Tianxia as the source of ontological insecurity: The construction, essentialization, and weaponization of ontological insecurity in modern China

Following the 2004 establishment of the World War II memorial in Washington DC, itself a product of the collective re-commemoration of the so-called ‘Greatest Generation’ of WWII veterans in the US, nonprofit organizations began the practice of ‘Honor flights’. These flights transported US veterans of the Second World War to Washington DC to visit that memorial and other commemorative sites, meet with Congressional members, and return to their local airports to great fanfare and celebration. The practice has evolved to incorporate Korean War and now Vietnam War veterans. As honor flights include much more than the veterans themselves, and as it has become an affectively charged festival for local communities to ‘honor’ their veterans during periods of unresolved wartimes, I articulate the Honor Flight as a treatment for – but also a symptom of – US ontological insecurity in the 21st Century. Honor flights are celebratory, judgmental, and political micro-practices that reflect and reproduce US militarism in ways that will likely outlast the wartimes of the 21st century United States. Along with other micro-practices of US ontological (in)security, Honor Flights threaten to destabilize the politics of military intervention hereafter, and encourage the extension of or inauguration of new times of war.

Reviewed by: Mass Vaccination: Citizens' Bodies and State Power in Modern China by Mary Augusta Brazelton Wayne Soon Mary Augusta Brazelton. Mass Vaccination: Citizens' Bodies and State Power in Modern China. Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2019. 258 pp. Ill. $47.95 (978-1-5017-3998-9). Mary Augusta Brazelton has written an impressive history of vaccination in twentieth-century China. Through a sophisticated analysis of English, French, and Chinese archival materials, correspondences, scientific reports, consular documents, and speeches, Brazelton argues that mass vaccination was central in constructing the modern Chinese citizen. Not only did immunization campaigns entail collective participation as a means of identity building, but they also established the expectation that Chinese people would subject their bodies to the dictates of the state. This process accelerated during the Second World War between 1937 and 1945, when Yunnan province in Southwest China emerged as a critical site for vaccine experiments and the development of vaccination ideas and techniques. Scientists and physicians affiliated with the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, KMT) and their local allies led wartime expansion of immunization. Their efforts left critical legacies for the post-1949 Chinese Communist Party–led People's Republic of China (PRC) utilization of vaccination for state building and medical diplomacy. [End Page 533] Chapter 1 highlights how Chinese physicians were limited by the financial and logistical limitations of prewar public health administration, even as they accumulated knowledge and experiences from fellow microbiologists around the world. Arriving in wartime Yunnan, Chinese doctors, as chapter 2 shows, encountered medical systems shaped by competing French, British, and Chinese forces. Chapter 3 describes how Chinese physicians finally received the support needed to enact mass vaccination from multiple health care organizations that emerged during the Second World War. These institutions were backed by a variety of overseas patrons, such as the League of Nations. Chapter 4 delineates how the Chinese government prioritized the production and dissemination of vaccination in wartime Kunming. They sometimes used coercive methods to compel immunization and thereby expanded the power of the state. Chapter 5 shows how the KMT and local government officials shifted their attention from disseminating cholera vaccines in wartime Southwest China to promoting Bacille Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccination in coastal China to combat tuberculosis during the Civil War period from 1945 to 1949. Chapters 6 and 7 show how the PRC state used vaccination to improve China's rural public health in the 1950s, setting the stage for touting its success in its global medical diplomacy in the 1960s and 1970s. Mass Vaccination, curated carefully from diverse sources, illustrates the negotiations over vaccination on the ground. We encounter officials in Yunnan who insisted on receiving bribes from custom duties on imported drugs and medical supplies before allowing them into the province (p. 61). We meet cafeteria workers who did not want injections because they were too painful (p. 94). We see mothers who rejected vaccination on the grounds they were too occupied with child-rearing (p. 139). We shudder that a prominent microbiologist committed suicide in 1958 after being hounded for being an "anti-rightist" by the PRC government (p. 168). One wonders if these cumulative acts of resistance and failure effectively challenged the expansion of state-led biopolitics (pp. 7–9). Or were they merely casualties of an unstoppable modern Chinese state, bent on inoculating patients at will for the sake of the greater good? In light of the global race to develop an effective COVID-19 vaccine quickly in 2020, one wonders too whether vaccinators resisted the Chinese state's calls to rapidly develop new vaccines. It is critical to ask if mass immunization (as opposed to barefoot doctors or commune-style healthcare) really underpinned the PRC's rural health advances, as these claims later formed the basis of international experts' promotion of the PRC model in resolving global health issues. As Brazelton points out, underpinning this global desire for the PRC's model is a much more complex history, ironically, that began with its principal rival, the KMT, which sought to immunize its way to victory against the Japanese during the Second World War. This book will undoubtedly...

