Chengxin Pan

What is Chinese about Chinese businesses? Locating the 'rise of China' in global production networks

There is an implicit but commonly held assumption that Chinese businesses are distinctively Chinese. Casting them in unitary and national terms, this assumption has often provided the underpinnings for the conception of the strength of Chinese businesses as signs of an emerging China threat. Drawing on a global production networks (GPN) approach, this paper aims to question the assumption by arguing that many Chinese businesses, embedded in the expanding global and regional production networks, have taken on important transnational characteristics. Given these transnational connections, Chinese business networks in both ‘Greater China’ and China proper are characterized more by diversity and fragmentation than by cultural coherence and homogeneity. This analysis of the transnationalization and fragmentation of contemporary Chinese businesses helps better understand and respond to the complex challenge posed by the economic dynamism in China.

The ‘Indo-Pacific’ and geopolitical anxieties about China's rise in the Asian regional order

The Indo-Pacific seems to have come of age. In a growing body of literature on this subject, the rise of India and China, as well as the ensuing great-power competition and deepening economic links across the Asia-Pacific and the Indian Ocean regions are often seen as mere (albeit new) geopolitical realities, which the term ‘Indo-Pacific’ can best capture. This article, however, questions the ‘naturalness’ of the ‘Indo-Pacific’ and illustrates how it is largely a product of geopolitical imaginations about the perceived ‘rise of China’—imaginations that are shared among some influential observers and practitioners, particularly in the USA, Australia, Japan and India. Fuelled by their collective anxieties about Chinas growing influence in Asia, the ‘Indo-Pacific’ is not an innocent or neutral description, but is a manufactured super-region designed to hedge against a perceived Sino-centric regional order. In doing so, it is complicit in the production of great-power rivalries and regional security dilemmas. It is thus important that the ‘Indo-Pacific’ construct be subject to critical re-examination and re-imagination.

Neoconservatism, US–China conflict, and Australia's ‘great and powerful friends’ dilemma

Abstract Following its time-honoured ‘great and powerful friends’ foreign policy tradition, Australia has been cultivating close ties simultaneously with the United States and China. Yet, as a rivalry between the two powers apparently looms large, Australia faces an acute dilemma. While the rise of China and the question of Taiwan are often cited as main causes of US–China discord, this article argues that the American neoconservative policy on China, underpinned by a belief in both military strength and moral clarity, is integral to this growing competition and is, by extension, partly responsible for the emergence of Australias predicament. To avoid such a difficult choice, the article suggests that Australia should strive to curb the policy influence of neoconservatism both in the United States and at home by pursuing a more independent foreign policy, making clear its strategic postures on US–China relations, and helping establish a trilateral strategic forum between Australia, the United States, and China.

Neoconservatism as Discourse: Virtue, Power and US Foreign Policy

Neoconservatism in US foreign policy is a hotly contested subject, yet most scholars broadly agree on what it is and where it comes from. From a consensus that it first emerged around the 1960s, these scholars view neoconservatism through what we call the ‘3Ps’ approach, defining it as a particular group of people (‘neocons’), an array of foreign policy preferences and/or an ideological commitment to a set of principles. While descriptively intuitive, this approach reifies neoconservatism in terms of its specific and often static ‘symptoms’ rather than its dynamic constitutions. These reifications may reveal what is emblematic of neoconservatism in its particular historical and political context, but they fail to offer deeper insights into what is constitutive of neoconservatism. Addressing this neglected question, this article dislodges neoconservatism from its perceived home in the ‘3Ps’ and ontologically redefines it as a discourse. Adopting a Foucauldian approach of archaeological and genealogical discourse analysis, we trace its discursive formations primarily to two powerful and historically enduring discourses of the American self — virtue and power — and illustrate how these discourses produce a particular type of discursive fusion that is ‘neoconservatism’. We argue that to better appreciate its continued effect on contemporary and future US foreign policy, we need to pay close attention to those seemingly innocuous yet deeply embedded discourses about the US and its place in the world, as well as to the people, policies and principles conventionally associated with neoconservatism.

The threat of autocracy diffusion in consolidated democracies? The case of China, Singapore and Australia

ABSTRACT The majority of today’s authoritarian regimes have little hope of promoting autocracy beyond their own borders, let alone to consolidated democratic countries. However, China and Singapore are two prominent examples of non-democratic countries whose soft power arsenals have given them some global appeal beyond that enjoyed by most authoritarian regimes. But to what extent has China’s and Singapore’s power of example influenced consolidated democracies in terms that the latter wanting to replicate some political practices or even norms in these non-democratic regimes? In this article, we engage recent works to examine this question in relation to how Australians perceive the political example offered by China and Singapore. Focusing our analysis on several prominent polls conducted recently by the Lowy Institute for International Policy, we suggest that at present there is little evidence of a causal impact of the rise of authoritarian powerhouses such as China and Singapore on how Australians view democracy at home. Through these case studies, this article sheds some light on the theoretical as well as practical questions about the inherent impediments of authoritarian diffusion in consolidated democracies.