The Sichuan Earthquake and the Heavenly Mandate: legitimizing Chinese rule through disaster discourse

In the aftermath of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, the Chinese authorities launched a major public relations campaign to relay positive images of their relief effort and strengthen their political legitimacy. The effect has been a proliferation of symbols and political statements related to the disaster, not only in the official media, but also in cultural products such as movies or mass-media events. The earthquake has become part of the discourse of suffering, struggle, solidarity and ultimately victory. This article examines the ways in which various cultural products present the Sichuan earthquake and asks what meanings national crises have in the Chinese discourse on political legitimacy. The article analyses two cases: Chinese film, here in the form of Feng Xiaogang's blockbuster Aftershock, and performance-based discourses during the Beijing Olympics, the PRC's 60-Year Anniversary and the Shanghai Expo. By conducting a discourse analysis, we show how the earthquake has become part of a recurring discursive formation that is used by state and non-state actors alike to legitimate China's developmental model. Within this discourse, the leadership of the Party, the mastery of free markets and a revamped version of the Confucian idea of benevolent rule are marshaled as the decisive factors for winning any ‘battle’.     

Mainstream IR Theoretical Perspectives and Rising China Vis-À-Vis the West: The Logic of Conquest,Conversion and Socialisation

The aim of this article is to critically examine how the mainstream International Relations (IR) theoretical perspectives — realist, liberalist, and constructivist — make sense of the relationships between Self and Others in explaining the rise of China in IR. Our argument is two-fold. First, although mainstream IR perspectives are believed to produce objective, neutral, scientific, and universal knowledge about reality and how the world works, they are not value-free explanations but normative approaches that serve the US/West hegemony, and Orientalism appears to constitute the hidden normative underpinning of those perspectives. Second, considering mainstream IR perspectives as problem-solving approaches for the hegemonic US/West reveals that the hegemonic Self uses the logic of conquest, conversion, and socialisation to deal with the Other, rising China.