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China scholarship in Taiwan, in social sciences as well as humanities disciplines, is constituted by the choices of scholars over encountered and constantly reinterpreted imaginations of how China's names, identities and images are contextualised. Due to its colonial history, its civil war and Cold War legacies, and internal cleavages, China scholarship in Taiwan is characterised by strategic shifting among the Japanese, American and Chinese approaches to China, as well as their combination and recombination. The mechanism of choice, including travels that orient, reorient and disorient existing views on China, produces conjunctive scholarship. The rich repertoire of views on China, together with the politics of identity, challenge the objectivist stance of the social sciences to the extent that no view on China could be exempted from political implications and politicised social scrutiny. Concerns over exigent propriety in a social setting are internal to knowledge production. Therefore, understanding the process with which the historically derived approaches inform the China scholarship in Taiwan through the mechanism of encountering reveals both the uncertain nature of knowledge, in general, and the uncertain meaning associated with China worldwide, in particular. (China/GIGA)

The rise of China is now one of the primary issues in IR literature. However, this development promotes also changes in the structure of the discipline itself, as it fosters self-reflection in the rapid expansion of the Chinese IR school. Moreover, the quest for Chinese theory of IR provokes other Asian countries to conceptualize their place in the world, in order not to be intellectually submerged by the rising neighbour. This theorizing is enlightened by the national traditions of thinking about international politics, largely overseen in the West. This trend promotes genuine liberalization of the discipline.

After presenting and discussing a stochastic modell (the Markov model) of change and continuity in a nation's diplomatic principles, the author applies this model to mainland China's diplomacy. He believes that the model successfully describes the pattern of change and continuity in mainland China's diplomacy, suggesting that the system is unstable and full of transitions and changes in principles. (DÜI-Sen)

The author takes a critical look at He Baogang's critique of Lucian W. Pye's approach to political culture (published in this issue of the journal). He (Chih-yu Shih) asks if the institutional cultural approaches can be reconciled. (DÜI-Sen)

Content analysis of the book "Kuo-chi tou-cheng te chi-pen li-lun yii wo-kuo wai-chiao cheng-ts'e te chi-pen yüan-tse" (Basic theory of international struggle and basic principles of our policy) written by Hsieh I-hsien and used as a textbook at the Institute of International Relations and the Institute of Diplomacy (both located in Peking). The book is on the nature of world system, on the nature of the USSR, on the RRC's strategic position etc. (DÜI-Sen)

The present study traces the cultural and political contexts within which Beijing considers global governance. They include: (1) Confucian dispositions toward non-interventionism and self-governance; (2) the socialist collectivist ethics that stress persuasion instead of unilateralism; (3) a lingering sense of inferiority arising from underdevelopment that harms self-confidence; and (4) the repugnant experiences with the United Nations (UN) and the United States that have dominated most international organizations since World War II. The consequential Chinese style of global governance is reactive rather than proactive, problem-solving rather than goal-driven, and attentive to obligation and reform more in other major countries than in failing states. That said, China could still assert global leadership by acting as a model of self-governance for other major countries and by intervening in failing states only through closed-door persuasion and exemplification as opposed to open sanctioning. (J Contemp China/GIGA)