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Review| April 01 2022 Science and Really Existing Socialism in Maoist China: A Review of Recent Works Mary Augusta Brazelton. Mass Vaccination: Citizens’ Bodies and State Power in Modern China. Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2019. 258 pp., illus., index. ISBN 978-1-5017-3998-9. $47.95Arunabh Ghosh. Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China. Histories of Economic Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2020. 360 pp., illus., index. ISBN 978-0-6911-7947-6. $45.00Sigrid Schmalzer. Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China. London: University of Chicago Press. 2016. 320 pp., illus., index. ISBN 978-0-2263-3015-0. $45.00. He Bian He Bian History and East Asian Studies, Princeton University. hbian@princeton.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (2022) 52 (2): 265–275. https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2022.52.2.265 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation He Bian; Science and Really Existing Socialism in Maoist China: A Review of Recent Works. Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 1 April 2022; 52 (2): 265–275. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2022.52.2.265 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentHistorical Studies in the Natural Sciences Search On January 31, 1979, Michel Foucault made an offhand remark during a lecture at the College of France: “I do not think that there is an autonomous socialist governmentality. There is no governmental rationality of socialism.…One can, moreover, reproach it…but it has lived, it has actually functioned, and we have examples of it within and connected up to liberal governmentalities.” In this rare reference to socialism in The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault framed it as “the internal logic of an administrative apparatus” in which the “governmentality of a police state” forms “a fusion, a continuity, the constitution of a sort of massive bloc between governmentality and administration.”1 One can read this remark as dismissive, slotting socialism as a pseudo-ideology subsidiary to an all-encompassing global history of capitalism. And in the three decades since the end of the Cold War, such readings of socialism have only multiplied—not least due... You do not currently have access to this content.

China Scholars Have long appreciated the critical importance of the twentieth century in modern Chinese history. As the world entered the twenty-first century, they have gained new insights into China's political-institutional, socioeconomic, and ideological developments during the first three quarters of the previous century. Although few scholars have attempted to define precisely what they mean by “modern China” or “modern Chinese nation state,” it is clear that, for much of the twentieth century, modern China or modern Chinese nation state is characterized by the struggle to achieve and maintain national unification and independence, to develop national defense, and to centralize state power and build state institutions. As a major leader of the Nationalist Party and subsequently the leader of the Nationalist Party-State, Chiang Kai-shek was central to, as well as the main actor in, this epic “struggle for modern China”. The purpose of this essay is to analyze how Chiang contributed to the making of modern China and assess the extent to which Jay Taylor succeeds in defining Chiang's role in the making of modern China.

This chapter examines the social legitimacy of China’s order-building project in the South China Sea. It argues that all major interested regional parties, including non-Chinese specialists, regional states and the US, to the maritime and territorial disputes have challenged, by virtue of various legal, discursive and diplomatic means, the legitimacy of China’s expansionist order. What China has done and said in its discursive legitimation strategy are interpreted as an illegitimate revisionist rising power, aiming to unsettle the ‘liberal’ status quo unilaterally with little regard to historical evidence unfavourable to China’s claims, international treaty and international law. The non-recognition of China’s claims to the territories as well as historic rights in the South China Sea by regional states and the US exacerbates China’s ontological insecurity and anxiety. Needing biographical continuity of the self, China decides to stick to its self-comforting historical narrative and claims.

