Search

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]

This special issue contributes to the study of decolonization and the Cold War by tackling their interactions and framing them into comparable topics. Collectively, we explore how decolonization has proceeded during the Cold War—discovering the impacts of the Cold War, tracing the agency at post-colonial sites for adaptation under the impacts of the Cold War, and acknowledging the uneven consequences the Cold War engendered for decolonization. Theoretically, decolonization in East Asia takes place in three different spheres of relations—international, interethnic, and subaltern. 1) International relations: This sphere involves complex role relations between former colonies as security allies, economic entities, colonial rivals, historical neighbors, and cultural acquaintances. 2) Interethnic relations: This sphere attends to mutual respect and equality between territorially internal groups that have been divided since colonial times. 3) Subaltern relations: The third sphere involves the peculiar relations wherein former colonies find inspiration from each other or support one another to attain political and economic autonomy. In terms of theoretical approaches, the authors adopt historical, discursive, narrative, political economics, postcolonial, and international relations perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The disappearance of references to "Yadong," Asia's East or Asiatic East, as opposed to East Asia, in Taiwan's post-World War II (WWII) political history presaged the impracticality of decolonization in Taiwan. The Cold War, pertaining especially to the American intellectual intervention in the conceptualization of the world through the fault line of its containment policy, contributed greatly to the substitution of East Asia for Yadong. I argue that Yadong is a geocultural lens, while East Asia connotes strategic purposes of various kinds. The latter concept echoed the discourse of the "Great East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere," which colonial Japan relied on before and during WWII to justify colonialism as well as expansion. The familiar discourse of decolonization embedded in "strategic essentialism," i.e. deliberate use of some fundamentalism for the occasion of resistance, reproduces the colonizing/colonized binary. I re-theorize decolonization as a relational project. Empirically the intellectual demise of Yadong as a relational discourse accompanied the evolution of the Cold War. Yadong's disappearance indirectly testifies to the fate of decolonization in Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]