Astrid Nordin

Subverting official language and discourse in China? Type river crab for harmony

While the promotion of ‘harmony’ (和谐) in Chinese official discourse is widely regarded as a feature of state propaganda and censorship, scarce attention has been paid to the reception and redeployment of such language among Chinese citizens. The often creative and ironic reappropriation of official language in everyday speech practices, both on the Internet and in conversations with peers, is an important aspect of Chinese language/politics and deserves careful examination. Much of the current work has regarded these discursive practices in terms of a resistance to ‘harmonization’ or, following a Bakhtinian reading, as ‘carnival’. We argue that such approaches do not fully take into consideration actors’ actual experience of consuming and producing such language play. Based on semi-structured interviews with Chinese university students conducted in 2009–11, this article shifts away from the dominant assumptions about the role of ironic reiterations of official language, in order to highlight how the presumed repoliticization of these linguistic practices also involves a depoliticization, reflecting the complexity and ambiguity of the relationships they negotiate.

Space for the future: Exhibiting China in the world at the Shanghai Expo

China’s modernization and rise is commonly understood as a key factor that will shape future world order. This article examines narratives at Expo 2010 Shanghai China as an instance of the local constitution of this future world. Such imaginations of China and/in the world actively create the future, through assumptions about time and space that structure the possible imaginations of China, the World, and their interrelation. This article examines how the technological and conceptual innovations that play out at the Expo draw on two common cosmologies, the ‘unit-based’ cosmology of the international state system and a Chinese ‘holistic’ imaginary of tianxia (all-under-heaven). It shows how these two cosmologies order universal/particular, time/space, and self/other through Beijing’s ‘harmonious world’ policy. It argues that the two cosmologies are not mutually exclusive, but are deployed at the Expo in ways that reinforce one another by ordering spatial difference through teleological time. The effect is a story of China and the World where others are not different; they are just behind. This is a problem because the reduction of spatial difference to place in a historical queue makes it difficult to imagine plural futures, as opposed to The Future already inscribed in the story.

Taking Baudrillard to the Fair: Exhibiting China in the World at the Shanghai Expo

Scholars have recently paid increasing attention to China’s “mega events” as a form of image management striving to influence future world order. In this article, the author examines China’s recent world fair, Expo 2010 Shanghai China, and argues that we need to move beyond the reading of mega events as simple representation and ideology and read it also as simulation and simulacra. Reading the Chinese world fair as a simulacrum of world order can provide different ways of relating “the West” to its “other country” China. The author examines this relation through asking what it means to be the fair: Where is the world fair? When is the world fair? Who is the world fair? Reading the world/fair as simulacrum disrupts the fair’s notions of inside and outside, now and then, subject and object to the point where these terms are no longer workable.

Targeting the ontology of war: from Clausewitz to Baudrillard

Against a surprising level of agreement between Clausewitz, contemporary military doctrines and critical war studies on an ontology of war as fighting, we suggest that the study of contemporary warfare needs to focus more on war as processing. Through Jean Baudrillard we argue that at least some of what is referred to as ‘war’ is no longer characterised by encounters through fighting. We exemplify our argument by how the repetitive battle-rhythm of military targeting strives for perfect war. What remains is not war as an object in itself, but a reified ‘war’ that obscures the disappearance of that very object. The debate on war contributes to the reification of such a war, as an imperative telling us: ‘we have a concept, you must learn to think through it’.

Gender transformations in higher education

This paper offers a critical perspective on issues around gender and sexual transformation within the context of UK Higher Education. Drawing on qualitative data carried out by undergraduate and postgraduate students, the analysis explores some of the diverse and often challenging ways in which young/er women and men are thinking and talking about gender, sexuality and feminism, as well as their strategies for turning ideas into political action. The research focuses on the activities and opinions of students belonging to an anti-sexist organisation within one UK university, who are engaged in campaigns to raise awareness about the damaging effects of gender and sexual inequalities, as well as promoting the popular appeal of contemporary feminisms. Locating the voices and research findings of the students themselves at the centre of the discussion, the paper is produced collaboratively between students and teachers who are involved in both the activist and research elements of this project. The paper also argues for (and provides evidence of) the transformative potential of alternative and critical forms of student engagement and student/ staff collaboration in relation to gender informed academic activism.

Futures beyond ‘the West’? Autoimmunity in China’s harmonious world

It has become fashionable amongst International Relations scholars to draw on the concept of “autoimmunity”, which some call “the ultimate horizon in which contemporary politics inscribes itself”. To these scholars, most of whom draw on the thought of Jacques Derrida, such logics open systems up to a future to come. At the same time, they tend to identify such logics with Europe, America, Western modernity and/or democracy. Implied, and sometimes explicit, in their accounts is the denial of autoimmune logics at work outside such an imagined configuration. This paper challenges that denial through arguing that the system of “harmony”, deployed in contemporary China, also works on an autoimmune logic. If autoimmunity opens up a system to the future, this is not only so for European democracy or its derivatives. Moreover, the expulsion of “non-Western” others from accounts of autoimmunity undermines their rethinking of difference by falling back on an immunitary logic, denying China an open future. This exclusion is their condition of possibility. At the same time, this exclusion is what keeps open their promise of its future to come. Paradoxically, the exclusion of the “non- West” is what keeps the idea of an autoimmune “Western” or European democracy alive.

Friendship and the new politics: beyond community

What role can friendship play in contemporary politics? This article answers this question by showing how friendship supplements one of the central tropes of modern European thought: community. It argues that both the recent phenomenon of populism and more traditional political practice rely on this trope. This results in a politics which focuses on identity and difference, inclusion and exclusion. Ultimately this form of politics seeks an immanence which is impossible to achieve. In contrast, friendship offers a new way of thinking about politics as it focuses on open-ended relations between persons based not on sameness, but otherness and difference. The article articulates five key features of this understanding of friendship: (1) that it is a relationship; (2) between self and other; (3) which exists between the friends; which is (4) extendable into a network but not a unity; and (5) it eschews all programmes or projects. In this way, friendship suggests not a project or a programme, but an ethos. This article concludes by claiming that friendship is the open-ended and ongoing encounter with the other, and its politics holds a shared space open for the potential that this encounter brings.

A reply to Xu Changfu’s ‘Why do we need practical wisdom?’

This is a reply to:Xu Changfu. 2015. “Why do we need practical wisdom? A Chinese lesson in the process of globalisation.” Global Discourse 5 (4): 519–533. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2014.968361.