Abstract:
 This article analyses the four main military strategies of the People's Republic of China toward the South and East China Seas Security architecture under President Xi Jinping. These strategies of Beijing have been applied mainly to the region, which has been under the US alliance system's security umbrella since the Cold War. The article demonstrates that the People's Republic of China, under the leadership of Xi Jinping, seeks to reorder the regional security architecture to its favour by leveraging military modernization, influence operations, and diplomatic-economic power to push out the US and allies’ countries' influence outside East and South China Seas. This article argues that the successful conclusion of the rising power's strategies over the East and South China seas will translate the current geopolitical rivalry to result in a power transition to the detriment of the rising power.
 Keywords: China, Xi Jinping, East China Sea, South China Sea, Power Transition

Realism- and geopolitics-inspired rhetoric was common currency in Russian foreign policy discourse throughout the 1990s. This led some commentators to adopt realism and geopolitics—realism’s more nationalist and strategic counterpart—as conceptual lenses for understanding Russian foreign policy. As a result, Russian foreign policy of the 2010s is still considered predominantly geopolitics-driven despite the fact that geopolitical vocabulary has virtually disappeared from foreign policy discourse while a desire to carve out spheres of influence have been officially pronounced utterly anachronistic and inappropriate, a “thing of the past”. Thus, a more nuanced interpretation views the rise of geopolitics in Russian post-Soviet foreign policy discourse as an attempt to tap into the symbolic and rhetorical power of geopolitics in order to reduce ontological insecurity brought about by the end of the Cold War. The chapter, therefore, advances a theoretical claim about the relevance of the constructivist and poststructuralist literature and very limited relevance of realism for understanding the twists and turns of Russian post-Soviet foreign policy. Methodologically, the chapter argues that an exploration of state identity rooted in the ontological security argument will benefit from employing discourse analysis. Empirically, the present study provides substantiation of the theoretical claim that the concept of hegemony captures well the historical trajectory of Russia’s relations with its ‘significant other’- Europe/the EU/the West—and provides important insights into the sources of Russia’s ontological insecurity in the twenty-first century.

We live in both a risk society (Beck 1992) and an exclusive society (Young 1999). At the same time as we orient ourselves around the risks and dangers which we see surrounding us in our everyday lives, so also do our social and political arrangements lend themselves to the magnification of inequalities in access to those goods which reassure, protect or expose ourselves to risk. As our perception of the ‘bads’ increases, so do we seek to garner the ‘goods’ which would keep them at bay, trading on our capital reserves and capacities across the various spheres of economy, community and culture. The ‘ontological insecurity’ which the condition of late modernity inspires in us (Giddens 1990; Young 1999) fuses with the apprehension of mundane insecurities, pressurising us to invest in the means of risk avoidance (Hope and Sparks 2000). As we feel increasingly that the public sphere alone can no longer guarantee sufficiently the public goods of everyday safety (see Garland 1996), so we are thrown upon our own individual and collective resources and strategies to acquire the private goods which would remedy our perceived security deficit. And our incapacity to protect ourselves from risk leads to frustration with government – still seen as the primary provider of safety in modern society – and with ourselves, as a reflection of our own powerlessness in the face of the risks and harms that surround us.

