Asia Pacific Viewpoint最新文献

China is often considered as motivated by a desire to challenge the international status quo, a challenge the West is trying to mitigate. Social constructivists account for this challenge via a norm of nationalistic assertiveness in Chinese foreign policy; a norm constructed in the synergetic relationship between China's Communist Party and its nationalist movement. However, this work argues that Chinese foreign policy is motivated, in part, by nationalist pressure arising from an antagonistically symbiotic relationship between the Communist Party and China's nationalist movement. This understanding is significant as it indicates that western policies are paradoxically factoring in the emergence of a challenger China. © 2023 Victoria University of Wellington and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd.

In this research note, I expand the discussion on multicultural policies in East Asia by proposing the concept of ‘geopolitical multiculturalism’. It describes that the receiving state promotes multiculturalism or pro-immigrant programmes and discourses to enhance the nation's global standing, regional importance, economic development, and geopolitical security. East Asian countries serve as illustrative examples of this concept, as their substantial immigrant populations are relatively recent, and the development of multicultural programmes is closely tied to international influence. I will first elaborate on three approaches to geopolitical multiculturalism, followed by a detailed analysis of Taiwan's case, including the recent implementation of the New Southbound Policy. I draw conclusions regarding the implications and potential applications of this concept for future research.

Originated in southern China, nanyin (南音) is regarded as ‘the sound of motherland’ (乡音) performed and loved by the Hokkien dialect speakers in Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and diasporic populations living in Southeast Asia. Having thrived in transnational spaces, nanyin is now celebrated as a shared heritage in China and Southeast Asian countries, such as Singapore. This paper explores the process of heritage-making, that is, the ways in which the art form and cultural practice of nanyin have been re-shaped and re-appropriated by the diasporic communities and the native place to articulate different understandings of the Chinese identity in their distinct nation-state frameworks. In this ambivalent entanglement, China has re-appropriated the diasporic history of nanyin to gain international recognition and build soft power through United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. In Singapore, the Siong Leng Music Association has actively engaged in the heritage-making of nanyin, leading to the creation of a unique Singapore brand that speaks to hybridity and cosmopolitanism, in the same way as the re-construction of their Chinese identity. Examining the two processes of heritagisation of nanyin along the China-Singapore ‘heritage corridors’, the paper argues that the two ends are connected in important ways but always seek to maintain distance to articulate their own cultural representations at international stages. Thus, nanyin through a comparative perspective enables a critical examination of issues of centre versus periphery, authenticity, and hybridity in the Sinophone world.

Women are under-represented in Indonesian legislatures, and those women who are elected are disproportionately from ‘elite’ backgrounds. This research sought to understand the conditions for women to succeed in politics in conditions of patriarchy and clientelist politics. Research in North Sumatera, Indonesia, revealed that many women did not make the conscious decision not to enter politics, but rather found that they had not established the required preconditions earlier enough in life. Patriarchal social norms and a transactional political culture frustrate women's ability to acquire these conditions, yet they are also subject to change. Interviews with women elected representatives and women who had never contested an election revealed three sites that are critical to women either acquiring the preconditions to contest elections, or frustrating that pathway: the household, the ‘community’ and religious/ethnic associations. We demonstrate how women's actions in these sites transform the conditions to make them more conducive to women's political participation.

This paper examines how Chinese transnational investments, as (re)framed in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), contribute to changes in urbanisation processes in Southeast Asia. On the ground, the BRI becomes contextualised and intersects with local and national development trajectories. The growing presence of Chinese actors in the region intensifies urban dynamics, especially in secondary cities and emerging urban sites, where the BRI is used as a lever for local internationalisation strategies. The heterogeneous nature of the links between the BRI and various large urban projects is demonstrated on the basis of case studies involving changing consortia of private and public Chinese and Southeast Asian actors. A regional approach allows us to identify connections and shared processes across Southeast Asian countries. It provides a historically grounded understanding of how the BRI incorporates long-term interactions with China and more recent partnerships in Southeast Asian countries. The paper paves the way for a research agenda that contests the image of China as a monolithic actor implementing the BRI uniformly and consistently. Further analyses are needed to examine systems and networks of actors as well as the local urban politics that affect the BRI on the ground.

