and an external construction. This is why the simple name of Shui cannot guarantee itself as a basis for revival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I examine the lack of attention given to ethnicity in Yongshun County in Tujia-Miao Autonomous Prefecture of Western Hunan. Contrary to most other papers on Chinese ethnic politics, my discussion is on the lack of ethnicity. The aim of this paper is to serve as a reminder that, in a case like Yongshun, ethnic identification means more to a visitor than to the locals. Yongshun's Tujia and Miao people do indeed form one community, but it is because of clan Confucianism not ethnicity. Modernisation is yet to replace local conventions, and villagers who advance most quickly in the market willingly make sacrifices for siblings and children. The government and the Party assume the leadership role to meet the locals' mentality of dependency. The lesson of my four visits to Yongshun is the following: while everyone seems to agree that Yongshun's residents are ethnically Tujia and Miao and they have seen some degree of modernisation, neither ethnicity nor modernisation has a clear meaning to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the case of Muslims in Litong, China in order to shed light on the process of becoming a citizen in modern China, with particular emphasis on the relationships between ethnic identity and state identity. Religious identity; Muslim policy; Market economy; Differences and similarities with the Hans.

Examines the interaction between economic development strategy and political culture in China. Characteristics of the Chinese moral regime; Impact of the failure of the Great Leap Forward (GLF) on the moral decline in politics; Characteristics of the GLF; Alternative explanations to the decline of moral regime in China; Economic developments after the GLF failure.

Focuses on the postcolonial legacy which the notion of sovereignty in China carries. Why the notion of sovereignty was adopted in China; Detailed information on China's sovereign status; Explanation of China's harsh policy towards Taiwan.