The conference theme emerged from a 'China Rising' discussion. After decades of underestimating China's contribution to world culture and its place in the world, in the last few years we have witnessed a Zhongguo re 'China fever', certainly in Europe. We have also seen a counter-reaction with some people claiming China is over-hyped, that it lacks creativity and that the impressive progress China has made in recent years is all down to Western investment and models. What has China's contribution to world culture been? Does China offer alternative models? Are we witnessing a paradigm shift in the 21st century? Is our discourse on China capable of capturing the immense complexity and challenge China presents? Are we still trapped in modes of understanding that belong to the past and hamper our ability to comprehend the China of today? These are the kind of questions the central theme seeks to address, critically evaluating the claims of both traditional and contemporary China to creativity and originality. BACS promotes scholarship on all disciplines relating to China, both traditional and modern, and including China proper, other Chinese-speaking areas and the diaspora. We welcome papers across the whole spectrum. 

Abstracts

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:

Shuisheng Zhao: Chinese Nationalism and its Foreign Policy Implications

 Suisheng Zhao is Professor and Executive Director of the Center for China-US Cooperation at Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver. He is founder and editor of the Journal of Contemporary China, a member of the Board of Governors of the US Committee of the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific (USCSCAP), a member of National Committee on US-China Relations, a Research Associate at the Fairbanks Center for East Asian Research in Harvard University, and a jianzhi professor at Beijing University, Renmin University and Fudan University. His most recent books are Debating Political Reform in China: Rule of Law versus Democratization (M. E. Sharpe, 2006), A Nation-State by Construction: Dynamics of Modern Chinese Nationalism (Stanford University Press, 2004), Chinese Foreign Policy: Pragmatism and Strategic Behavior (M. E. Sharpe, 2003), China and Democracy: Reconsidering the Prospects for a Democratic China (Routledge, 2000), Across the Taiwan Strait: Mainland China, Taiwan, and the Crisis of 1995-96 (Routledge, 1999). In addition, his forthcoming book, The Rise of China and Transformation of US-China Relations, will be published by Routledge in 2007.

Martin Jacques: Inside and Outside, Convergent and Divergent: China as a Global Power

China poses a quite different challenge to every previous rising power. China, unlike any previous major power, apart from Japan, does not stem from European or western roots. Chinese modernity will therefore, while displaying convergent aspects, be quite distinctive from western forms of modernity, thereby requiring the world to rethink the dominant western-centric concept of modernity. And its distinctive cultural legacy, combined with its sheer size, mean that China will not be a conventional power that will essentially adapt and conform to the western-designed international system, but its rise will inevitably, over time, lead to fundamental changes in the nature of that system.

Martin Jacques is a writer and columnist. He has been working on his new book, When China Rules the World for several years. Some of the initial research was done while he was based in Hong Kong for two years. Since 2005, he has been a visiting professor at the International Centre for Chinese Studies, Aichi University, visiting professor at Ritsumeikan University, senior research fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, and visiting professor at Renmin University. He is a visiting research fellow at the Asia Research Centre, London School of Economics and a columnist for the Guardian. He has prevously been, amongst other things, editor of Marxism Today, founder of Demos, deputy editor of the Independent, and a columnist for the Times and Sunday Times. He has also presented and scripted many TV programmes for the BBC and co-authored several books. When China Rules the World will be published by Penguin UK and Penguin US in 2008.

Yunxiang Yan: The Embarrassment of Virtue: The Good Samaritan's New Trouble in China and Its Moral Implications

Yunxiang Yan is professor of anthropology at UCLA and co-director of its Center for Chinese Studies.His research interests include: Economic anthropology, social change and development, family and kinship, exchange theory, peasant study, and cultural globalization. His publication include: The Flow of Gifts: Reciprocity and Social Networks in a Chinese Village. (Stanford University Press,1996) and Private Life under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949-1999 (Stanford University Press, 2003).

ABSTRACTS OF PRESENTATIONS (in alphabetical order of presenter's name)

Felix Boecking (PhD candidate, University of Cambridge)
The Search for Modern China: Tariffs, Administration and Modernity in China 1927—1937

Between 1853 and 1949, China’s tariffs on international trade were collected by a foreign-led institution. Because of its foreign leadership, the Chinese Maritime Customs Service served as a conduit for the introduction of Western concepts and practices into China, and significantly contributed to the shape of China’s economic and administrative modernity. After the Nationalist Government regained tariff autonomy in 1929, it began to use tariffs as an instrument of protectionist trade policy. The Customs became a tool in shaping the Chinese economy according to the developmental vision of the KMT. Protectionist intentions were often hindered by revenue constraints or foreign pressure; nevertheless, they affected the shape of Chinese economic development in the 1930s. 

Designing tariffs intended to promote the growth of domestic industries required the Customs to collect nationwide trade data, so as to analyze China’s trade and to measure the effect of tariff changes. Through these datasets, which became widely used by Chinese economists, the Customs contributed much to the way the modern Chinese economy was depicted in China and abroad. Nationwide datasets also contributed to the emerging notion of China possessing a national economy as opposed to several regional economies.
 

In order to make revenue collection more efficient, and to increase revenue yield, the Customs were one of the first institutions in China to introduce modern technology and administrative practices, such as  scientific management technique,  typewriters, chemical analysis of imported commodities, and x-ray machines. From the Customs, these concepts and practices spread to the Ministry of Finance and on to other parts of the KMT bureaucracy.

Through contributing to the design of protectionist trade policy, gathering nationwide trade data, and introducing modern technology and administrative practices, the Customs significantly contributed to the shape of China’s economic and administrative modernity in the 1930s and 1940s.

Chih-jou Jay Chen (Associate Research Fellow, Academia Sinica)
The Sources and Trends of Social Protest in China

This paper examines the various sources of social protest in China and the substantial changes emerging in the body politic in the mid-2000s. It observes that mass protests in today’s China have not only increased in frequency with its concomitant scale of violence, but has also spread more widely to incorporate and involve different social groups. This study uses a news database which has collected more than 700 pieces of social protest reports in the press from 1997 to 2007, highlighting China’s major protest groups and the social issues that have sparked off their struggles. Equally important, as market reforms proceed apace, some urban white-collar social groups have begun to struggle for their collective rights and interests. These trends signal the unleashing social forces of the rising middle-class in China. At present the mass protests in China do not constitute a grave threat to political stability and regime survival, because the vast majority of protests are not explicitly or overtly political but derive from economic grievances that are taken as by-products of the economic sphere or they are made to appear as if they are due to the apparent misconduct of individual local officials. However, the contentious issues of disgruntled social groups appear to persist and continue to act against the interests of those who hold the stakes. This paper also analyzes the extent to which the policies of China’s central government and the degree to which the behavior of its local governments affect the different kinds of mass protest. And finally, this paper shows that state-society relations in China are changing to a degree that the regime has to take due cognizance of these deleterious factors in order to maintain its legitimacy and effect good governance.

Jue Chen (Associate Professor, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan)
“The Foreigners Who Know Where the Treasures Are”: Immigration and Cultural Exchanges under the Tang Dynasty as Reflected in the Record of an Ancient Mirror

The Record of an Ancient Mirror (Gujing ji), a fictional text produced in the early Tang period, involves a well-known topos: “the foreigners who know where treasures are” (胡僧識寶). This topos is related to the hu 胡, “foreigners”, who came to China in large numbers during the reigns of Emperor Gaozong and Empress Wu.