Conditions of Democracy in German Austria and Hungary, 1918–1919

Subsistence Crises, Managerial Corruption and Labour Protests in China

The People’s Liberation Army Navy’s deployment of ships and submarines in the Indian Ocean region (IOR) has been an enormous source of apprehension in India, which fears encirclement by China. To counter China, the Indian navy has started regular port visits with friendly states such as Vietnam and the Philippines. The Indian government has revived the somewhat dormant “Look East” policy and rechristened it as “Act East” policy under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. As a part of this newly revised “Act East” policy India aims to develop stronger relations with states that have ongoing disputes with China in the South China Sea such as Vietnam and the Philippines. India has sought to pressure Beijing on the maritime front in an area that is rife with conflict and overlapping territorial claims. India’s maritime strategy is increasingly shifting to sea-control and forward looking naval diplomacy. Vietnam has emerged as a focal state in India’s “Act East” policy and as a strategic partner in countering China’s maritime assertiveness. This chapter examines India’s growing closeness and strategic partnership with Vietnam, which is emerging as a frontline state in India’s eastward pivot, as the territorial conflict and competition with the People’s Republic of China is intensifying. India’s overtures towards Vietnam should be understood in the context of India’s territorial conflict with China and the growing crosscutting international alliance that is emerging against China’s territorial expansionism and aggressiveness in South China and East China Sea. India does not have a direct stake in the South China Sea maritime dispute, but it increasingly views China’s highly assertive and domineering behavior as a harbinger of Chinese actions in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR), and in the highly contentious border dispute in the Himalayas.

Journal Article Securing the safety of navigation in East Asia: legal and political dimensions. Edited by Shicun Wu and Keyuan Zou: Solving disputes for regional cooperation and development in the South China Sea: a Chinese perspective. By Shicun Wu Get access Securing the safety of navigation in East Asia: legal and political dimensions. Edited by Shicun Wu and Keyuan Zou. Oxford, Cambridge, Philadelphia and New Delhi: Chandos Publishing. 2013. 291pp. Index. £85.00. ISBN 978 0 85709 489 6. Available as e-book.Solving disputes for regional cooperation and development in the South China Sea: a Chinese perspective. By Shicun Wu. Oxford, Cambridge, Philadelphia and New Delhi: Chandos Publishing. 2013. 211pp. Index. £85.00. ISBN 978 1 84334 685 2. Available as e-book. Tim Summers Tim Summers 1Chatham House, Hong Kong Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 91, Issue 2, March 2015, Pages 443–445, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2346.12271 Published: 27 March 2015

The period following World War II (WWII) marked a significant turning point in Britain’s global standing, characterized by the loss of its empire and the existential anxiety regarding its new role on the world stage. Dean Acheson’s famous quote, “Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role,” poignantly captures the sense of diminishing power and identity crisis experienced by the Kingdom since 1945. Along with the consequences of WWII, the process of decolonization, coupled with events such as the Suez Crisis, further confirmed Britain’s declining position in the international system, disrupting its established narrative of global power and leaving it in a state of ontological insecurity. This paper, focusing on ontological security studies in international relations, explores the connection between Britain’s ontological insecurity in the new global order after WWII, and the Anglo-American special relationship (AASR) as a response to these anxieties. In this context, the suggested theoretical framework promises to address the concepts of narrative identity and existential anxiety and their respective contributions to understanding the underlying factors in explaining the emergence and stability of the AASR.

ABSTRACTIn 1943, the United States began to consider the issue of the world order after the end of World War II; at that time, the status of the islands in the South China Sea remained undetermined. Towards the end of the war, a US policy-planning document on this issue favored either returning the islands to one of the parties claiming sovereignty or placing the islands under international trusteeship once the war ended. Immediately after the end of World War II, the United States withdrew its support for an international trusteeship, and it did not back up any single party’s claim of sovereignty over the islands. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the United States did not clarify its stance on the issue of sovereignty over the South China Sea islands, hoping the eventual outcome would not favor the newly founded People’s Republic of China. Finally, the San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951, signed under the guidance of the United States, stipulated only that Japan relinquish the islands, but failed to identify who would take them over. The San Francisco Peace Treaty signaled the formation of the official US policy towards disputes over the islands in the South China Sea.