China’s soft power conundrum,film coproduction,and visions of shared prosperity

ABSTRACT

This paper looks at China’s soft power strategy in relation to the film industry, which since the early 2000s has opened to international co-productions and investment. Despite many coproduction projects being endorsed by government, results have not added significantly to China’s film-making reputation. The paper shows that coproductions have a diplomatic function, which implies a more conventional understanding of soft power. The paper also considers the tension between artistic freedom and censorship that impacts on all coproduction projects in China and which undermines the efficacy of China’s soft power strategy. The paper advances the proposition that coproduction with countries in Eurasia under the cultural template of the Belt and Road Initiative might present new opportunities to blend China’s stories into a narrative of shared prosperity. In doing this, the advance of China’s economic power is supported by cultural policies that evoke a historical past as much as a shared future.     

Securitizing Development Assistance: India’s Nuclear Program and Canadian Societal Views on Nuclear Reactor Exports, 1974–1978

This article examines an often overlooked but nevertheless important element of Canada’s Cold War-era development assistance policies—the export of nuclear reactors to the developing world. In particular, the focus is on societal responses to India’s explosion of an underground nuclear device in May 1974, an accomplishment made possible in part through the export of Canada’s nuclear expertise, technology, and material. India’s entrance into the nuclear club sparked an intense and wide-ranging debate in Canadian society concerning the nature of Canada’s development and foreign policies, and more specifically, the types of policies that would enable the country to fulfill its main international purpose as a middle power—contributing to conditions of international peace and security. The protracted debate which involved not only politicians but many civil society actors revealed stark divisions among Canadians centered on the extent to which nuclear reactor exports served Canadian national interests.     

“Refusing to be a victim,refusing to be an enemy”. Form-of-life as resistance in the Palestinian struggle against settler colonialism

This paper focuses on practices of non-violent resistance as they are played out in the ongoing Palestinian struggle against the Israeli settler colonialism in the occupied West Bank. By looking at the resistance of expanding settlements, demolition and land confiscation orders, and livelihood destruction in two Palestinian sites, the paper shows how Israeli settler colonial apparatuses, and the variety of techniques and practices of erasure they mobilize, can be fruitfully studied through site-specific ways of Palestinian resistance. In order to do so, the paper turns to discuss a peculiar form of non-violent resistance grounded in what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘destituent power’. It shows how the acts of destituent resistance in the two sites under study function by playing with the apparatuses of control in creative but non-violent ways; namely, by using the potentialities of that form-of-life that the settler colonial apparatuses try to cancel, overrule, control, weaken, criminalize, and erase. The idea of ‘destituent play’ is hence elaborated, and special attention paid to its ability to slow down and hamper the repressive functions of the settler colonial apparatuses through the creative use of the potentialities of Palestinian everyday life.     

Cultural diplomacy: India does it differently

Abstract

This article reviews the singularities of Indian doctrine and practice of cultural diplomacy, beginning with the observation that this term and the notions of ‘soft power’ and ‘public diplomacy’ commonly associated with cultural diplomacy elsewhere do not have much purchase in India, where the spirit and letter of ‘international cultural relations’ are the preferred currency. The essay explores the historical grounding for this preference, as well as the attitudes and practice that flow from it. Another singularity is the role and importance of the Indian diaspora: overseas populations of Indian origin have been both a significant segment of the target audience for international cultural relations – as if a certain idea of India had to be projected abroad to a part of itself – and a significant ‘co-producer’ in projecting that image. A third is the emergence of a new avatar of the diasporic Indian, now identified with capitalist entrepreneurship.     

The Chinese developmental state during the Cold War: the making of the 1956 twelve-year science and technology plan

Abstract

In 1956, the government of the People’s Republic of China made a 12-year plan for scientific and technological developments (‘The Long-term Plan for the Development of Science and Technology for 1956–1967’), often credited as a visionary blueprint for its nuclear weapons programs and industrialization. Yet, this study suggests that the plan was not the logical manifestation of a unified national leadership, but rather the result of political contestations and compromises among the Communist party-state leaders, especially between Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, and between the state and the scientific–technological elite. It further indicates that the making of Chinese science and technology policy was shaped by the cold war geopolitics, national developmental aspirations and transnational influences, especially from the Soviet Union and the USA.     

美国对建立拉美无核区问题的立场与对策(1962—1968)

为了避免核武器、核军备竞赛再次在拉美出现,古巴导弹危机之后,一些拉美国家提出了建立拉美无核区的设想。对该提议,美国经过考察发现此举同样有助于满足其国家安全需求,这使得约翰逊政府原则同意支持按照美国标准建立。然而,由于美国政府不同部门之间对建立拉美无核区的细节问题存有分歧,使得美国虽然促成了拉美无核区条约的缔结,但它最终却没有签署该条约。     

抗战时期中国公务员任用制度

八年抗战时期,国民政府变通普通行政人员、边远省区和具有特殊性质公务员的任用法规,降低考试及格人员的任职资格。与此同时,统一人事管理制度,补办公务员甄别审查,推行公务员、备用人员、军用文职人员的登记,以及公务员的聘用、派用与内外调任制度,兼顾了公务员任用制度的常态发展。这些举措,体现了公务员的依法任用,顺应了抗战建国的需要。由于公务员任用制度本身存在缺点,在执行的过程中"事前审查"变成"事后追认",以及专制制度的危害,孙中山关于考试权独立的理想没有完全实现。     

Reconsidering Donizone's Vita Mathildis: Boniface of Canossa and Emperor Henry II

Boniface of Canossa is a figure of great importance to the political and military history of eleventh-century Italy. Modern historiography has almost universally argued that Boniface gained his power through a close relationship and alliance with a series of German emperors. Most accounts see Boniface's fall and eventual murder in 1052 as a direct consequence of the breakdown of this relationship. This analysis is flawed, however, as it rests predominantly on the evidence of a single source: the Vita Mathildis by Donizone of Canossa. This document was produced more than half a century after the death of Boniface by an author who held complex political goals, but these have not been fully considered in the discussion of Boniface. Through an examination of the charter sources, this article argues that Donizone misrepresented Boniface's actions and that there is considerable evidence that Boniface was not a consistent ally of the German emperors.     

Projections of China's normative soft power

Fuelled by unparalleled recent development, China has by necessity been reaching outward in search of foreign resources and international recognition. The three books reviewed in this essay all speak to China's spectacular global ascendency of the past two decades—and to the political consequences and international reactions that have followed. What unites these three volumes—Tongdong Bai's China: The Political Philosophy of the Middle Kingdom (2012), Peter Nolan's Is China Buying the World? (2012) and William Callahan and Elena Barabantseva's edited volume, China Orders the World: Normative Soft Power and Foreign Policy (2011)—is their focus on the uniquely Chinese norms that now underpin China's soft power in the twenty-first century. How will China go about ordering the world and will it succeed? The answers to these questions, as these authors demonstrate, may have less to do with China's present than with its ancient past.