     The cultural background of the proliferation of immigration under the Sui and the Tang is complex, and these immigrants can be put into a variety of categories: merchant immigrants, religious immigrants, royal service immigrants, immigrants as articles of tribute, and refugee immigrants, among others.

These immigrants and short-term visitors introduced many exotic foreign cultural elements into China in various areas, such as foreign calendrical science and technology, foreign medicine, and foreign esoteric arts, to name just a few. These elements enriched not only medieval Chinese material life but also its intellectual atmosphere. This enrichment contributed much to the formation of the "all inclusive" nature of Tang culture. These foreign people also introduced many kinds of exotic treasures that had never been seen in China before. The enthusiasm for exotic treasures created by these foreign peoples put a strong imprint on the Chinese mind of the Tang dynasty. Since foreigners are specialized in treasure hunting and collecting, it was only natural for them to become experts in the business of distinguishing a real treasure from an ordinary object. This paper will take the Record of an Ancient Mirror as an example to analyze three types of foreigners, namely, medical doctors, pneumas-watchers, and fortune tellers, to demonstrate the cultural significance of the above mentioned topos in Tang China.

Lin Chen (PhD candidate, University of York)
A plan for action: filling the old age security gap for the elderly in poor rural areas in China                                  

China has had a history of social security pensions for more than 50 years. However, the traditional pension system covered only workers in state-owned enterprises. In 1999, the Chinese government began to expand the pension system to cover private companies. The government also tried to expand the pension system to rural areas. How to care for the rural population, which represents 60% of the total, is a big challenge China must address. According to the annals of MOLSS (Ministry of Labour and Social Security), only 54 million rural residents were enrolled in the basic pension system up to 2002. In other words, the other 900 million were relying on  their savings or support from their children. The level of economic development in rural areas is much lower than in urban areas. In addition, the rural and less-educated population makes up a high proportion of the elderly people in China.  

 The development of the economy, urbanization and the migration of rural population may bring a serious imbalance in the demographic age structure. The urbanization process has already attracted many rural young people into the cities and towns. Consequently, a pattern has formed of young people going into the cities to seek jobs while the elderly have to stay at home in the countryside. Therefore, the problem of caring for the elderly will become much more serious in rural areas.

 This paper provides an overview of the current ageing situation and pension system in urban and rural areas, analysing the gap between rural and urban areas in old age pension system benefits, and between richer and poorer rural areas. It also compares the views of senior and middle-aged generations in both rural and urban areas and in poorer and richer areas.

 Ming-chi Chen (Assistant Professor, National Tsing Hua University)
Panel Title: Contentions, Citizenship and Taiwan Connections: Studying China’s Social Change from the Vantage Point of Taiwan.

Panel members: Bih-Er Chou, Ming-chi Chen, Wu Jieh-min, Chih-jou Jay Chen

With the establishment of rapport between Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China in the late 1970s has come an ever-increasing flow of investment, goods, travelers, culture and ideas between these two societies.  The Taiwan connections have had significant impacts upon the trajectory and consequences of China’s social transformation, especially in the Coastal regions where Taiwanese-invested enterprises (TIEs) have become the major force in local economic development and the main agent linking them to the global production network.  This panel explores the configurations of the Taiwan connections and their direct and indirect effects on China’s social change.  The four papers illustrate a shift of focus in Taiwan’s China studies community from intelligence analysis serving military and political functions to empirical research based upon social science theoretical concerns and cross-society comparison frameworks.

Ming-chi Chen (Assistant Professor, National Tsing Hua University)
Networking without Local Embeddedness: The Fortress in the Air Model of Transnational Corporations in China

 Foreign direct investment (FDI) plays a pivotal role in the market transition processes of post-socialist countries.  In China, it is the transnational corporations (TNCs), especially those from Taiwan and Hong Kong, rather than the newly founded or reoriented domestic firms, that occupy the strategic position of linking Chinese coastal regions to the global economy.  In contrast to the economic approach of emphasizing the individualistic actions of TNCs, an institutional perspective focusing on macro-level institutions, and a cultural explanation stressing the rule of appropriateness inscribed in tradition, this paper analyzes the requisites of trust and trust building processes in business dealings and proposes a “fortress in the air” model as an ideal type to explicate the operational mode of one of the most important sources of China’s FDI, namely the Taiwanese transplants. While the flexibly specialized Taiwanese enterprises were deeply embedded in their native local communities, ones that resembled Italian industrial districts, they have a higher degree of vertical integration, encase transactional cooperation with other Taiwanese transplants, and engage in shallow local embeddedness in China.  By constructing fortresses in the air, they buffer core tasks from environmental turbulence, facilitate integration with the global value chains, and secure mobility.  This paper concludes by arguing that this network involution strategy aims to expedite necessary re-composition in a different place as required by cost fluctuations or regulatory changes and thus has limited sustainable spill-over effects to the host communities relying upon FDI for their development, even as these localities are currently enjoying transient prosperity.

Ming-Hui Chen (PhD candidate, Loughborough University)
Cyberfeminism and Contemporary Visual Art – From My Fingers: Living in the Technological Age

In 2002, Taiwan’s authorities launched the six-year Challenge 2008 Development Plan, to foster the creativity and talent Taiwan needed to transform itself into a green silicon island.  As a result, the development of high technology has been chosen by the Taiwanese government as their tactic to survive in a globalised world economy.  At the same time, Taiwan’s women artists used cyberfeminism as a strategy to debate the patriarchal systems which they have been challenging in a technology-led society.  From My Fingers: Living in the Technological Age (2003) was curated on the basis of cyberfeminism, and the exhibition expressed a new way of presenting contemporary visual art through technology.

In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991), Donna Haraway addresses the fact that technology has diluted the distance between ‘organic and non-organic’, ‘flesh and cyborgs’ and ‘sexuality’.  In addition, being exposed to an age of technology, the clear division of each nation’s territory has been shifting.  The concept of a real-life minority (e.g. Third World people) disappears in cyberspace as the world of technology ignores biological and cultural differences, although some characteristics of the minority have been retained, such as, for example the fact that they contribute the main labour force for producing computers and the high-tech hardware.

In this paper, I will argue how technology has been involved in Taiwanese women’s lives; how Taiwanese women artists addressed their identity in terms of race and gender via technology; how new perspectives of postcolonial feminism were generated in the age of cyberspace; how installations and high-tech works were created by women artists to respond to the concepts of cyberfeminism and to re-interpret their roles in the twenty-first century.

Jack Yong-jie Chen (PhD candidate, University of York)
What has been done to tackle student poverty in China?

The Chinese have witnessed a ‘Great Leap Forward’ style expansion of the country’s higher education system since 1999. Annual recruitment of students has increased more than five fold from 1997 to 2006. Without sufficient public resources to cover the extra costs occurred, such an expansion has resulted in a sharp increase in tuition fees across educational institutions as the burden has been shifted from government to students and their families. As a result, the education authorities admit that there are more than 20% of college students in China, over four million, who have ‘various type of financial difficulties’. The government’s policy to tackle student poverty is to establish a student support system that includes five key methods: bursary, student loan, financial assistance, part-time jobs subsidy, and fees deduction. However, to what extent this system has reduced student poverty and promoted equal access to university remains largely unanswered by research, yet it is a topic affecting millions. This paper attempts to explore the development of this system by critically assessing the implementation of the five support methods. The key purpose of this paper is, first, to provide an accurate description of how Chinese students cope with their financial difficulties and, second, to examine what the government has done to support them. This paper also compares the Chinese system of support for students with that of the UK, in order to discover if there is anything China should or should not learn from this example. By analyzing official figures as well as findings from the author’s empirical research, this paper will provide suggestions for future reform of the student support system in China. 

