Textualizing cultures: thinking beyond the MIT controversy

This essay examines how the MIT Controversy hardened identities in terms of the timeworn template of geopolitical conflict of national stereotypes. It critically analyzes the Chinese students’ response to the “Visualizing Cultures” project by putting it in the context of the PRC’s patriotic education policy that securitizes culture by focusing on identity as difference in a zero-sum game that distinguishes civilization from barbarism, and China from the rest of the world. It critically analyzes the professors response to the controversy by highlighting how meaning is not only produced by the author; it is also consumed by various audiences that bring diverse sets of experiences into meaning making. It concludes that the controversy is less about content, and more about who controls knowledge production and distribution

The politics of walls: barriers, flows, and the sublime

As Donald Trump’s presidential campaign showed, walls are a hot topic. While ‘globalisation’, with its free flow of capital and goods, characterised world politics after the end of the Cold War, the twenty-first century has witnessed a reassertion of cultural, legal, and physical barriers. It is common to criticise such post-Cold War walls, especially the US-Mexico Barrier and Israel’s West Bank Barrier, as ineffective and immoral. This article problematises such critical discourse by using unlikely juxtapositions (the Great Wall of China) and new conceptual frameworks (gaps, critical aesthetics) to explore: (1) how walls can be a rational security policy; (2) how they are not simply barriers, but can be complex sites of flows; and (3) how walls are not simply texts waiting to be decoded: they are also sites of non-narrative affective experience that can even excite the sublime. This critical juxtaposition of walls first explores what they can tell us about the politics of borders, identity, and foreign policy, and then considers how walls, as concrete visual artefacts, can be examples not simply of ideology, but also of affect. The article aims to understand walls in a different register as active embodiments of political debate – and of political resistanc

Identity and security in China: the negative soft power of the China dream

Joseph Nye concentrates on the positive attractive aspects of soft power as a foreign policy tool. This article will argue that the Chinese discussion of soft power is interesting because it does the opposite: soft power is negative rather than positive, and is employed as a tool in domestic policy more than in foreign affairs. It will use Chinese President Xi Jinping's new ‘China Dream’ discourse to explore China's ‘negative soft power’ strategy. Rather than take for granted that we understand what the ‘Chinese values’ are that inform the PRC's soft power, it argues that soft power discourse is a useful heuristic device for understanding how Chinese policy makers and public intellectuals are actively constructing a ‘China’ and a ‘world’ to promote regime legitimacy. The Chinese case thus suggests that we need a more complex view of power that considers the contingent dynamics of its hard/soft, positive/negative, foreign/domestic aspects

Review: \u3ci\u3eChina’s Megatrends: The Eight Pillars of a New Society\u3c/i\u3e

The future is a hot topic in China; bookstores are full of tomes asserting the 21st century as China’s century: Liu Mingfu’s The China Dream(2010) and Chan Koon-chung’s The Gilded Era: China 2013 (2009) are but two of the most recent books that describe how China is destined to become the number one country in the world

History, tradition and the China dream: socialist modernization in the world of great harmony

How will China influence world politics in the twenty-first century? Many people answer this question by looking to Chinese history, and particularly to traditional models of Chinese world order. This essay seeks to complicate this question by asking which history, and which tradition? While it is common to look at China's pre-modern history as ‘tradition’, this essay argues that we also need to appreciate how ‘socialism’ is treated as a tradition alongside Chinese civilization. It does this by examining how China's public intellectuals appeal to two seemingly odd sources: Mao Zedong's 1956 speech ‘Strengthen Party Unity and Carry Forward Party Traditions’, and the ‘Great Harmony’ passage from the two millennia-old Book of Rites. It will argue that these two passages are employed as a way of salvaging socialism; the ideological transition thus is not from communism to nationalism, but to a curious combination of socialism and Chinese civilization. This new socialist/civilization dynamic integrates equality and hierarchy into a new form of statism, which is involved in a global competition of social models. Or to put it another way, what these two passages have in common is not necessarily a positive ideal, but a common enemy: liberalism, the West and the United States

The visual turn in IR: documentary filmmaking as a critical method

Millennium: Journal of International Studies aims to publish the most innovative peer-reviewed articles from the discipline of international studies, as well as original thinking from elsewhere in the social sciences with an international dimension. Interdisciplinary and wide-ranging in scope, the journal provides a forum for discussion on the latest developments in the theory of international relations, welcoming innovative and critical approaches

Review: \u3ci\u3eChina’s Megatrends: The Eight Pillars of a New Society\u3c/i\u3e

The future is a hot topic in China; bookstores are full of tomes asserting the 21st century as China’s century: Liu Mingfu’s The China Dream(2010) and Chan Koon-chung’s The Gilded Era: China 2013 (2009) are but two of the most recent books that describe how China is destined to become the number one country in the world

China's futures and the world's future: An introduction

China’s growing economic, political, and cultural power is an important global issue; Chinese people are increasingly interested in thinking about their country’s future as a world power. This article introduces the special issue ‘China’s futures – and the world’s future’ by discussing how futurology works in China. It argues that Chinese futures studies exhibit two general trends: (1) a shift from locating the future outside China to see China itself as the future, and (2) a shift from officials centrally planning the future to many different people dreaming about many different futures. The battle for the future thus is not necessarily between China and the West, but also takes place within the People’s Republic of China amongst different groups of Chinese intellectuals. This Introduction examines themes that unite the special issue’s diverse set of articles, especially the interplay between technical and cultural innovation. Studying the future here is important not because the forecasts are ‘true’; more importantly, Chinese discussions of the future can tell us about how people in the PRC interact with their own past-present-future, and how they interact with people in other countries in the present. </jats:p