Suchergebnisse

The Eurocentric conventional wisdom holds that the West is unique in having a multi-state system in international relations and liberal democracy in state-society relations. At the same time, the Sinocentric perspective believes that China is destined to have authoritarian rule under a unified empire. In fact, China in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (656–221 BC) was once a system of sovereign territorial states similar to Europe in the early modern period. Both cases witnessed the prevalence of war, formation of alliances, development of the centralized bureaucracy, emergence of citizenship rights, and expansion of international trade. This book, first published in 2005, examines why China and Europe shared similar processes but experienced opposite outcomes. This historical comparison of China and Europe challenges the presumption that Europe was destined to enjoy checks and balances while China was preordained to suffer under a coercive universal status

AbstractInternational Relations (IR) scholars have taken China's presumed hegemony in pre-modern East Asia as an ideal case to 'undermine' the field's Eurocentrism. If Eurocentric IR is guilty of 'getting Asia wrong', do students of historical Asia 'get Asia right'? Analysts should avoid exotifying differences between the West and the East and 'exchanging Eurocentrism for Sinocentrism'. This article tries to 'get Asia [more] right' by 'disaggregating' and then 'reassembling' taken-for-granted concepts by time, space, and relationality. When 'Confucianism' is understood to justify both war and peace in competition with other thoughts, it does not dictate peace among East Asian states or conflicts across the Confucian–nomadic divide. When 'China' is unpacked, it does not sit on top of an Asian hierarchy. When Korea's, Vietnam's, and Japan's views of their relations with China are examined rather than presumed, cultural legitimacy is thinned out. When 'Asia' is broadened to cover webs of relations beyond East Asia to Central Asia, Confucianism recedes in centrality and pan-Asian phenomena including Buddhism and the steppe tradition come to the fore. The article concludes that a better challenge to Eurocentrism is not to search for cultural differences but to locate Eurasian similarities that erase European superiority.

Abstract: Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement occupied commercial districts for 79 days, from September 28 to December 15, 2014. The movement is so named because protestors opened umbrellas to shield themselves from the police's pepper spray and tear gas. The sudden explosion of public outrage had deep roots. This essay examines how the Hong Kong government fueled dissent through its hardline rejection of democracy and use of excessive police force. The movement demanded "genuine universal suffrage" because successive chief executives unaccountable to the public have eroded Hong Kong's freedoms. Protestors will persist on or off streets if the root causes are unresolved.