Chao-hsien Chiu (Ph.D candidate, University of Sheffield)
The Paradox of Soft Power in the ‘Peaceful Rise’ of China

With the economic growth over the past two decades, the suspicion that China’s economic power will be transformed into military power has been rising. The consequent arguments of a ‘China threat’ and a Confucian challenge, presented in Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of the civilizations,’ have caused controversies in the international community. To debunk the association with revisionist or expansionist ambitions, Beijing needs to be aware that its reputation for action can play a major factor when other countries assess Chinese intentions and policy behaviour in terms of its rising capabilities.

China proposed an idea of a ‘peaceful rise’ in late 2003 to refute negative arguments and foster an image of cooperative characteristics in its foreign relations. In the critique of Cold-War mentality such as American-led military alliances and unilateral actions, China realizes that emphasizing its soft power can ensure a respected status in the world. This orientation is evident when the Chinese Government accepts ideas with moderate and constrained features such as a new security concept, a peaceful rise, a responsible stakeholder, and a harmonious world. While adhering to its Marx-Leninist state doctrine, China applies concepts of Confucian undertones to its rhetoric strategy of advancing soft power abroad. Meanwhile, paradoxically Beijing’s mercantilist-oriented approach in seeking energy and armed forces in dealing with sovereignty-bound issues have caused western countries to be sceptical of its intentions while advancing its soft power.   

 This paper begins with China’s self-declared peaceful rise in the global discourse. It also highlights two aspects regarding China’s foreign endeavours to shape its positive reputation. First, Beijing has sought to export its culture and language, by establishing ‘Confucius Institutes’ throughout the world, to promote China’s international visibility. Second, China extensively participates in international institutions to foster its cooperative image in the world. This paper will explore factors which undermine China’s soft power in the process of China’s ‘peaceful rise’, and examine challenges that Chinese foreign policy faces.

 Bih-Er Chou (Professor, National Tsing Hua University)
Boss’ Wife of TaiShang: Wife or Boss, Before and After  

The paper addresses the relationships between gender and globalization by examining the changes and dynamics in the division of labor between the husband and wife of the Taiwanese business family, TaiShang, resulting from the relocation of the family business to China. Specifically, this paper will answer the following questions: (1) What changes in the roles of boss’ wives in production and reproduction when family business relocated transnationally? (2) Are there differences in these changes and their dynamics between different types of family business?  (3) How do the boss’ wives deal manage the changes and negotiate their new identities?

Based on the findings of previous research on boss’ wives and family businesses in Taiwan (and Chinese businesses) and insights from capital globalization and masculinity and the international division of labor, this paper will extend the concept of the division of labor or production relations to the three-dimensional.  That is, gender relations in production (public), reproduction (domestic) and intimacy (private) in order to capture more fully sexual politics in the power negotiations between TaiShang wifes and husbands.  Data from in-depth interviews with a group of TaiShang boss’s wives, currently residing either in Taiwan or in Donguan, regarding their relocation history and their involvement in the family business and domestic work both before and after the relocation will be used for analysis. 

Preliminary analyses of these data suggest that the boss’ wife is an invisible yet critical element in the success of the family business, both before and after relocation. When the family business relocated to China, due to the expansion of the business and the supply of cheap local female labour, these boss’ wives tended to withdraw not from active production to become ladies of leisure, but from domestic duty to become lady bosses or/and public women.  Moreover, there are diverse methods of both negotiating these new identities and of managing the (potential) challenge from local women to their claim on their husbands’ emotional commitment.

 This paper plans to shed light on our current understanding of the complexity of the relationship between gender and globalization. 

 Ming Ming Diao (PhD candidate, Macquarie University)
Television Industrialisation Reform in the Current Political and Economic System of China

Chinese society has experienced a dramatic process of industrialisation in the past three decades. Contemporary Chinese industrialisation has taken place within the framework of a globalising world with increasing liberalisation in terms of politics as well as the economy. The Chinese television industry has also seen a rapid development during this period. In recent years, central and provincial Chinese governments have gradually relaxed the restrictions on television industrialisation and attempted to reform the original television systems and operational patterns.

Under this situation, both Chinese state-owned television stations or corporate groups that occupy the dominant position in the television industry and the private or foreign-funded television firms are actively seeking long-term, feasible and sustainable development strategies for further opportunities and challenges.

This paper will concisely review the development of the television industry in China in the past thirty years, and analyse and discuss the main problems existing in China’s television industrialisation based on the principles and traditions of commodification, media concentration and pluralism, media economics, and the market chain of the television industry. An examination of the three steps, i.e. marketisation, conglomeration and capitalisation of horizontal concentration and the vertical pluralism in the six markets, i.e. capital, production, trading, broadcasting, consumption and investigating markets of the market chain in the television industry will be conducted to assess the entire television industrialisation reformation in China.

 Randall Doyle (Professor, Central Michigan University)
China – The Wild Card in Asia-Pacific

 One of the great arguments amongst Asia-Pacific observers and scholars, in the early part of the 21^st century, concerns the future role of China in Asia-Pacific. This discussion encompasses almost every aspect of existence within this vital region: economic growth, use of natural resources, regional security, the threat of environmental damage, educational prowess, regional hegemonic aspirations, future Asian-based institutions, etc. This paper addresses a number of these factors and presents a multitude of different opinions concerning how the U.S., and its key allies in Asia-Pacific, should react to an ever-growing Chinese presence in the Pacific region.

 The issues are complex and difficult to define and understand, and the danger of rising nationalism within America and Asia is real and potentially destructive. It is irrefutable that the global axis, especially economically, is moving toward Asia - and China is the primary reason for this new dynamic reality. How will the West respond to this historic shift? How will Asia, especially Japan, respond to the recent resurgence of the Middle Kingdom? In short, there are many difficult questions to answer, but no one has produced a comprehensive strategy in dealing with the rise of China.

 In the meantime, I believe that the U.S. has begun to implement a new version of ‘containment’ directed toward China. It is a ‘soft’ containment and it has the support of several primary and secondary powers in the region: India, Russia, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Vietnam and Australia. The recent spate of security agreements involving the countries mentioned above can not be ignored. In short, the rise of China has made the locals nervous. The ultimate question is: Can China’s hegemonic rise remain peaceful and be respectful of the vital interests of others within Asia-Pacific?

 This paper states the case that China can, indeed, continue to grow, prosper, and co-exist with its neighbors and the United States. However, we must acknowledge that history has not been kind to this type of great-power co-existence. In short, the great power of the moment almost always intensely dislikes the thought of sharing their global influence and power with an upstart. Thus, once again, the 21^st century presents us with another great-power dilemma situated in Asia-Pacific: Does America’s recent diplomatic initiatives represent its future intentions toward China? And, if so, will China accept these limitations as the new century unfolds? The future stability of the region and the world depend on their answers. Will history’s verdict repeat itself?

