Establishing Confucius Institutes: a tool for promoting China’s soft power?

Soft power has become China’s new diplomatic tool to spread its influence in today’s changing international landscape. The establishment of Confucius Institutes (CIs) since 2004 to promote the understanding of Chinese language and culture is a striking example of how the government promotes soft power through cultural means. Through the macro- and micro-level analysis of CIs, this study shows that CIs fail to increase the soft power of China because many countries regard CIs as a propaganda tool and a threat to academic freedom and the local community. It shows that China’s soft power is not so attractive in the eyes of receivers. In fact, China’s aggressive cultural initiatives through the establishment of CIs have triggered another version of the ‘China threat’.     

Architecture and Nature

Chinese-American architect Maya Lin has become renowned by people in China recently because of her latest work-"What is Missing?" The multi-site project aims to raise public awareness of the current crisis surrounding biodiversity and habitat loss. Lin recently talked about the project’s background and her understanding of the relation between architecture and nature with Beijing Review.     

曲译“忠贞”：《巴黎茶花女遗事》对晚清贞节观念的新演绎

《巴黎茶花女遗事》是中国近代最有影响力的翻译小说之一。在这部小说中,译者林纾不但用古文笔法重塑了＂茶花女＂的忠贞形象,更对妇女忠贞评判标准做了巧妙的演绎,使＂贞节＂评判的重心不在＂性贞＂,而是转移到＂情贞＂上,肯定以＂真挚之爱＂为核心的两性道德,拉开了五四前后贞节观念辩论的序幕。     

Touching stones to cross the river: Evolving telecommunication policy priorities in contemporary China

This article, drawing on fieldwork in China, charts the ascendancy of Lian Tong (China Unicom), the first competitor to the incumbent Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications. Commencing with an historical overview of Chinese telecommunications, it suggests that Lian Tong's formation has been contingent upon support from key constituencies within China's political elite. The company's emergence mirrors technological trends and user pressure evident globally. It embodies the drive towards market liberalisation now evident within the Peoples’ Republic. While the Chinese policy community is sensible of the need to make haste slowly toward the goal of telecommunications competition — ‘touching stones to cross the river’ in the contemporary aphorism — the success of this ‘policy experiment’ depends both on the subtleties of Chinese politics and the construction of bold new regulatory frameworks. Lian Tong's genesis is symbolic of developments in the telecommunications sector, and maybe also more generally in the Chinese economy.     

Market Watch

Moderate Prospects Investment and consumption have been the biggest motors of the economy,both surging in the first four months this year.Exports also regained some lost ground,soaring 30.5 percent in April from a year ago.     

Ready for RMB Reform

Now that the global recovery has taken hold and with the Chinese economy gaining ground,China's central bank-the People's Bank of China-has decided to proceed with reform of the renminbi(yuan)exchange rate regime and improve the flexibility.The central bank's spokesman on June 20 addressed a number of concerns over the issue in a statement posted on its website.Edited excerpts follow:     

The Path to Prosperity

正The teachings of Confucius illuminate the path for achieving our dreams in life,and one key teaching in particular has been illuminating China's path toward becoming a moderately prosperous—or xiaokang—society.It is that taking a moderate approach to building well-consolidated social and economic foundations is essential for achieving prosperity.The concept is far from new,but it is standing the test of time as China enters a new era of development.The Communist Party of China (CPC) has a strong understanding of this notion,and all Party leaders have been demonstrating it in their work.The main result has been the eradication of absolute poverty last year,which completed China's process of building a moderately prosperous society in all respects.     

Bridging Cultural Gaps

Learning Chinese provides young people a different perspective to understand today's China My eyes witnessed the shining miracle,And my ears heard the sound of time flying;I met an old Chinese man,His words had tea garden, Kungfu and Tai Chi;I met a young Chinese man and he talked about Lights, skyscrapers and high technology.     

Bashing ‘the Chinese’: contextualizing Zambia's Collum Coal Mine shooting

The 2010 shooting of 13 miners at Zambia's small, privately-owned ‘Chinese’ Collum Coal Mine (CCM) has been represented by Western and Zambian politicians and media as exemplifying the ‘neo-colonial’ and ‘amoral’ practices of ‘China’ and ‘the Chinese’ in Africa. CCM has been used to provide a sharp contrast to the supposed ways of the Western firms that own most of Zambia's mines. Embedded in racial hierarchy and notions of strategic competition between the West and China, the discourse of the CCM shootings further shapes conceptions of global China and Chinese overseas. While examining all the oppressive conditions that have given rise to protest at the mine, we contextualize the shooting and subsequent conflicts. In analyzing CCM's marginal and troubled development, we discuss aspects of the 2010 shooting incident known to miners and union leaders, but ignored by politicians and media. We look at the shooting's political fallout, focus also on the epilogue that was the 2012 CCM riot—in which one Chinese person was murdered and several others seriously injured—and trace the sometimes violent discontent manifested at other foreign-owned mines in Zambia since their privatization in the late 1990s. The empirical data for this detailed study derive from hundreds of documentary sources and interviews with union leaders, workers, officials and others in Zambia from 2011 to 2013.     

About Face—the relational dimension in Chinese IR discourse

The preservation of face is an important concept in Chinese behavioral patterns, both at individual and national levels. Beyond national interest considerations, modern-day diplomacy between China and the world also involves substantially the exchange of face. This article will argue that face represents a relational understanding of how China views and interacts with the world. By linking face to three themes that international relations scholars frequently use in describing how China sees the world, namely, the tribute system, the Chinese memory of historical humiliation and China’s distrust of the American-led international system, the article hopes to show how the understanding of face—as a crucial element of Chinese identity—can inform scholars and practitioners in their attempts to engage China.     

