Political Globalisation and the Politics of International Non-governmental Organisations: The Case of Village Democracy in China

Although there is a body of research regarding the development of village self-governance in China, there is only limited research regarding the activity of international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in relation to this development. The paper fills this gap through an analysis of the activities and effects of the village self-governance programs of three American-based NGOs: the International Republican Institute (IRI), the Carter Center and the Ford Foundation. These NGOs have assisted in the implementation of a number of reforms to village self-governance in China. NGO involvement in village democracy in China exemplifies a process of 'political globalisation' that involves the intermingling of layers of power and interests at the national and international levels. The paper concludes that, through this process of political globalisation, rural political reforms in China are both promoted and exploited by national and international political actors.     

环境政治中国际非政府组织的角色——基于批判地缘政治的视角

国际非政府组织（INGO）在国际环境政治中发挥着日益重要的角色,也是中国"一带一路"走出去的关键影响要素之一。批判地缘政治关注主权国家之外的非政府行为体,同时对权力概念提出了新的理解。借助其思想,本文指出国际环境政治中INGO的作用,并通过尺度-权力框架分析其行动和角色。发现：①INGO在环境等国际公共事务上作用不断凸显;②INGO在多个尺度上通过不同的权力影响环境政治;③INGO与政府存在依赖、合作和对抗等不同的互动关系。因此,应处理好与INGO的关系,借助其独特的权力助力"一带一路"建设。     

Territorializing spatial data: Controlling land through One Map projects in Indonesia and Myanmar

Once confined to paper, national cartographic projects increasingly play out through spatial data infrastructures such as software programs and smartphones. Across the Global South, foreign donor-funded digital platforms emphasize transparency, accountability and data sharing while echoing colonial projects that consolidated state-based territorial knowledge. This article brings political geography scholarship on state and counter-mapping together with new work on the political ecology of data to highlight a contemporary dimension of territorialization, one in which state actors seek to consolidate and authorize national geospatial information onto digital platforms. We call attention to the role of data infrastructures in contemporary resource control, arguing that territorializing data both extends state territorialization onto digital platforms and, paradoxically, provides new avenues for non-state actors to claim land. Drawing on interviews, document review, and long-term fieldwork, we compare the origins, institutionalization and realization of Indonesia and Myanmar's ‘One Map’ projects. Both projects aimed to create a government-managed online spatial data platform, building on national mapping and management traditions while responding to new international incentives, such as climate change mitigation in Indonesia and good democratic governance in Myanmar. While both projects encountered technical difficulties and evolved during implementation, different national histories and political trajectories resulted in the embrace and expansion of the program in Indonesia but reluctant participation and eventual crisis in Myanmar. Together, these cases show how spatial data infrastructures can both extend state control over space and offer opportunities for contesting or reimagining land and nation, even as such infrastructures remain embedded in local power relations.     

Globalisation,soft power,and the rise of football in China

Sport, especially football, has rapidly acquired global cultural, commercial, and also political prominence. China recently and belatedly has sought to acquire international recognition in sport and participate in global development by linking soft power, national status, and football. Market principles have been adopted, football clubs are owned by wealthy corporations, partly directed by government, and expensive coaches and players have been transferred from Europe. Conversely, Chinese corporations have invested in European football clubs. State plans are oriented to success in the World Cup and the adoption of the ‘world game’ throughout the nation, but cannot easily be implemented from above in a team sport with weak ‘grassroots’. Successfully developing the ‘people's game’ in the People's Republic has proved difficult. In this sporting arena, soft power has been limited because of domestic and international failings.     

Economic statecraft in China's new overseas special economic zones: soft power,business or resource security?

China's rapidly growing economic engagement with other developing countries has aroused intense debates, but these debates have often generated more heat than light. The Chinese government is clearly pushing its companies to move offshore in greater numbers, and state‐owned firms figure prominently in many of the major investments abroad. Yet relatively little research exists on when, how and why the Chinese government intervenes in the overseas economic activities of its firms. China's state‐sponsored economic diplomacy in other developing countries could play three major strategic roles: strengthening resource security, enhancing political relationships and soft power, and boosting commercial opportunities for national firms. This article examines China's programme to establish overseas special economic zones as one tool of Beijing's economic statecraft. It traces the process by which they were established and implemented, and investigates the characteristics of the 19 zones initially selected in a competitive tender process. The article concludes that even in countries rich in natural resources, the overseas zones were overwhelmingly positioned as commercial projects. Particularly in the Asian zones, China is following in the footsteps of Japan. The zone programme, and the Chinese foreign investment it hoped to foster, represents a clear case of the international projection of China's developmental state. However, in Africa (but not generally elsewhere) discourse surrounding the zones publicly positions them as a transfer of China's own development success, thus potentially enhancing China's political relationships and soft power on the continent.     

