Yih-Jye Hwang

The Sichuan Earthquake and the Heavenly Mandate: legitimizing Chinese rule through disaster discourse

In the aftermath of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, the Chinese authorities launched a major public relations campaign to relay positive images of their relief effort and strengthen their political legitimacy. The effect has been a proliferation of symbols and political statements related to the disaster, not only in the official media, but also in cultural products such as movies or mass-media events. The earthquake has become part of the discourse of suffering, struggle, solidarity and ultimately victory. This article examines the ways in which various cultural products present the Sichuan earthquake and asks what meanings national crises have in the Chinese discourse on political legitimacy. The article analyses two cases: Chinese film, here in the form of Feng Xiaogangs blockbuster Aftershock, and performance-based discourses during the Beijing Olympics, the PRCs 60-Year Anniversary and the Shanghai Expo. By conducting a discourse analysis, we show how the earthquake has become part of a recurring discursive formation that is used by state and non-state actors alike to legitimate Chinas developmental model. Within this discourse, the leadership of the Party, the mastery of free markets and a revamped version of the Confucian idea of benevolent rule are marshaled as the decisive factors for winning any ‘battle’.

China and Japan’s Quest for Great Power Status: Norm Entrepreneurship in Anti-Piracy Responses

In responding to piracy in the Gulf of Aden, both Chinese and Japanese policymakers have acted as norm entrepreneurs who intend to transform the dominant norms of international society. Chinese and Japanese norm entrepreneurship is grounded in the ways in which foreign policy actors construct and reconstruct their state identity. In China’s case, policymakers have projected China’s self-image as a responsible and benevolent Great Power that derives from the Chinese conception of Tianxia. Japanese foreign policy actors, on the other hand, have advanced the notion of Japan as a bridge that mediates between East and West, developing and developed states, members and non-members of international society. Although we do not advocate that Chinese or Japanese norm entrepreneurship should be accepted uncritically, we do maintain that there exist opportunities to combine and develop the multiple approaches that different states promote to problems. This article has shown that dealing with Somali piracy is one such case.

Olympiad, a place of linguistic struggle – the discursive constitution of ‘human rights’ in the 2008 Beijing Olympics

This article investigates the Beijing Olympics as an event that incited people in the contemporary international community to talk about ‘human rights’, and to engage in the discursive proliferation of human rights. China experienced three waves of this discursive proliferation of human rights in 2008: firstly, through anger at foreigners over Tibet and the torch relay; secondly, in grief after the Sichuan earthquake, and thirdly, in pride at the successful games. Certain conceptions of human rights were brought to the fore during these three periods of time. This article aims to study the competing discourses over human rights among different political forces, such as international human rights groups, pro-Tibetan Independence groups, and the Chinese government. All of them speak, or appear to be speaking, of one and the same thing: the ‘human rights’. Things being said in turn underpin the production of particular conceptions of ‘human rights’.

The 2004 Hand-in-Hand Rally in Taiwan: “Traumatic” Memory, Commemoration, and Identity Formation

This article investigates how a collective memory of trauma was produced in the course of commemorating the 2-28 Incident in the context of the 2004 election campaign, and how this memory production led to the parallel formation of a Taiwanese national identity. The 2-28 Hand-in-Hand Rally was designed to remember the 2-28 Incident as a historical trauma in order to be forgotten. The remembering of the 2-28 Incident must be regarded as a constructive process as opposed to a retrieval process. The memory of the 2-28 Incident was selectively constituted in favor of sovereign power.

5 Law of War

This chapter introduces the two distinctive fields of public international law related to war and peace: namely, jus ad bellum and jus in bello , and three subfields of public international law: namely the United Nations system, International Criminal Law and International Humanitarian Law. It examines how the idea of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ influences moral and legal obligations of states and the international community, and what consequences its violation may entail. The chapter explores the development of the concepts of humanitarian intervention and responsibility to protect (R2P). It looks at institutions and mechanisms that have been created to sanction violations of the laws and customs of war. The Security Council in the UN system (UNSC) is able to pass resolutions for interventions easily for some countries than for others. Whereas the law of war provides an overarching framework, political, economic and social aspects can also play an important role. Keywords:humanitarian intervention; jus ad bellum ; jus in bello ; law of war; public international law; responsibility to protect (R2P); UNSC