 Feng Chongyi (Associate Professor, University of Technology, Sydney)
Liberal Tradition within the Chinese Communist Party

With the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union during 1989-1991, China was left as one of just a handful of countries maintaining communist party rule. Politically, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is still firmly committed to maintaining its dictatorship and to forestalling a democratic transition. This grim reality impels many to forget the fact that the birth of the CCP was an unintended consequence of the May-fourth New Culture Movement, known as both the Chinese Renaissance and the Chinese Enlightenment. Originally the CCP inherited the liberal values of the intellectual movement heralding the communist movement, and the liberal elements within the CCP have never been completely eliminated, not even by the stark madness of the Chinese totalitarianism during the Cultural Revolution. The establishment of the CCP in 1921 resulted from the transformation of several pre-eminent thinkers from liberals to communists, most notably Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao. Likewise, the CCP’s rise to power in 1949 benefited greatly from the shift of thousands of educated youth from liberalism to communism in the late 1930s and 1940s. However, the process has been reversed at the end the 20^th Century with the phenomenon of transformation in the opposite direction in China: from communists to liberals. Re-emergence of liberalism and social democracy within the CCP since the 1980s is an indication of the transformation of the CCP and the beginning of the end of the communist rule in China. This paper is an attempt to trace the liberal tradition and liberal elements within the CCP and assess the potential of liberal transformation from within the CCP and the prospect for democratisation of China.

 Alison Hardie (Lecturer, University of Leeds)
Innovation and tradition in Ruan Dacheng’s drama: The Sakyamuni Pearls (Mounihe)

Ruan Dacheng (1587-1646), notorious as the associate of Wei Zhongxian, chief eunuch of the Tianqi court, and of Ma Shiying in the ill-fated Southern Ming regime, was also a highly-regarded poet and dramatist. In a preface to Ruan’s earliest surviving play, Spring Lantern Riddles or Ten Cases of Mistaken Identity (1633), the Zhejiang scholar-official Wang Siren observes that Ruan had decided to create his own plots from then on, rather than adapting traditional tales, and Ruan himself confesses in his own preface ‘I much prefer a story made up by myself’.

The Sakyamuni Pearls, probably written sometime between 1635 and 1638, is different from his three other surviving dramas in that its plot is almost entirely tragic or melodramatic, with little of the comic relief of the other plays. The interesting thing is that, although the complex plot was made up by Ruan (as with Spring Lantern Riddles) and the main characters are fictional, one of the drama’s most melodramatic and apparently far-fetched elements, the cannibalism of the evil barbarian waterways official Mashumou, was taken from a historical record (of course it may not be true, but it was not Ruan’s own invention). At the same time, one of the villains of the historical record, Mashumou’s subordinate Tao Lang’er, becomes a less sinister character in the play, while Tao’s role as out-and-out villain is taken over by the invented character Feng Qibu.

 This paper will examine how the playwright uses tradition and innovation to blend historical ‘fact’, fiction and the supernatural in the play, and will attempt to draw some conclusions about what message Ruan Dacheng wants to convey through the combination of these aspects.

 Hille, Marie-Paule (PhD candidate, EHESS [School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences] Paris)
Rethinking the dichotomy between memory/oblivion : how a Chinese Muslim community, the “Xidaotang”,  is managing its legacy of the past ?

Based on four months of multi-sited anthropological fieldwork conducted in the North-West of China (Gansu Province) in 2005 and 2006, this paper examines how a minority Muslim community, the Xidaotang 西道堂 , makes sense of and mobilizes the legacy of the past to shape the course of negotiations with local authorities.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how this religious community tries to find new alternatives in its face-to-face relationship with the government and other social groups to legitimate its history, its religious identity and its present demands. Whereas nowadays a lot of works are dealing with violent social conflicts in China, this paper offers another approach to show how new configurations are emerging. This fieldwork in progress underlines how people ‘are proceeding by trial and error’, and sheds light on the difficulties faced to delineate these complex mechanisms.

In the first part of the paper, specific experiences undergone by this community to successfully adapt itself to the economic, social and political context of the first part of the twentieth century are examined. These include the constitution of a religious identity, the emergence of an economic power and the accumulation of wealth.

Then, data from recent fieldwork stress the great capacity of this community to revive past experiences and configurations from the 80’s: to rebuild a religious identity, create new economic opportunities, and justify particular demands to the local government.

This re-evaluation of the legacy issue questions the dichotomy between memory/ oblivion in taking into account the actions of the players. Instead of arguing about the theme memory/oblivion, this analysis focuses on how this community manages the legacy of its past, what it is that they want to or are able to mobilize and, finally, the degree of this mobilization.

Szu-chien Hsu (Assistant Research Fellow, Academia Sinica)
Panel Title: Understanding the Dynamics of Chinese Elite and Mass Politics – Democracy Perception, Nationalism, and Central-Local Relations

Panel Members: Horng-luen Wang, Szu-chien Hsu, S. Philip Hsu, Yi-feng Tao

 It has been widely recognized that China has been experiencing fast economic growth and transformation. However, to what extent China is also experiencing parallel transformation in its current politics is highly contentious and controversial. The four following papers present the writers’ understanding of elite and mass politics in today’s China.

 Szu-chien Hsu (Assistant Research Fellow, Academia Sinica Paper)
The Perceptions of “Democracy” in China: An Empirical Study

 By using the survey data from the East Asian Barometer Project (2000-2004), this paper will examine how Chinese people perceive the concept of “democracy.” The paper will draw from the responses to an open-ended question: “To you, what does ‘democracy’ mean? What else?” Respondents are allowed to give up to three response items to describe their perceptions of “democracy.”

 The purpose of this study is to examine whether and how the Chinese people perceive “democracy” differently from the West. The paper thus will first examine the literatures discussing different perception of democracy from the Asian or Chinese culture. It will also examine how “democracy” is perceived in the Western context. A preliminary typology will be developed in order to code the responses to an open-ended question on the perception of democracy. The paper then will try to simplify the responses into three ideal types: the “Western Type,” the “Non-western Type,” and the “Mixed Type.”

 By comparing the distribution among these types, this paper then will try to answer the research question on whether Chinese people have their peculiar way of perception of “democracy.” Emphasis will be put on the “Mixed Type” so that the stereotypes that either Chinese people simply do or do not have different perceptions of “democracy” can be broken down. Furthermore, multinomial analyses will be conducted to characterize the profiles of these different types of democracy perception in today’s Chinese society.

 S. Philip Hsu (Associate Professor, National Taiwan University)
Bringing Factional Politics Back In: Political Succession and Resource Allocation, 1993-2005

Right now we are already toward the end of Hu Jintao’s first tenure of the general secretaryship of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since the conclusion of the Party’s 16^th National Congress.  To look back, there is little doubt that Jiang Zemin’s retirement from the chairmanship of the CCP’s Central Military Commission (CMC) in July 2004 was a critical watershed. Indeed, the shaky status of a newly inaugurated CCP party secretary Hu Jintao, overshadowed by a paramount leader from the last generation of political elites, was nothing new in post-Mao China. Stressing the decisive impact of the succession crisis, Susan Shirk explained in her groundbreaking work how the crisis had shaped China’s major economic reform policies in the 1980s. Shirk demonstrated how the need to maximize political support for succession in the CCP’s Central Committee (CC) had made those reform initiatives of particularistic contracting more popular and feasible to be carried out at the local level.  

 Nevertheless, right after the 16^th Party Congress, Hu had assembled a sizeable group of cohorts, most from the Chinese Communist Youth League (CCYL), by making twenty four of his cohorts elected full members (among 198 full members in total) of the 16^th CC, and thirty two of them alternate members (among 158 in total).  This sharp contradistinction merits our attention to test the central argument advanced by Shirk: what new lessons can we learn about the effect of competition for leadership succession on economic outcomes, if we take into account the additional factor of factionalism?  Could informal politics modify the logic deduced from formal institution? 

 To answer this research question, this paper conducts an empirical test on the role of factions in economic policy.  The test aims to compare the extent to which informal networks between provincial and central leaders affected resource allocation in fixed assets investment (FAI), when the succession crisis did and did not come into play, during 1993 to 2003.

