This co-authored text represents the output of the research project 'Futures of Global Relations', led by Astrid H. M. Nordin, the first meeting of which was funded by the Chiang-Ching Kuo Foundation and the Lancaster Institute for Social Futures.
the rise of china became a popular subject in china comparatively recently, gaining prominence only in the last decade. for those in china who were used to understanding modern chinese history as a history of victimisation at the hands of imperialism, recognising such a return to the world stage was an uneasy shift. in the context of international concerns that china’s rise poses a threat to world peace or a contribution to the clash of civilisations, chinese narrators initially refused to portray a ‘rising china’ because this could easily lead to china becoming the target of a us-organised containment policy in the post-cold war era. shortly before the chinese communist party (ccp) outlined new policy directions at its fifteenth congress in 1997, leaders in beijing began to think about a way of describing china’s rise as unthreatening. yet this was a reluctant change because beijing was willing to acknowledge china’s rise only indirectly. what came out of the congress was the recognition of the necessity that beijing should frame its foreign policy to emphasise its relations with the other great powers more than those with the third world. accordingly, they decided that beijing should develop a distinctive strategy specifically to deal with the other great powers.
This paper discusses the meaning of 'the West' in Chinese and Japanese political discourse. It argues that for Japanese and Chinese political thinkers, the West does not exist in the West. Rather, the West is sometimes at the periphery and, at other times, at the centre. For them, 'the Chinese' is about the epistemology of all-under-heaven. There is no such concept as 'Other' in this epistemology. As a result, modern Western thinkers depend on opposing the concrete, historical, yet backward Other to pretend to be universal, while Chinese and Japanese thinkers concentrate on self-rectification to compete for the best representative of 'the Chinese' in world politics. 'The Chinese' is no more than an epistemological frame that divides the world into the centre and the periphery. In modern times, the Japanese have accepted Japan as being at the periphery of world politics, while the West is at the centre. To practise self-rectification is to simulate the West. The West is therefore not the geographical West, but at the centre of Japanese selfhood. Self-knowledge produced through Othering and that through self-rectification are so different that the universal West could not make sense of the all-under-heaven way of conceptualizing the West.
Neither cultural conversion to Western liberalism nor resort to local traditions such as Confucianism adequately deals with the hybrid nature of democratization in a postcolonial context. With its assortment of Chinese, Japanese, American, and Taiwanese hegemonic legacies, Taiwan offers a case in point. Its version of democratic politics operates across three contending normative domains: liberal political institutions, Confucian rationales for power, and Taiwanese nativist/nationalist sensibilities. Some may despair at this “distortion” of the (Western) liberal democratic ideal. We suggest, alternatively, that the contentious and unstable nature of liberal politics in Taiwan may render its polity more open-ended and organic, with simultaneous potential for both authoritarianism and democratization.
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