Culture Mandala: The Bulletin of the Centre for East-West Cultural and Economic Studies

China's long-term relations with Southeast Asia: Beyond the pivot

R. James Ferguson — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 16:01:58 PST

Extract: Early China’s southward expansion over two millennia from its core zone north of the Yangtze River allowed it to engage nearby states. Regions along the Yangtze and in what is now southern China were gradually absorbed into an enlarging cultural sphere that was eventually integrated into China's imperial domain (basically by the third century B.C.E). Thereafter, when unified, dynastic China engaged Southeast Asia states with a relative but not absolute preponderance of power. China's linkages via diplomacy and trade led to it being at the core of a set of power relations that came to be formalized as the 'tribute system', though China was never an absolute hegemon of Southeast Asia as a whole.2 These perceptions have returned in new forms in the 21st century, with China's economic and military 'rise' being viewed at times as a return to its rightful, historic place, or at least a practical re-balancing of East Asian relations (Harris 2005; Stuart-Fox 2004; Shih 1993).

Conference report: A Confucian tinge to security

R. James Ferguson et al. — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 21:18:34 PDT

Extract: Security conferences are not what they used to be. Nor are they quite what they could be. Military matters with geostrategic calculations are no longer their core business. Nowadays, both traditional and non-traditional security concerns fill their programs. The latest strategic thinking, ‘weapons platforms’, the changing face of terrorism, threats issuing from cyberspace, climate change or global financial dislocation are some of the topics that occupy an increasingly crowded security agenda. Even so, there seems little room or relevance for what passes as the arcane. Yet in the widening field of security studies, the study of the ethical systems of a bygone era in non-Western cultures may not seem so far-fetched.

Book review: Writing as enlightenment: Buddhist American literature in the 21st century

Trevor Carolan — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:42:34 PST

Extract: If uneven in nature and scope, this compendium of essays, interviews, and literary speculations provides a still cogent look at how effectively Buddhism has been transmitted in the U.S. through literature. Whalen-Bridge and Storhof (eds. The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature, SUNY, 2009), contend here that Buddhism has become “an important cultural dimension of America” (2). With various contributors, including several from their previous volume, they advance this view convincingly in talking up the indigenization of Buddhism in the U.S.

Who has heard of the Faroe Islands?

Marius Thomassen — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:28:51 PST

Extract: The Faroe Islands are one of the smallest countries in the world. In fact, the country is so small that its neighbours barely know of it, and hardly know anything about it. What is more, the Faroe Islands are not defined as an independent country, and therefore have limited access to the international society. The Faroe Islands are a self-governing region under the Danish realm. The current Danish government, as well as the opposition, have declared their support for an independent Faroese state, as long as the Faroese people themselves want independence. Thus, the only barriers for Faroese independence are psychological, where the population is more or less divided half and half into those who want independence and those who want unification with Denmark, though the Faroe Islands have become ever more autonomous. Furthermore, the Faroe Islands have all the qualifications of a proper independent state, such as their own language, culture, history, flag, national anthem, and geographically-defined territory. This leads to the question of how would an independent Faroe Islands fit into the current system of global governance?

China's foreign aid policy: Motive and method

Sara Lengauer — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:19:25 PST

Extract: Foreign aid, also referred to as development assistance, is one of the most common instruments used by governments to achieve foreign policy goals, especially since the end of World War Two. Aid can attain many forms – mostly it comprises the transfer of money, goods or services from one country to another. Military assistance and food aid are among the earliest forms of foreign aid. In the last decades aid projects with the ultimate goal of improving the infrastructure in the recipient country have become increasingly common.

The world of development assistance is being shaken by the economic power shift occurring across the globe. Emerging donors, including China, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Korea, India and Brazil, are inconspicuously beginning to change the rules of the game. These new donors have been able to increase their volume of aid to least developed countries on terms of their choosing, as none of them belongs to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).[1] The People’s Republic of China (PRC, China) is the most prominent in this group of emerging donors.