 Yuqin Huang (PhD candidate, University of Essex)
The First Footloose Generation: A Perspective from Working Country Girls in the Pre-collective Rural China (1926--1956)

 Conventional wisdom has indicated a minor role for women in farming in pre-revolutionary rural China, and emphasized 1949 as a watershed in women’s participation into productive labour. Based on historical documents and life stories of 21 women from a village in mid China, this article instead shows that the country girls’ contribution to farming in pre-1949 era has been underreported. Born from the 1920s-1940s and living as the first footloose generation, the country girls were compelled to work for the family as early as possible in the pre-1949 era, and began their formal farm work on a large scale before the mobilisation of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Starting from auxiliary and non-productive work, going on to productive work and then farm work, the girls played an important part in the family economy at different stages of their life cycle. Their participation under the CCP’s mobilisation was just continuity of what they had done before. Social, economic and demographic changes caused by wars and revolution, family structure and son preference played a part in the organisation of their labour as such. Those who were mobilised into productive farm work by the CCP after 1949, for most purposes, were the girls’ mothers. But due to their bound feet and old age, they had to rely on their daughters for most or all of the farm work they were expected to do, or they struggled in the fields if not applicable. The country girls’ labour helped them develop a relied-relier relationship with their mother with the coming of the collective campaign, and earned them some say in the family and some special treatment over food, even when people were on the verge of starving.

 Jinhua Jia (Assistant Professor, City University of Hong Kong)
A New Interpretation of the Origin of the Term Dao

This paper applies a synthetic approach of etymological, archaeological, and religious studies to explore the original meaning of the term dao 道, the most important concept in traditional Chinese intellectual history. The earliest form of the character dao is a compound of two graphic constituents, shou 首 (head) and hang 行 (a picture of a crossroads, meaning to walk and move, or road). Both dao (*dgəwx) and shou (*skhjəwx) belong to the you rhyme group and share the same final in archaic Chinese, so shou must be the etymon. It is notable that several graphs of oracle bone inscriptions that have been identified as shou are simplified forms of the face motifs or masks (mianwen 面紋, shoumianwen 獸面紋, or taotiewen 饕餮紋) presented in unearthed or received jade and bronze artifacts dated from late Neolithic period to the Shang and Zhou dynasties, which represent supreme deity/High God/Heaven. Therefore, shou originally represents the High God/Heaven, while dao, with the additional constituent of “to move,” represents tiandao 天道, the movement and course of Heaven. In addition, as is a general rule for characters of common etymon in early writings, the two characters dao and shou are used interchangeably in early writings. Thus, dao also connotes the meaning of the supreme deity/High God. Inspired by the newly unearthed text, “The Great One Gives Birth to Water,” some scholars have reexamined and confirmed the identification of Dao with the Great One (Taiyi 太一)/spirit of the Pole Star/High God in Warring-States to Han-dynasty texts. This identification is now further supported by our new interpretation of the origin of Dao.

 Chun-Yi Lee (PhD Candidate, University of Nottingham)
The Rise of China and The Impact of Foreign Investment—The Case of the Taiwanese Businessmen’s Associations

China’s growing economy plays a decisive role in a globalised world, but the “China factor” cannot be explained without considering the long lasting effects that massive foreign investment is having and will have upon the Chinese society. Acknowledging this state of affairs, this paper focuses on the relationship between spontaneous business groups, such as the Taiwanese Businessmen’s Associations (TBA), and the Chinese government. The first TBA was established in Beijing in 1990; nowadays there are over 100 TBAs in China. It has been argued that TBAs can be seen as the emergence of a sort of civil society in China; to others, they merely reflect the strong will of the Chinese government to attract foreign investment. In analysing the relationship between the TBAs and the Chinese government, statism (e.g. rational choice) appears to be a valid theoretical framework.

 Seungho Lee (Lecturer in Chinese Studies, University of Nottingham)
Public-Private Partnerships in the Chinese Water Industry

This research explores the extent to which public private partnerships (PPPs) in the Chinese water industry have developed and evolved since the late 1990s by analyzing policies and regulations of the central and local governments and contracts awarded to water companies in China. The study also aims to address institutional challenges that water firms have been confronted with in the privatisation process. Case studies will focus on projects awarded in highly industrialized cities such as Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai. The research concludes that PPPs in the Chinese water sector have gradually evolved based on the distinctive socio-economic and political landscape through interactions between the private sector and local governments.

Until the late 1990s, the monopolization of the state in water services had caused problems including dilapidated facilities, inefficient management skills, and a lack of finance. Such situation began to make the central and local governments resort to the private sector including foreign companies. Public private partnerships in the water sector have become a norm in big cities such as Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai since 2000. The Chinese water industry has been dominated by water multinationals, i.e. Suez, and Veolia. Such dominance by water multinationals, however, has been challenged by Chinese companies as well as Southeast Asian firms in recent years. This unprecedented development has been regulated by Chinese authorities with new laws and regulations in favour of privatisation. The research assesses a range of institutions and legal framework as well as organisations and regulators that deal with water privatisation in China. Water multinationals and other companies’ performance in the water industry will be evaluated through various case studies based on projects awarded.

Yu-Jung Lee (Assistant Professor, Kainan University)
Human Rights in Transition: Bottom Up or Top Down

The emphasis of human rights in China has limited its discourse to human rights at governmental level. This emphasis emerged in the 1990s with the issue of a human rights white paper. The Chinese government claims that political, social and cultural conditions need to be considered when implementing human rights. This illustrates a lack of agreement on the universality of human rights and gives rise to debates between the universality and particularity of human rights, as well as the implementation of human rights in each country.

Although this claim has set an example for the impossibility of universality, recent developments in China have further shifted the position on this claim. Following the case of Sun Zhigang in 2004 that publicised China’s household registration system as unconstitutional, the development of a lively local press and legislative reforms has resulted in, and illustrated, a breakthrough in this fixed position.

China’s situation on human rights is in transition, but in what ways? Will the transition lead to a recognition of the universality of human rights? Does this transition derive from a bottom-up demand? What are the solutions for the Chinese government in dealing with this shift? This paper attempts to discuss this shift in human rights and investigate its origins. It is divided into four parts: governmental understanding of human rights, the legal structure, recent developments and the impact of transition.

Dimon Liu (Visiting Fellow, Woodrow Wilson Foundation)
What Will It Take to Democratize China?

Two models, the British or evolutionary model and the American or constructivist model, exist for building democracy, a task which is inherently an elite enterprise.   In the first, those in power are forced to democratize by others bent on curbing their dictatorial power gradually.  In the second an elite group assumes responsibility to build democratic institutions.  The first model requires time, tradition, and social cohesion.   South Korea, Taiwan, and Ukraine to some extent, have followed this model in recent years.   The second model is more clear-cut.   It was followed by the American military in postwar Germany and Japan, and in many Eastern European states after the demise of the Soviet Union.  The types of elite, the circumstances, and the time required to build democracy may differ greatly, but the essential models are limited.

 The premise of this paper is that the current Chinese regime, while apparently stable, is inherently weak and cannot sustain itself over the long run.  With respect to the possibility of democratization, then, the question we must ask is which of the two models will China follow?  This paper explains why China lacks the time to follow the first model.  It examines the three conditions that must occur simultaneously for transition from the current political system to a new one, namely: 

1. Massive social, economic and/or political crises. 
2. Viable political opposition which is ready to step in and take responsibility – the nature of the opposition will determine the future China.
3. The limited, but nonetheless crucial, roles that the international community can play in protecting the opposition, in conferring legitimacy, and finally in recognition of the new system.

