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.     

“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.     

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.     

Masculinity and political geographies in England,Ireland and North America

Historians have recently turned their attention to the place of masculinity in the politics of early-modern England. This essay widens that exploration to include the imperial settings of Ireland and North America. Drawing upon a range of English- and Irish-language sources – including political treatises, maps, state papers and court poetry – it contends that manhood, as a relational value between men, helped structure the form and character of politics in the metropole, the kingdom of Ireland and the American colonies. In all of those settings, the definition of acceptable male behaviour was different, the effect being that political action and theory in each place took on unique features. Consequently, the essay cautions against studying England and its colonies as distinct units of historical analysis and calls for further exploration of the particularities of colonial settings and their influence on the imperial centre. Moreover, the essay aims to demonstrate that masculinity, particularly contest over its proper expression, is an agent in historical change, in this case helping to shape political theory and practice as England developed into a multiple monarchy and budding imperial power in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.     

Civil Power and the Deconstruction of Scholasticism in the Thought of Marc'antonio de Dominis

Summary

Marc'antonio de Dominis is well known to historians as a figure in the political and religious culture of early modern Britain and Europe. This article contends that he was also a major theorist of civil power: his critique of Catholic scholastic political thought is compelling and his account of divine right kingship sheds light on conceptual problems that troubled a range of early modern thinkers. De Dominis dismantled the scholastic theory of political power on its own terms, insisting that Almain, Bellarmine, Suárez and others could not distinguish, as they sought to, between the potestas politica in general and the rule of particular princes. By this insight de Dominis could vindicate royal authority against the deposing pretensions of the Pope, the main objective of James I's supporters during the Allegiance Controversy, but his own positive account of how to think about power ran into theoretical trouble which he evidently perceived himself. If the potestas politica cannot be abstracted from a specific regime, and if the prince's absolute sovereignty depends on this fact, can politics be understood only at the level of the particular and contingent? The article closes by setting Thomas Hobbes—well versed in Jacobean polemic—in the context of this question.     

“Les jeunes des banlieues”: neighborhood effects on the immigrant youth experience in France

This paper explores the impact of the spatial context on populations of immigrant descent in French segregated suburbs, focusing on the youth. The phrase “jeunes des banlieues” (suburban youth) has become a whole concept in itself, capturing the variety of challenges raised—and faced—by immigrant youth in segregated neighborhoods. Our study was a follow-up to the Trajectories and Origins (TeO) Survey conducted by the French National Institute of Demographic Studies from September 2008 to February 2009. It is based on a series of in-depth interviews and a systematic observation survey about the neighborhood. Our results clearly show that neighborhood matters in how young people experience their school system, their interactions with the police, and the way they perceive themselves and their own environment. Outside perceptions of the neighborhood also shape individual and social identities. Overall, high concentrations of immigrants negatively impact the experience of young people of immigrant descent.