《论语》中庸思想阐微

《论语》中孔子所言"中庸",是一种实用理论,更是一种实用方法,是放之四海而皆准的通用之"道",即"常道"。它是一个内涵极其丰富的理论体系,包括为政、治学、交友、处事等中庸之道。其"中庸"思想传递给我们历久弥新的真理指南,尤其是在构建和谐社会,全面建设小康社会的今天,孔子的"中庸之道",仍具有积极的理论意义和实践意义。     

Introduction: China,Ltd

The study of Chinese nationalism is very popular—both in China and the West. This article introduces a special section of seven articles (four of which are in this issue) on ‘The Limits of Chinese Nationalism’, arguing that our understanding of nationalism in China is problematic. This special section aims to explore the limits of many of the statements about Chinese nationalism that have now become ‘common sense’: the rise of Chinese nationalism, nationalism filling an ideological vacuum, elites manipulating nationalism to gain legitimacy, and so on. Using critical IR theory this Introduction explores the concept of limits to argue that borders in China are not just territorial, but cultural, economic and thus political. It seeks to change the objective of our discussion of Chinese nationalism from seeking an Answer—either as a measure of the objective nature of Chinese nationalism or as a moral judgment of it as good or evil—to seeing ‘nationalism’ as a provocation which pushes us to think about China and identity in a host of different and productive ways.     

MARKET WATCH

Stock Market Nightmare A bearish mood dominated the Chinese stock markets in the first half of this year with the benchmark Shanghai Composite Index dropping 26.82 percent by June 30.     

从中国共产党百年历史看加强政治建设的内在逻辑

中国共产党是社会主义中国的领导核心,是中国政治体系的核心特征和显著优势,是实现中华民族伟大复兴的根本保障。党的十九大在党的建设方面最具开拓性的贡献,是第一次把党的政治建设纳入党的建设总体布局,突出新时代党的建设要以党的政治建设为统领。我们不仅要把政治建设看作党建理论和实践的重大突破,更要把它作为党建重大课题的破题和任务的开启。要深刻理解和把握党的政治建设的深刻内涵和重大实践意义。从理性逻辑上看,中国共产党强调政治建设遵循了现代政党建设的一般规律和要求;从历史逻辑上看,中国共产党强调的政治建设是总结国际共产主义运动和中国共产党百年历史经验教训所得出的基本结论;从现实逻辑上看,中国共产党强调的政治建设是推进党的自身建设和实现中华民族伟大复兴的要求。     

The Localism of Local Leadership Cadres in Reform Shanxi

The changing face of China's politics is to be found as much in the cadre force as in the categories of ‘new rich’ engendered by economic reform and rapid development. A series of interviews undertaken in 1996 and 1997 with local cadres—at sub-provincial, county and section levels—in Shanxi Province provides evidence as to the extent of change and continuity in their social backgrounds, careers and political attitudes. Analysis focuses in particular on five common hypotheses about the cadre force in reform China: that they are conservative upholders of the status quo; a priviligentsya; imposed ‘from without’; the source of a ‘new class'; and one which has come in the reform era to be dominated by ‘technocrats' (rather than former revolutionaries). Though local political and administrative leadership in the 1990s appears to have become more localist, and even in some senses parochial, such analysis must be kept in perspective. The local cadre force is considerably less local, parochial and ‘privileged’ than their counterpart local business elites; and the agency of the provincial organisation of the Chinese Communist Party is still very much in evidence.     

Xi Jinping’s ‘Big Power Diplomacy’ and China’s Central National Security Commission (CNSC)

The current Chinese foreign and national security system suffers from problems of inefficiency, a lack of coordination and information sharing, and accountability of decision makers. China’s newly established Central National Security Commission (CNSC) is designed to build a strong platform to coordinate national security work and to strengthen unified leadership of national security at the central level. This article examines the CNSC’s foreign policy and institutional rationales. It argues that the establishment of the CNSC must be viewed in light of China’s growing power and Xi’s aspiration to play ‘big power diplomacy’ in world affairs as well as his ambition for overall institutional reforms of foreign and national security policymaking in China.     

Nationalism,Civilization and Transnational Relations: the discourse of Greater China

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

A Pragmatic Embrace

Paulo Estivallet de Mesquita The fact is that, through-out the years, a lot of communication between Brazil and China was mediated by others. We have to gain a direct perspective on one an-other and not just hear about the other through the developed countries' press systems. Today, we have to establish more direct contact. The increase in the number of Confucius in-stitutes in Brazil has been huge, with Brazilian students eager to learn standard Chinese. And Chinese culture in itself has always been attrac-tive. The extraordinary development of China in recent years has also led these young Brazilians to spot either new career prospects related to the country or simply find a new place where they might gain something valuable for their own knowledge.     

习近平新时代中国特色社会主义思想在毕节的实践研究

习近平新时代中国特色社会主义思想是马克思主义中国化最新成果,为全党全国人民实现中华民族伟大复兴提供了行动指南。十八大尤其是十九大以来,毕节试验区深入学习贯彻落实习近平总书记对毕节试验区的重要指示精神,取得了一系列新成果,彰显了习近平新时代中国特色社会主义思想的强大力量,对贫困地区的发展具有示范作用。     

“The China problem” in the eyes of the China‐watchers

This research is a survey study of the opinions of one group of China scholars in the U.S.—scholars teaching Chinese politics in American universities—on issues concerning the People's Republic of China. Our findings suggest that despite some new developments in the Sinologist community in the U.S., China scholars continue to favor more generous and more pragmatic approaches toward China. They are more concerned with practical issues such as regional stability and economic ties with China and do not want the U.S. to be highly moralistic in dealing with China.