 The paper also examines the debate on democracy within the Chinese tradition from the late Qing dynasty to the present and suggests why most Western theories on democracy do not or cannot apply to China.

 Raviprasad Narayanan (Associate Fellow, Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi)
The Discourse on the ‘Rise of China’: An Indian Perspective

Ideas and concepts are powerful forces in shaping the course of human events and nations. China is no exception to this. A national self-image conceptualises its role amongst the comity of nations. This image is confirmed and actualised by the pursuit of national interests derived from this national self-image. National self image to the Chinese is termed guojia xinxiang. While this expression appears in Chinese publications, the axiom guoji xingxiang (international image), which emphasises the international community as the target of image projection appears more often. The comprehensive debate and rhetoric generated by the ‘rise of China’ – China’s current self-image - is a case in point. The concept of ‘peaceful rise’ (heping jueqi), later replaced by the concept of ‘peaceful development’ (heping fazhan), has been intrinsic to the strategic orientation of China’s leaders since 2003. These concepts were, and are, efforts by the Chinese leadership to counter the ‘China threat’ arguments prevalent in academic discourse, by stressing the ‘peaceful’ manner in which China would emerge as a world power.

 The ‘Rise of China’ as a concept has found resonance in the lexicon of international relations and strategic studies. To be interpreted in multiple layers the proposed paper will examine the concept from an Indian point of view. The Sino-Indian engagement – complex and increasingly intense – is forecast to be one of the most important relationships in the coming decades and the proposed paper seeks to identify the main strands that determine the relationship within the overall context of the debate over the rise of China.

 Lucille Ngan (PhD candidate, University of New South Wales)
Understanding Chineseness through Life Course Trajectories of Long Established ABC

 The word ‘Chinese’ conventionally represents both a single language and an enormous range of citizens of other countries, some of whom may speak one or more Chinese dialects, but many of whom have nothing in common with China except a distant line of descent. However as Chinese diasporic communities expand throughout the world, their narratives are nevertheless fraught with contentions over difference and belonging, leading to ambiguous ramifications of identity politics. While the dominant Chinese diasporic discourse is based on the relations between the East and West, differences also proliferate amongst diasporic ‘Chinese’ as each community has its own cultural conception of Chineseness which invariably differs from communities elsewhere. Specifically, those who have long departed China and have been socialized in the Western world, their conception of Chineseness invariably differs from Chinese communities elsewhere. Yet, they are still implicated by the perpetuation of essentialised Chinese ideologies. To escape the monolithic modes of understanding Chineseness that hamper our ability to comprehend the meaning of being Chinese today,  it is important to highlight a diversity of life trajectories within and across successive generations of diasporic Chinese, rather than a commonality as the narrative of identity formation. While rewriting of identity takes place against the varying circumstances of resettlement, vital life events across the life course also constitutes a scaffolding on which identities are negotiated. The ‘life course’ is a significant resource through which individuals construct their biographical narratives which is fundamental to not only one’s orientation to the world but also to how one is seen and interacted with by others. This paper brings together the experiences of forty three Australian born Chinese (ABC) whose family has resided in Australia for over three generations, to examine the manner in which Chineseness and the developing path of life intricately shape each other.

 Richard O’Leary (Lecturer, Queen’s University, Belfast)

Yaojun Li (Professor, Manchester University)
The characteristic of religious believers in contemporary China: An analysis of survey data on Christians, Buddhists and Muslims and non-believers.

The social scientific study of religion is very advanced in Europe but this is much less the case in China. In particular the empirical study of religion in the People’s Republic of China is relatively undeveloped. This has left the field open to unsubstantiated claims about the numbers and composition of religious believers in the country. This paper is an empirical study of reported religious belief based on national random sample survey data from China. It presents some new findings on the the composition of believers in China and their social and demographic characteristics. Just as much of the empirical research on religion in the West has been concerned with the effects of modernization, our data also allow us to comment on the relationship between modernization and religion in China.

Antony Ou (PhD Candidate, University of Sheffield)
Modern Liberal Confucianism on Human Rights: Truth or Fiction?

A number of moral and political traditions have featured in the scholarly literature on human rights. There are, for example, sophisticated scholarly comparisons of the Islamic thought and human rights. However, the Modern Liberal Confucian perspective, to date, has been unduly neglected. Scholars like Theodore de Bary, Tu Wei-ming, Daniel A. Bell, Joseph Chan and so on attempt to argue that ancient Chinese tradition could be compatible with or even support the human rights ideas in various ways. However, is Modern Liberal Confucianism one of the true human rights philosophical contributors— or simply a fiction that contributes minimally to the questionable mission of “overlapping consensus?”

This paper begins with a brief history and philosophical analysis of Modern Confucianism. Next, it identifies the three analytical problems with the Modern Confucianism: 1) re-selecting Confucian literatures, 2) re-prioritizing and re-defining Confucian values and 3) misplacing Confucian values in present socio-historical contexts. Three human rights issues are studied in great detail namely gender equality, civil rights and economic rights in order to demonstrate the limitations of Modern Confucianism when addressing those problems. It ends with the argument that the reconstruction of Confucianism implies scholarly misinterpretation. This is a by-product of the international human rights movement and its universality demands for overlapping consensus.  

Neil Renwick (Professor, Coventry University)

Cao, Qing (Lecturer, Liverpool John Moores University)
Responding to China’s Rise: Engaging China’s Cultural ‘Soft Power’

Building upon earlier research examining the domestic sources of China’s evolving security discourse presented at the 2006 BACS annual conference, this paper assesses the international responses to China’s rise and to its increasing focus upon national cultural power as a component of soft power. Joseph Nye, the originator of the concept, defines this as the ‘ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments.’ China’s search for enhanced soft power capabilities has garnered international attention; not least with respect to China’s growing involvement in Sub-Saharan Africa for example. This has led some observers to conclude (correctly) that, some limitations notwithstanding, China’s pursuit of soft power has been more successful than some other states and must be regarded seriously by the international community. Nye, on the other hand, argues that for the so-called ‘Asian drivers’ of India and China, ‘neither country yet ranks as high on the various indices of potential soft power resources as the US, Europe and Japan. While culture provides some soft power, domestic policies and values set limits, particularly in China, where the Communist Party fears allowing too much intellectual freedom, censors the internet, and resists outside influences.’ This paper considers the various interests at play in the formulation and exercise of foreign policy responses both in regional contexts and globally. It specifically seeks to examine the engagement of major Powers with China in the domains of ‘soft power’. However, it is also interested in examining and critically evaluating responses found amongst ‘middle Powers’ and regional and global organisational institutions. In so doing, it seeks to evaluate the arguments of observers such as Nye, Bates Gill and Yanzhong Huang and others, and to contribute to the wider international debate over the security implications of ‘China rising’.

 Ewa Rzanna (Jagiellonian University)
The new world of the city – the urbanization of Chinese mind.

In Western scholarship there can be distinguished two general orientations in the research on contemporary China. According to the first approach, Chinese politics, economy, culture and mentality resemble their Western counterparts and therefore they should be measured against the same criteria that are applied to Western societies. The other approach represents the opposite view by claiming that due to her heritage, outlook and divergent experience China differs radically from the West, which makes any similarities between them merely superficial and potentially misleading.

