Taiwan, China and the Meta-civilizational World System of Eastern Asia: Towards a New Vision of Asian Globality

Abstract

The stalemate in China-Taiwan relations calls for new approaches to the problem of security and stability in APR. The article examines the current confrontation between the "two sides of the Taiwan Strait" in its relation to Chinese civilization’s specificity and globalization processes. Taiwan is not just China's periphery, but also the last Chinese frontier. Taiwan's politics of "de-sinicization" and transformation of the Taiwanese into an "Oceanic Nation" is considered in the three-dimensional context of modern Chinese civilization: the continental centralized state of imperial type, represented by the "Middle Kingdom" concept, the Chinese periphery and the Chinese diaspora, representing the global aspect of Pax Sinica. A real focus of this structure is precisely the point of Frontier, a sort of heterotopy with its capacity to bring together singularity and universality, internal and external aspects of existence. The author offers a new concept of Greater China as a link between the local and the global aspects of Chinese civilization. This mediation is realized through the transformation of various qualities of existence into its persisting types as the symbols of the fullness of existence. These types create a special kind of communicative space which constitutes the East Asian meta-civilizational world system. This approach to the relationship between China and Taiwan and their globalist aspirations reveals a special East Asian type of globality, in which cooperation between China and Taiwan can be reconciled on the synergy basis, despite their widely divergent political systems. The Pacific region is a convenient testing ground for this type of relationship.