Expansionism

About: Expansionism is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 979 publications have been published within this topic receiving 11169 citations.

Sinocentrism and the Geopolitics of Tianxia

Abstract: China’s Inner Asian periphery borders territories in neighboring Russia, Mongolia, and Central Asia lost during the final decades of Qing rule, and toward which the PRC maintains a still-ambivalent relationship. Beijing has resolved its border disputes with Russia and its Central Asian neighbors, but longstanding fears of Chinese expansionism have grown more acute since the announcement of the BRI, by which Beijing aspires to reshape the economic, political, and potentially, military balance. China’s neighbors worry the BRI could help consolidate a regional order that is more Sinocentric, with recipient states compelled to adopt much of China’s own security paradigm. Among the ideas invoked to support Beijing’s aspirations is the concept of “Great Unity [datong],” first discussed in the Confucian Book of Rites, with its emphasis on a single ruler for “all under the sky [tianxia] as one Family, and . . . all the Middle states [zhongguo] as one man.” Such ideas imply that Chinese preeminence throughout the historical tianxia—essentially the then-known world radiating out from northern China—was benign, and that Beijing’s contemporary aspiration to create what Xi Jinping calls a “Community of Common Destiny” is similarly based on a desire for “win-win” outcomes.

The ‘War on Terror’ and the Backlash against Orientalism

Abstract: The last few years have witnessed a vigorous backlash against Orientalism. Edward Said’s most influential work has been accused of sweeping denunciations of Western scholarship about the Orient as well as knee-jerk anti-Americanism and even covert support for terrorism and radical Islam. His critical stance on Western colonialism and especially Zionism meant that Said was no stranger to abuse and misrepresentation, from Edward Alexander’s coinage of the epithet ‘Professor of Terror’1 to Justus Weiner’s baseless claim that he had invented his status as a Palestinian and a refugee. Said’s argument in Orientalism is, of course, that the purportedly disinterested study of the Orient frequently perpetuates age-old prejudices about the East that make it easier to denigrate the region and justify its domination. However over-determined its reception was by specifically academic and institutional trends, Orientalism’s confrontational tone and its appearance in the late 1970s along with its author’s forthright advocacy of the Palestinians’ national aspirations meant the book was soon caught up in the passionate ideological disagreements surrounding the Iranian Revolution, the hostage crisis, Israel’s accelerating expansionism after the 1967 war and the election of the first Likud government in 1977, and the general audibility of the Arab and Islamic worlds. In short, this was a book pitched into the tented field of political controversy.

The Chinese factor in the formation of the American foreign policy doctrine of "open doors" (1899-1900)

Abstract: The article examines the formation of one of the foreign policy doctrines of expansionism, which became the main instrument of US foreign policy in the twentieth century. The theory of "open doors", the essence of which is to provide equal opportunities to all interested parties on the basis of unlimited economic freedom and unhindered penetration of capital, was proclaimed by Secretary of State J. Hay in 1899 in relation with China, which was considered as a potential market for the sale of industrial goods and a profitable object of capital investment. Having opposed the division of China by the European powers, the American ruling elites proposed to replace individual control over individual parts of the country, according to the concluded agreements on "spheres of influence", with the establishment of a collective system of external supervision over its entire territory. By putting external expansion in the form of international agreement, they wanted to force competitors stronger in military and political terms to play by the proposed rules, transferring power rivalry to the trade and economic area, where their commercial superiority was undoubted. The nationalist movement of the Yihetuans, which began in the autumn of 1898, aimed at expelling foreigners out of the country, jeopardized the idea of implementing the doctrine of "open doors". After much thought, the White House abandoned the widely disseminated peacefulness and approved the participation of the expeditionary force in the joint intervention of European powers in China. Interference in the internal political affairs of a formally sovereign state meant that the United States was involved in its violent redistribution. Later, Washington continued to follow its course around the world, creating an arsenal of new political and economic methods, officially formalized as a generally accepted international principle in the 1922 treaty of the Nine Powers.