As I find both of these perspectives simplistic and insufficient, in my paper I propose a more nuanced approach. On the one hand, the fundamental change that has taken place in China over the last fifty years had such a tremendous impact on the society that any attempt to explain the present day China exclusively by reference to her cultural and historical traditions is doomed to be inadequate. On the other hand, an entirely new set of regulating mechanisms and leading ideas that has been imported from the West has been used there to sort out, filter and structure entirely different material provided by the distinct tradition. This socio-cultural phenomenon is the focus of my research.

In my paper I intend to present one example of it by showing how the modern Western concept of the city has been adopted and to a great extent internalized by the contemporary Chinese culture and society. The material I am going to base my presentation on stems from the new genre of urban dramas directed and produced by Chinese artists in the last ten years.

 Yi-feng Tao (Associate Professor, National Taiwan University)
Economic Openness and Political Control in China: The Development of Central-Local Relations since the 1990s

Since the early 1990s, we have witnessed China’s integration into the global economic system at an unprecedented speed and scale.  In the meantime, we have also observed the re-centralization of political and economic control through more frequent exercise of appointment power over provincial leaders and more thorough reforms of the fiscal and financial systems.  In other words, two apparently controversial trends – economic openness and political control – have co-existed during this time period.  How have these two trends together affected the localism that has prevailed since the reforms began?  What are the implications of their effects on the development of localism for the central-local relations?

 This article, aims at studying the effects of these two apparently controversial trends – economic openness and political control – on the development of localism, and will draw insights from existing theories of state transformation amid marketization as well as of political institutionalization to modify the conventional “zero sum” perspective in the studies of central-local relations.  It will propose a preliminary model of a “non-zero sum” perspective and test two hypotheses generated from the model with a combination of both qualitative and quantitative methods.

 Hailong Tian (participant in New Discourses in Contemporary China project, Lancaster University)
Teaching quality in a Chinese university: discursively constructed or practically achieved?

After an expansion of recruitment in Chinese universities, teaching quality has become the main concern of both educational bureaucrats and universities. To ensure an improvment in teaching quality in universities, teaching quality assessment is now being introduced to Chinese universities. This practice involves, among other things, a lot of paper work with discourses of and about teaching quality. Discourses of teaching quality may include the university’s self-assessment, and the assessing group’s assessment of the teaching quality; discourses about teaching quality are solely those produced by the university itself. These teaching assessment discourses of and about the teaching quality, though addressing the same topics and issues, display differences in terms of order of discourse.

Adopting the interdiscursive analysis method practised in the field of critical discourse analysis (e.g. Fairclough 2001, Wodak 2001), this paper analyzes a Chinese university’s assessment discourse and the discourse about its assessment. Its assessment discourse includes its self-assessment report and its president’s report; the discourse about its assessment includes newspaper reports on the university’s efforts to guaranee teaching quality. By examining the topics these two discourses are concerned with and the ways the teaching quality is represented in these two discourses produced by the university, this interdiscursive analysis aims to investigate how these discourses affect the teaching quality assessment discourse of the assessing group.

The findings of this interdiscusive analysis may formulated as follows: though the assessing group is in a dominant position and has a decisive role to play, it is influenced to a great extent by the discourses produced by the university when the group produces its assessment discourse on teaching quality in the university. In this case, its final and decisive assessment of the teaching quality of the university turns out to be very similar to the discursive construction of the teaching quality by the university itself which, through mobilizing the mainstream media so as to create a different order of discourse, influences the assessing group to reach a decision in favour of the university. Teaching quality in the assessing practice is then more a discursively constructed replica of the reality than a practically achieved reality.

 Horng-luen Wang (Associate Research Fellow Academia Sinica)
War Memories, Military Discourse and Nationalist Sentiments in Contemporary China

 The rise of so-called “new nationalism” in China since the 1990s has drawn increasing concerns from other nations. Despite the reassertion of the “peaceful rise” by China’s high officials, the militant rhetoric in popular nationalism, accompanied by the PLA’s (People’s Liberation Army) growing military muscles, has led many to view the rise of China as “threatening” rather than “peaceful.” This paper aims to examine elements concerning war and the military in nationalist discourse in contemporary China. The building of “New China,” namely, the People’s Republic of China, has been intertwined with numerous heroic battles and wars involving heavy sacrifices. As previous studies have pointed out, war often plays a significant role in the nation-building process, not only in that it contains enormous power to mobilize the “People,” but also because it entails enduring effects to evoke collective memories about the nation in the future to come. Among the wars that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has fought, the anti-Japan war, the civil war against the KMT (Kuomintang), and the Korean War are the three that have left profound legendary imprints on collective memories about the birth of the new Chinese nation. In addition, Mao’s celebrated slogan that “political power grows out of the barrel of the gun” has further reinforced popular conviction that war is legitimate—indeed, inevitable—if the nation is to survive. This paper will provide a preliminary analysis of how memories about these wars have been incorporated into the nation-building ideology and how, consequentially, military discourse has become an organic part intrinsic to Chinese nationalism to evoke the nation. It is argued that only when we grasp, with empathy, the central role that war and military discourse have played in China’s nation-building process can we truly understand why nationalism sounds rather militant from time to time in contemporary China.

 Wu Jieh-min (Associate Professor, National Tsing Hua University)
Migrant Citizenship Regimes in China’s Southeast Developing Region 

Since the late 1990s, the Chinese state has implemented a series of policies aiming to alleviate migrants’ urban situations. More state resources have been redirected toward migrant groups under the circumstances of deepening globalization. Are the new polices in effect significantly improving the migrants’ lives, and even promoting their citizen rights in the cities? Or, on the contrary, is capitalism under the state-socialist regime so deleterious to citizenship that the central government’s ameliorative polices will not result in any positive changes upon migrants’ citizenship? This study explores the recent policy changes regarding the migrants’ civil rights and social rights, particularly the issues of household registration (hukou) and the social insurance system. Major arguments run as follows. First of all, the legacies of rural-urban dualism still play a pivotal role in the formation of migrants’ rights. Overall, the continuing strictness in the issue of local hukou to migrants serves to prevent them and their families from enjoying critical urban public goods such as education, medical care, and social security. In theoretical terms, the interlocking of civil rights – hukou as a centerpiece of civil freedom in choosing residence and occupation – with social rights helps explain the chronic sore of differential, hierarchical citizenship among segmented hukou status groups. However, there is significant regional variation in the treatment of floating populations in the rapidly developing regions. The variation is attributable to the interplay of the centre, local governments, and capital. For the central and metropolitan cities, differential citizenship embodied in the welfare allocation appears to be tenacious notwithstanding the centre’s policy pressures. For the heavily foreign invested manufacturing regions, differential treatment tends to attenuate and it is relatively easier to acquire local hukou. In the domestic private capital-dominated areas, social welfare is very thinly covered among the floating population. In this pattern, “laissez- faire” local policies prevail and officials and private enterprises collude to produce a local social security regime with little coverage for the undocumented, “ghost workers.”

 Xu Wu  (Assistant Professor, Arizona State University)
Chinese Cyber Nationalism: A Wild-Weird-Wired (WWW) Card

 In the coming decades, issues involving China will be shaped and determined not only by how well China integrates into the existing world system, but also by how well the world understands China and copes with China’s rise. Among those fundamental knowledge-gaps, perceived or real, lying between the East and the West, the emerging trend of Chinese cyber nationalism developed in the past decade has been a closely monitored, hotly debated, but nonetheless, largely misperceived topic.