Spatial processes and politics of renewable energy transition: Land,zones and frictions in South Africa

This paper seeks to make a contribution to on-going debates about how to conceptualise the spatial processes of renewable energy transition. It makes a case for understanding renewable energy transitions as simultaneously spatial and political processes, constitutive of new territories and configuring development pathways. Drawing on a case study of South Africa's Renewable Energy Independent Power Procurement Programme (REI4P), the paper explores the ways in which energy transitions are intrinsically bound up with both the materiality and the historical and contemporary politics of land. It then examines the relationship between energy transitions and territory to conceptualise the ways in which transitions take on an experimental shape in the form of 'zones'. The paper argues that these zones are new territories deploying forms of spatial and political-administrative exceptionality, which allow political and economic actors to exercise authority and commercial power. Two types of zone emerging from South Africa's energy transition exemplify these processes: legally-defined zones for the development of solar and wind energy and zones of socioeconomic development required by REI4P. The paper explores the spatial and political consequences of these strategies and suggests that these may not necessarily translate into conflict and confrontation, but instead produce uneasy co-existences of different political, social and spatial projects and interests, with potential to create new polities.     

PARADES,PUBLIC SPACE,AND PROPAGANDA: THE NAZI CULTURE PARADES IN MUNICH

As the birthplace of the Nazi Party and the official Capital of the Movement, Munich assumed a high profile within the party's propaganda apparatus. While Berlin became the political and foreign policy centre of Hitler's Reich and Nuremberg the site of massive displays of national power during the annual party rallies, national and local party leaders launched a series of cultural initiatives to showcase Munich as the Capital of German Art. Munich hosted numerous festivals proclaiming a rebirth of German art and culture, as well as the regime's supposedly peaceful intentions for domestic and international audiences. To help achieve these goals, Nazi leaders staged a series of extravagant parades in Munich celebrating German cultural achievements. The parades provided an opportunity for the regime to monopolize Munich's public spaces through performances of its particular vision of German history, culture and national belonging. While such mass public spectacles had obvious propaganda potential, several constraints, most prominently Munich's existing spatial layout, limited the parades’ effectiveness.     

Faith in China: religious belief and national narratives amongst young,urban Chinese Protestants

This paper investigates the national narratives of young, urban Protestants in contemporary China. Based on 100 interviews conducted in Beijing and Shenzhen, it argues that in constructing their national narratives, Chinese Protestants display critical selectivity in adopting the values of official party‐state nationalism. They display affection towards China, a sense of responsibility for improving the country and a concern for society's morality, all of which echo official nationalist priorities. However, they are critical of China's political arrangements, dispute the primacy of economic growth and are less hawkish on international and territorial issues. They see no contradiction between their Protestant and Chinese identities, but generally prioritise the former. This selectivity is explained by the fact that Protestantism generally attracts those less satisfied by the social and political status quo, and because of, in Carlson's terms, the ‘boundary‐spanning’ nature of the Protestant identity and morality to which these converts then subscribe.     

New perspectives on instrumentalism: an empirical study of cultural diplomacy

Museums are increasingly recognised as having a role to play within international relations, to facilitate cultural exchange, assert national identity and foster mutual understanding. Whilst international work is perceived to be politically motivated and diplomatically advantageous, it can be highly beneficial to cultural institutions. In this paper, ‘cultural diplomacy' is shown to be a strategy used by museums to enable organisational development and economic growth. This paper demonstrates how national museums adopted a political rhetoric and used strategic lobbying to formulate a new cultural policy, which expanded the scale and scope of their international work. By defining the parameters and principles of this policy, the institutions wield power, thus challenging the conventional perceptions of policy-making and contradicting commentators who accuse museums of political subservience. Throwing the notion of instrumentalism into disarray, this paper calls for a theoretical and conceptual rethinking, to revamp understanding and bring it in line with practice.     