Sino-Indian soft power in a regional context

Rosita Dellios et al. — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:09:46 PST

This article examines the possibilities of new ‘mandalas’ - or schemas - of cooperative power in the geopolitics of India and China as it affects their common Indo-Pacific region. As Asia’s two great civilisational states and reputed arch rivals, India and China need not be on a collision course as they rise to become the 21st century’s new global powers. There is much scope for cooperation in their mutual quest for resources, security and prestige via an understanding of the dynamics of today’s geopolitics and the role of ‘soft power’ embodied in aspects of the strategic cultures of both India and China. The study therefore entails a comparative analysis of the strategic cultures of China and India, and the prospects of sustained cooperation across the Eurasian landmass and surrounding maritime zones. The key concepts in this article are soft power (as the power of attraction rather than coercion), ‘strategic culture’ (a people's distinctive style of dealing with and thinking about the problems of national security), ‘mandala’ (from India's traditional strategic cultures) and ‘harmonious world’ (from Chinese strategic culture).

Tibet and Xinjiang: Their fourfold value to China

Franziska Elmer — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 18:59:19 PST

Tibet and Xinjiang are two of the five administrative divisions known as ‘autonomous regions’ within the People’s Republic of China (PRC, China) that are allocated for national minorities. Unlike the other three - Inner Mongolia, Guangxi and Ningxia - Tibet and Xinjiang are well known to the wider world which associates them with national independence movements. Tibet in particular has received major media attention with the prominence of its charismatic leader and Nobel Peace Prize recipient, the 14th Dalai Lama. The run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics was also a driver for continued awareness of the pro-independence issue and criticism of China’s human rights record in these regions.

However, this article is less concerned with providing yet another critique of Beijing’s policy towards Tibet and Xinjiang and more interested in exploring the value of these two regions to China. Their importance can be analysed under four areas: 1) territorial unity; 2) history and development; 3) resource security; and 4) geopolitics. To begin with, a brief overview of the two regions is needed.

Natural justice and its political implications: Legal philosophy revealed in The Doctorine of the Mean

Shan Chun — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 18:24:25 PST

The Doctrine of the Mean is one the major Confucian classics focusing on natural justice and its political implications via cosmic dynamics (Cheng) and its concepts of equilibrium and harmony. The rule of the sages modeling themselves after heaven’s virtue is advocated as the so-called ‘rule of man’ or ‘rule of virtue’, in which natural harmony in the cosmos is believed to be the manifestation of eternal and universal justice. Both the editors of this Pre-Qin Dynasty text and its commentators in the Tang Dynasty have availed themselves of its ideas on natural justice and cosmic fairness (in a Heaven-Mandated-Nature Theory) to repudiate Legalist utilitarianism (abused in the despotic Qin Dynasty) and the ‘Empty-World’ concepts of Buddhism prevalent during the Tang Dynasty. Their academic endeavors were directed at consolidating cosmological faith and moral fairness as the basis for a Confucian political ideology focused on self-regulation, family relationships, moral governance and world-harmony.

European counter-traditions and the Western unconscious

R. James Ferguson — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 18:24:24 PST

Extract:
European history and world history, for all the work of critical scholars and deconstructive revisionism, still tends to be viewed in terms of epochs and periods. Combined with a core event or central theme and a sense of 'narrative closure', these factors are sufficient to shape the key historical narratives or storylines that are repeated about the past. Simply by knowing the time, the general social context and place, we seem assured of having some genuine understanding of the issue at hand. Popular histories, often but not always written by experts in the field, remain best sellers, especially when stripped of the references and technical apparatus that supports a strong storyline. The History Channel suggests to its viewers, with narrative glibness and engrossing visual detail, that we can easily explore not only the main galleries but also the side chambers of history with just a little extra effort. These video documentaries imply that more detail will always be discovered about the past, but for now, this twenty-five or fifty-minute slice of reality is all you need to know (before the series becomes available). The 'past is honored and forgotten', even as it is positioned within the realm of commercial infotainment. The technical expertise of such products, both written and filmed, conceals their highly constructed, editorialised and inferential nature.

Viewpoint: Global order - Enlightenment or Confucian values?

Reg Little — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 18:17:51 PST

Extract:
Books with titles such as When China Rules the World by Martin Jacques, In the Jaws of the Dragon: America’s Fate in the Coming Era of Chinese Hegemony by Eamonn Fingleton and China's New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society by Daniel A. Bell already pose the question that is the title of this piece. Moreover, articles like Complexity and Collapse by Harvard Historian Niall Ferguson in the March/April 2010 edition of the authoritative American journal Foreign Affairs, with its focus on the abrupt collapse of empires, give the question an additional immediacy.