China's “Politics of Harmony” and the Quest for Soft Power in International Politics
Linus Hagström,Astrid Nordin +1 more
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TLDR
The authors argue that the soft power of the politics of harmony is coercive and has legitimized and enabled oppressive, homogenizing and bellicose expansionism and rule in the West and Japan, and that a similarly structured exercise of soft power may enable violence in and beyond China, too.Abstract:
This article engages with China’s “politics of harmony” to investigate the dangers and possibilities of soft power as a concept and practice. Chinese sources claim that China will be able to exercise soft power due to its tradition of thinking about harmony. Indeed, the concept of harmony looms large in Chinese soft power campaigns, which differentiate China’s own harmonious soft power from the allegedly disharmonious hard power of other great powers—in particular Western powers and Japan. Yet, similarly dichotomizing harmony discourses have been employed precisely in the West and Japan. In all three cases, such harmony discourses set a rhetorical trap, forcing audiences to empathize and identify with the “harmonious” self or risk being violently “harmonized.” There is no doubt that the soft power of harmony is coercive. More importantly, the present article argues that it has legitimized and enabled oppressive, homogenizing and bellicose expansionism and rule in the West and Japan. A similarly structured exercise of soft power may enable violence in and beyond China, too. Ultimately, however, we argue that China’s own tradition of thinking about harmony may help us to theorize how soft power might be exercised be in less antagonistic and violent ways.read more
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Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern BodiesThinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary WestYearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural PoliticsGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
TL;DR: The body politics of Julia Kristeva and the Body Politics of JuliaKristeva as discussed by the authors are discussed in detail in Section 5.1.1 and Section 6.2.1.
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Destined For War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?
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Narrative power : how storytelling shapes East Asian international politics
Linus Hagström,Karl Gustafsson +1 more
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Influence of Chinese managerial soft power on African skills development
Alexis Abodohoui,Zhan Su +1 more
TL;DR: The authors examined the influence of Chinese managerial soft power on the development of management skills by Africans who had previously studied in China before returning to Africa to run their own businesses and identified themes emerging from the cognitive repertoire of African managers after their cultural adaptation in China.
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Emergence, consolidation and dominance of meta-regimes: Exploring the historical evolution of mass production (1765-1972) from the deep transitions perspective.
TL;DR: This paper conducts a case study on the historical evolution of mass production in the Transatlantic region from 1765 to 1972 to explore the co-evolutionary model linking niche-level dynamics, transitions in single systems and ‘great surges of development’, as conceptualized by Schot and Kanger (2018).
References
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Book
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
TL;DR: The body politics of Julia Kristeva and the Body Politics of JuliaKristeva as mentioned in this paper are discussed in detail in Section 5.1.1 and Section 6.2.1.
Journal ArticleDOI
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.
Location of Culture
TL;DR: The postcolonial and the post-modern: The question of agency as discussed by the authors, the question of how newness enters the world: Postmodern space, postcolonial times and the trials of cultural translation, 12.
Book
The Location of Culture
TL;DR: The postcolonial and the post-modern: The question of agency as mentioned in this paper, the question of how newness enters the world: Postmodern space, postcolonial times and the trials of cultural translation, 12.