 What is Chinese cyber nationalism? It is a non-government sponsored grassroots movement that has originated, existed, and developed in China’s online sphere over the past decade. It is a natural extension from China’s century long nationalistic campaign, but it is different from both the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) official version of patriotism, and the traditional Chinese nationalism movement. Taking advantages of the online communication technology (Internet media, online chat rooms, online forums, bulletin board systems, personal blogs, etc.), Chinese cyber nationalists have been utilizing the Internet as a communication centre, organizational platform, and execution channel to promote the nationalistic causes among Chinese people around the world.

 For this presentation, I will mainly review the key findings in my newly released book Chinese Cyber Nationalism (Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Groups-Lexington Book, April 2007) as to the evolution, characteristics and political implications of this transitional force in China’s cyber sphere. Peaceful rise or not, that is CCP’s benign intention, or wishful thinking. As the choppy water in-between the Taiwan Strait keeps rolling and rocking, the whole world now must closely watch the formidable Wild-Weird-Wired card—Chinese cyber nationalism—in China’s foreign policy making process.

 Liyun Yao (PhD candidate, University of Manchester)
Transnational Network Construction between the PRC Government and High-Level New Chinese Migrants in the UK

 To promote national revitalization and China’s global strategy in the context of globalization, the PRC government has placed transnational network construction among high-level new Chinese migrants on the agenda. Tracing the PRC’s policies towards the trans-boundary activities of overseas Chinese students and scholars with foreign educational and working experience, and the transnational practice and perception from the high-level new Chinese migrants in the UK, this paper attempts to probe the mechanism for this transnational network construction. Most of the available literature, which analyzes the Chinese PRC government in pursuing the legitimization of its transnational strategy towards overseas Chinese affairs, lays stress on the role of ethnic nationalism and cultural identity among the new Chinese migrants. In contrast with the previous trajectory, this paper mainly discusses the trans-border practices of the Chinese government and its new migrants, focusing on their transnational network mechanisms instead of the ideological construction of national identity. It is concerned with the associations of high-level new Chinese migrants as transnational agencies connecting the new migrants and Chinese government, especially analyzing how the Chinese Government integrates the affairs of high-level new Chinese migrants into the cause of national construction and China’s globalization. On the other hand, the paper attempts to explore how those high-level migrants integrate their personal development into the Chinese modernization and globalization strategy by institutionalizing their collective activities. In the case of high-level Chinese new migrants in the UK, transnational initiatives “from below” and “from above” cling deeply together. This paper contends that besides the national and cultural identity of the new Chinese migrants, the reciprocal pragmatism is pivotal to promoting transnational network building between the Chinese Government and the high-level new migrants. It reinforces the national emotions of the Chinese new migrants, and finally facilitates the legitimization of the transnational strategy of China. 

Yin, Wei (PhD candidate, University of Wales, Aberystwyth)
Worlds under Heaven— Contending Imaginaries of Self/Other Relations in the Discourse of ‘Tianxia’ (天下)

Much ink has been spilt on the revival of the classical Chinese concept ‘Tianxia’ (天下; All-under-heaven) as an alternative to the Eurocentric imaginary of world order among critical IR scholars. This paper will critically examine the connotations and implications for our understanding of self/Other relations in these contending discourses of Tianxia. Three confronting interpretations of self/Other relations in Tianxia will be reviewed: Zhao Tingyang’s argument of ‘Tianxia’ as a normative world order of ‘no outside’, William Callahan’s criticism of Tianxia as means of exclusion and conversion, and Chih-Yu Shih’s exploration of the possibility of a self without presuming an opposed Otherness or even difference shown in the classical texts of Tianxia. This paper will then locate Tianxia within postcolonial literature to examine three crucial points of overlap in terms of identity politics: first, the skepticism of the revival of Tianxia, a reminder of China’s hierarchical empire for some, reflects postcolonial theorists’ cautious attitude toward a rising regional/world hegemony in the name of an alternative world view; second, the theoretical potential Tianxia provides with its all-inclusiveness echoes the postcolonial desire of going beyond the binary structure of self/Other, oppressed/oppressor, and East/West; third, theorizing Tianxia as a ‘non-Western’ world view goes in line with the postcolonial attempt to shift the theoretical focus from the West as the hegemonic standard to a diversity of alternative reference points. To what extent postcolonial theory and Tianxia are limited, promising, and mutually informative in terms of self/Other relations is the main concern here. Finally, this paper will argue that regarding Tianxia as a substantial blueprint of world politics, utopia or empire alike, adds only restriction on our understanding of self/Other relations. Therefore this paper proposes an understanding of ‘Tianxia as method’, which leads us to actually think through the world rather than for the world.

 Zhang, Juan (PhD candidate, Macquarie University)
Remapping the China-Vietnam Borderland

 The unprecedented economic reforms have changed the face of China’s borderlands since the 1980s. The increasing volume of border-crossing practices, especially in the form of tourism and trading, suggests that China’s national borders have become a new focus of interest and a new space for social imaginations. As borders become China’s new “bankable” territories, issues such as border demarcation, border control, border trading, and border tourism have taken a more prominent position in the national media as well as in the everyday dialogues of ordinary Chinese people. While celebrating the establishment of various cross-border economic cooperation networks and organizations, we can also witness an accelerated process of border demarcation and growing enforcements on border control and border security. The physical territorial borderline is by no means disappearing in the presence of extensive economic collaboration. China’s borderland presents an interesting case that reflects China’s new relations with her neighbour countries as well as the ways in which she engages with the rest of the world in the battle of global economic competition.

 This paper uses the China-Vietnam borderland as an example to illustrate this kind of new relations and its effect on the changing geo-politics in this special territory. Until the 1990s, the borderline between China and Vietnam was still a line of warning, caution, invasion and retreat with memories of war. But since then, this borderline has suddenly transformed into a lifeline that is pivotal to the survival of regional economy. By remapping the China-Vietnam borderland, this paper examines the social practices and transformations that are unique to this borderland and how these practices and transformations reflect the power relations between China and Vietnam nowadays. Regarding China’s borderland a merging point where government policies, bilateral interactions, negotiations between nations, transnational networking, and population movement all become materialized, this paper argues that we can have a more tangible understanding on how China is positioning herself in the global economic competition as well as regional cooperation, how this kind of positioning is accepted or contested by her neighbor countries, and how this acceptance or contestation is translated into the everyday practices enacted by different agencies and subjectivities at the local level.

 Yangwen Zheng (Lecturer, University of Manchester)
When did China Rise: a Historian's Gaze from 2007

The "peaceful rise of China" has become the only talk in town among politicians, social scientists and journalists. When did China rise? This paper looks back into history to see when China rose, the circumstances of her ascension, the height of her power-glory, the constraints on her ambition and the ways in which she fell.  Professor Wang Gungwu believes that China saw three "rises" in the past - the Han, the Tang and the Ming, the current rise being the fourth.  When the short-lived Qin dynasty, 15 years, laid the foundation for the first rise of China - the Han dynasty, the short-lived Sui dynasty, 37 years, laid the foundation for the second rise - the Tang dynasty.  I would like to push it further and say that the short-lived Mongol ruled Yuan dynasty, 87 years, paved the way for the third rise of China – the Ming, in many ways continued into the Qing dynasty. It is perhaps not surprising that the short-lived Nationalist regime on the mainland, 38 years, preceded the fourth rise of China in the post-Mao era.

 Although the height of their power-glory and the constraints to their ambition vary very much from dynasty to dynasty, the way in which the Han, the Tang and the Ming dynasties disappeared from the map of China were quite similar. Does this tell us something about the fourth rise and fall?  What are the constants and variables for each?  I will not make predictions as it is not my trade; but I will provide a young historian's novice analysis and synthesis of China's pattern of rise and fall.