Domestic troubles,national identity discourse,and China's attitude towards the West, 2003–2012

Prior to its recent, much discussed international ‘assertiveness’, China's attitude to the West had deteriorated, as reflected in official discourse of national identity. Drawing from political science and social psychology literature on identity studies, I argue that the discursive pattern of national identity can shift as a function of an elite strategy to exclude internal others through opposition to foreign others. Internally exclusionary nationalism, often employed by elites during major crises, is instrumental to consolidating control and maintaining order. But when targeting internal opponents alone is politically inconvenient or lacks public resonance, elites will accentuate ethnocentric national identity discourse vis‐a‐vis foreign nations in order to reinforce internal battles and divert popular discontent externally. An interpretive analysis of the official texts of Chinese national identity discourse during the Hu Jintao decade, supplemented by quantitative data, shows a significant correlation between the regime's fear of internal instability and bottom‐up political opposition on the one hand and the timing and intensity of ethnocentric identity discourse regarding the West on the other. The party‐state negatively framed the West in order to shift the blame for domestic troubles onto foreigners and discredit internal resistance.     

地缘政治关系简析

本文从地缘政治学分析国际政治大国与全球地理环境之间的关系实质,即地理位置、综合国力和战略利益在地域政治体系中的相互联系、制约和影响,及变化规律.     

Iranian Exceptionalism and Twelver Shi‘ism

Homa Katouzian's exceptionally perceptive, influential, and wide-ranging scholarship has been marked by three mutually reinforcing characteristics: a profound and detailed mastery of Iran's multi-civilizational heritage; a comparatively informed focus on the country's distinct historical trajectory; and an existentially grounded pluralist perspective in examining and evaluating the country's major political turning points and actors. These features are already fully displayed in his early magnum opus, The Political Economy of Modern Iran (1981), whose historical and political conclusions have been underlined time and again by the subsequent and often shocking national and international turns. In the intervening period, Katouzian has developed the cyclical theory of Iran's history as an “aridosolatic,” “pickaxe” or “short-termist” society. Of the important questions that his contributions raise or address, this paper examines the long-term continuity of Twelver/Imami Shi‘ism's trajectory which uniquely in the twentieth century Muslim and other worlds produced the leaders of two great revolutions. The result entails the addition of a still unfolding evolutionary-institutional layer within Katouzian's research program which may enhance its explanatory power and reinforce its political vision.     

Engendering Gramsci: Gender,the Philosophy of Praxis,and Spaces of Encounter in the Climate Caravan,Bangladesh

This paper examines the gendered politics of national and international networking amongst peasant farmers' movements in South Asia. In particular the paper provides an ethnographic account, based upon the author's critical engagement with the Bangladesh Krishok (farmer) Federation and the Bangladesh Kishani Sabha (Women Farmers' Association), of the Climate Change, Gender and Food Sovereignty Caravan that was organised in Bangladesh in 2011. The paper draws upon Antonio Gramsci's theory of the philosophy of praxis and feminist research on social reproduction, dispossession and materiality to interrogate the spaces of encounter and solidarity‐building practices of the Caravan between different communities in the country and between different social movement actors. The paper examines how processes of political organisation and consciousness‐raising within and between social movements are problematised by gendered power relations. The paper concludes with suggestions concerning how the philosophy of praxis in Bangladesh might be “engendered” to incorporate a politics of social reproduction.     

Feminism,Pacifism and Political Violence in Europe and China in the Era of the World Wars

This article examines international collaboration between Western and Chinese feminists in the interwar decades. Focusing on the 1927–28 ‘mission to Asia’ sponsored by the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), the article shows that, contrary to what existing historiography would lead us to suspect, neither feminist Orientalism nor colonial nationalism stood as a serious impediment to the formation of a truly international feminist alliance. Instead, European and Chinese women's varying experiences and memories of international conflict, and their varying understandings of the relationship between feminism, pacifism, militarism and political violence, defined the limits of global feminist collaboration in the late 1920s. The WILPF delegates, like many European women in the 1920s, were living in the shadow of the First World War, a conflict they condemned as futile and barbaric; their Chinese ‘sisters’ were living in the midst of a battle to determine the political future of their nation. For both sets of women, the question of women's emancipation was fundamentally entwined with broader national and international struggles. This article incorporates reports, personal letters and diaries of WILPF delegates as well as articles, speeches and letters by Chinese women to offer new insights into one of the earliest efforts to build a truly international women's movement and draw our attention to the centrality of warfare in defining the limits of global feminist collaboration in the twentieth century.     