With an increasingly assertive China and the intensifying influence of the Sinocentre, Chinese overseas who have access to Chineseness can exercise their agentic power in using their cultural capital for economic gains. Beijing has recognised the potential for diasporic Chinese entrepreneurs to contribute to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) given their influence in Southeast Asia's economy. Correspondingly, these entrepreneurs hail the BRI as a strategic opportunity for them to turn their cultural capital into fiscal capital. Considering the increased global connectivity and new Chinese migration geographies led by the BRI, this article examines the case of Chinese business associations in Brunei Darussalam. The heterogenous responses of these ethnic Chinese and their associations to China and the BRI attest to the multiplicity and contestations of Chineseness based on different migration histories and sentiments to their ancestral land. We focus on the dynamics between the old Chinese Bruneian business elites and the more recent Chinese business migrants from Malaysia and China. An investigation of the cultural and economic politics within the Chinese Bruneian business community will provide insights into the modality of Chineseness as an economic asset that can be tactically used by diasporic Chinese entrepreneurs to maintain their social position and to respond to China's economic rise.

Moratorium is a common marine resource management strategy used by nation-states that abruptly reclassifies the harvesting and trade of designated resources as ‘illegal’ for a defined period. Nation-states use moratoria to help ecological stocks of overharvested marine species to recover. The Fijian state instituted a moratorium on the harvest and trade of beche-de-mer between 2017 and 2022 due to evidence of overfishing. Through ethnographic fieldwork with Fijian beche-de-mer fishers, traders and exporters, I examine how the moratorium affected relational trade flows of beche-de-mer. In precolonial Fiji, marine resources flowed through historically established regional socio-cultural pathways. During the colonial period, Chinese migrants in Fiji occupied a unique relational positionality to indigenous (itaukei) communities, which allowed them bridge domestic and international resource markets. Through my ethnographic fieldwork, I detail how beche-de-mer continued to be traded during and post moratorium within such a relational resource geography. I argue that the relational ties between itaukei communities and Chinese-Fijian buyers that subsequently connect to international markets undermined the moratorium restrictions, as well as the new conditionalities of trade after the moratorium was lifted. Such relationality in the marine resource trade renders moratoria an ineffective marine resource management strategy as it is inattentive to Pacific context.

This paper builds on assemblage theory to propose a new theoretical understanding of modernity. While the conceptual framing is meant for modernity at large, this paper locates its conceptual discussion in the context of tourism in Macao and illustrates how plasmatic thinking, the new conceptual framework proposed, advances analysis of aspiration, exploitation and freedom of its tour guides. Plasmatic thinking helps examinations of tourism labour to engage with the fragile and fluid nature of the sociomaterial environments. Instead of structures, networks or fluidities, plasmatic thinking sees the world as composed of ‘plasmas’ – ‘charged’ sociomaterial clustering of objects, humans and the processes between them. Plasmas are a form of charged matter falling outside solid, liquid and gaseous states and metaphorises the fragility and impermanence of sociomaterial situations for plasmas disintegrates when discharged. The attention to charges and fragility of plasmas helps describes both pandemic levels shocks and everyday disruptions. Through a plasmatic analysis of the falling apart and coming together of such plasmas and how they bring about significant consequences to Macao's tourism, I showcase plasmatic thinking as a theoretical approach which vividly uncovers the fragility and fluidity of modernity and the workings of power in our sociomaterial worlds.

The commentary attends to India's rapidly changing craft economy to notice how individual economic actors in the craft sector make complex and often contradictory ethico-political choices realising hopeful possibilities. Through the mode of care and repair, the commentary examines how the artisans operating within diverse economies negotiate with exploitative labour regimes and survive a dwindling craft sector. It considers how a woman owner-artisan creates an atmosphere of togetherness and extends her notion of family by cooking for her team of workers. Care ethics, in this analysis, is not only a gendered feeling but realigns with co-dependent economic exchanges essential for collective survival. The second case focuses on the everyday repair of musical instruments as an alternative act of ordinary ethics. The commentary argues, even when these small doings do not bring immediate and intentional change in the economic organisation of the two crafts, they require pivotal consideration as already existing alternative value systems anchored within everyday world-making practices.

Drawing upon cases studies from Southeast Asia, especially Singapore and Malaysia, this article addresses the following questions pertaining to the rise of China and its impact upon Chinese voluntary associations (CVAs) in the region over the past two decades. By employing theoretical insights of positionality, nudging and de-territorialisation and by focusing on various strategies pursued respectively by CVAs and the state, we conclude: (i) the growing economic ties between China and Southeast Asia serve as the platform through which the reconstruction of the CVAs take place; (ii) the reconstitution of the CVAs has been significantly driven by their own initiatives to compete in a new economy, in which knowledge of and connection with a rising China as an expanding market and a culture has advantages; (iii) the states in both China and Southeast Asia have played a part in the reconfiguration of the CVAs, motivated by their respective political and economic agendas; and (iv) it is imperative to go beyond the conventional approaches in understanding CVAs (internal structure and external connections) that have dominated much of the existing literature; and we argue that it is in the interactions and intersections between the internal dynamics and external political economy that a new type of CVAs has emerged.