Assembling dams in Ghana: A genealogical inquiry into the fluidity of hydropolitics

The paper offers a geographical interpretation of the evolving technical, political, and economic intricacy of large dams. It incorporates existing hydropolitical scholarship and the notion of the Chinese Water Machine to reframe dams as assemblages built by specific political, financial and technical processes in particular socioenvironmental regions. The paper examines the continuity of hydropolitical relationships through a genealogical inquiry into the formulation and materialisation of Ghana's three dams: the Akosombo and Kpong dams built during the Cold War, backed by Western lenders and engineering companies; and the Bui dam commissioned in the 2010s, with support from China. Based on fieldwork in Ghana and China, as well as documentary evidence, the paper argues that the thinking, planning and building of dams interconnect the host regime and external techno-financial actors with their floating political-economic interests, but in a durable way. Sometimes, even if little concrete is actually poured, the symbolic power of dams endures, transforms, and at certain times and places expands, through events and discourses of national and international interest groups pursuing their own purposes, albeit with the replacement of influential individuals and powerful institutions, and regardless of the involvement of Western, Chinese and/or other actors. Ruptures exist but do not necessarily break the continuity of dam assemblages. The emergence of an opposition assemblage that battles against dams is a more recent complexity.     

国家空间分异与国家空间视角的中国城市研究思路初探

中国城市研究的主流理论视角一直忽视国家的内部空间分异,国家空间理论的发展为从理论上重新审视国家的空间分异提供了的可能。在此基础上,介绍了国家空间视角的内涵及其在海外地理学研究中的发展与应用,分析了中国城市内部的国家空间组织的独特性及国家空间重构实践的丰富性,指出这种理论视角在中国城市研究中具有显著的应用可能性和必要性,并基于中国城市的政治经济背景提出了中国化的国家空间概念与分析框架。在此基础上,探讨了基于国家空间视角的重要城市研究议题及其可能面临的挑战与局限性。     

Unpacking administrative rank: Intercity competition and the remaking of local state space in China

The literature on interurban competition emphasizes that market rules as an external coercive power dominate local state space conductive to economic growth. Is there another external coercive power, other than the market as a hidden hand, to promote and mitigate interurban competition? Addressing this question, this paper specifies that the Chinese state's political efforts to downplay the role of the market in, and remake the rule of, interurban competition could have far reaching implications for urban political economy. The two cases are Ruili and Wanding, two border cities located on the edge of China's southwestern borderland adjacent to Myanmar. While reranking is supposed to balance out the inefficiencies of market principles in interurban competition, multiple rounds of reranking in Ruili and Wanding in the past seven decades indicate that this political orchestration can accelerate interurban competition into a cutthroat game for economic growth and thus create problems for macro economic management. Nevertheless, it can become a political tool to revamp the game by strategically selecting some cities as nodes of development at the sacrifice of urban fortunes of other cities. In this process, market rules operate in parallel with, and sometimes succumb to, the principle of political order from above. This finding expands the geographies of the state: the co-constitution of the local and the national becomes necessary and pragmatic since interurban competition is not a territorially-conditioned endeavor, but remains open to extralocal stakeholders—upper-level governments in this case—who can remake local state space.     

Talk to the hand: strategic spatial planning as persuasive storytelling of the Loop City*

The paper analyses how the spatial vision of the Loop City for the Øresund Region has played an important persuasive role in legitimizing and mobilizing local and national political support for a light rail link along the outer ring road in the Greater Copenhagen Area. The paper discusses the persuasive power of spatial concepts and supportive storylines in bringing transport infrastructure projects onto the national policy agenda. In conclusion, the paper calls for critical attention to the rationalities underpinning practices of persuasive storytelling in contemporary strategic spatial planning.     

Political chess and vernacular discursive strategies: A study of the late Qing Sichuan Railway Protection Movement

ABSTRACT

Interdisciplinary literary and historical studies of late Qing vernacular are rare, and the vernacular texts of the Sichuan Railway Protection Movement have been overlooked by academics. This paper focuses on this topic, arguing that the discursive strategies in such texts revolved around the movement's aim of “breaking the agreement and protecting the railway,” and primarily included discourses on constitutionalism, financial interests, patriotism, cultural order, and the late emperor, as well the ideas of “ridding the emperor of evil ministers,” borrowed from traditional Chinese political discourses, and “national subjugation,” within the context of the national crisis. None of these discourses were “anti-Manchu” or “revolutionary,” yet they were able to mobilize the people of Sichuan to devote themselves to the Railway Protection Movement, as well as attracting the “sympathetic understanding” of high-ranking Sichuan officials, such as Wang Renwen 王人文 and Zhao Erfeng 赵尔丰, thus lending discursive power to the railway protection camp in its game of political chess with the Qing court. Meanwhile, the government's weak discursive power was an important factor in the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty by the revolutionary tide triggered by the Sichuan Railway Protection Movement. The discursive strategies in vernacular texts on railway protection (including the particularly strategic discourse on the late emperor) spread, transformed, and were reborn to varying degrees over the course of history.