Abstract The rise of China has sparked growing scholarly interest in its political and philosophical thought, including the “Chinese schools” of international relations (IR). With this article, we add to the scholarship by asking two questions: which of these schools are mobilised in Chinese elite political narratives, and what explains their discursive visibility? We analyse the presence of relational theory, moral realism, tianxia, and gongsheng in Chinese political communication. Drawing on Chinese narratives of the United States between 2013 and 2024, we show that motifs associated with all four schools appear in official discourse, yet gongsheng is invoked more consistently and coherently than the others. To explain this patterned selectivity, we refine and operationalise the concept of political soundness as a framework for assessing the viability of narratives in politically constrained environments. We argue that gongsheng exhibits comparatively high political soundness, which accounts for its greater portability and resilience in the face of diplomatic contestation. With this article, we contribute both an empirical mapping of school-specific motifs in elite discourse and a transferable analytical tool for studying the uptake of IR theories in politically bounded settings.
Abstract This special issue focuses on the Hui, Chinese-speaking Muslims in China, including those who identify themselves with the Hui, regardless of whether they conform to Muslim identities or practices, across space, ethnicity, language, religion, and culture. It investigates how the conventional “borders” for these categories, temporally or contextually defining the Hui, have been redrawn by their transboundary activities, such as migration experiences, the construction of transregional networks, negotiations over ethnic or religious identity, the translations of texts, and interreligious, interdenominational, or intercultural dialog. Thus, the special issue explores how the Hui people have straddled the institutionalized borders of classification to preserve a distinct space for their lives in China and, by doing so, have secured long-term survival through different political and cultural contexts. We regard the label of “Hui” not as an immutable entity but simply as a heuristic framework. We discuss how conceptual boundaries between “us” and “them” have been flexibly re-interpreted and re-expressed by the Hui people themselves.
Handheld firearms have been little studied in the military history of the Portuguese in Asia. Historians have centered on naval and siege warfare, in which cannons feature extensively. The way artillery was used in ships and sieges has been depicted as an important innovation of European origin, which gave the Portuguese a decisive advantage over their Asian opponents. Yet, this approach has confined harquebuses and muskets to a secondary role. We reconsider this historiographical imbalance using Jeremy Black's idea that fitness-for-purpose is the best standard to measure military effectiveness. We argue that even if handheld firearms were not used by the Portuguese in a particularly "innovative" way, they were important and effective at the time.
China impressed the world with its success in containing the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. Many researchers have attributed China's success to its hybrid mode of urban neighborhood governance, which could effectively mobilize residents to implement strict surveillance and quarantine measures for the state. However, despite their growing attention to urban neighborhood governance, they tend to privilege the government's role while neglecting residents' agency, thereby perpetuating the myth of an omnipresent and omnipotent Chinese state and reducing residents to passive objects of governance. This article challenges earlier researchers' assumptions by exploring a crisis scenario - the lockdown of Shanghai from March to June 2022 - in which the local government's capacity to surveil and micro-manage individual residents and deliver public services was significantly hampered. Through semi-structured interviews with eighteen individuals who experienced the lockdown in Shanghai, it examines the self-preserving efforts made by Shanghai residents to address the most serious challenge confronting them - supply shortages. It demonstrates that spontaneous organization and autonomous action among Shanghai residents were crucial to their survival during the crisis.
Amidst the pedagogical anxieties of the late Qing and Republican China, Tong Xiegeng's yizhi puzzle (1862) emerged as a creative response to a rigid educational system that privileged rote memorization and dismissed play. This article argues that the puzzle and its accompanying books represent a sophisticated, bottom-up attempt to redefine traditional Chinese education by transforming the classical texts into an interactive, child-centered experience. Through an innovative 15-piece puzzle and a series of books, Tong created a multimodal "edutainment" ecosystem. The study highlights the puzzle's core pedagogical method: a synergy of text and image (tuwen jiehe) that shifted the child from a passive recipient of memorized text into an active constructor of meaning. Learning was achieved through hands-on, embodied play, internalizing classical knowledge rather than merely reciting it. By challenging the traditional dismissal of play (xi wuyi), Tong's work prefigured a modern, child-centered pedagogy and stands as a powerful example of private cultural synthesis as a form of educational reform.
Many institutions today promote "Global Asia(s)" and "Global Asian Studies" as both a method and an initiative. As a growing field, these institutions are committed to reimagining the studies of Asia through transnational, comparative, and boundary-crossing approaches. To map its contemporary landscape and identify emerging challenges, this study draws on interviews with ten directors from diverse institutions around the world, each engaged in Global Asia(s)/Global Asian Studies in distinct and pioneering ways. Despite varied contexts, these institutions share strong commitments - particularly a collective dissatisfaction with traditional models of Asian Studies and a common drive to transcend geographic boundaries, the East-West divide, and disciplinary silos. At the same time, local histories, community needs, academic traditions, institutional structures, leadership visions, and available resources shape divergent interpretations and implementations of Global Asia(s). Rather than advancing a unified model, this study emphasizes the field's plurality and reflexive knowledge production process, arguing that its strength lies in this diversity and ongoing dialogue.
Freyberg Place in Auckland's central business district has emerged as a focal site for youth cultural gatherings. Within this space, university students have localised transnational popular culture, generating new cultural meanings, identities, and affiliations. Over the past decade, Hallyu, and K-pop in particular, has expanded significantly in Aotearoa, New Zealand. This study draws on personal accounts from university student K-pop fans of diverse backgrounds, with attention to their involvement in Auckland's K-festival, random play dances, and the University of Auckland K-pop Planet club and its Konstellation dance crew. These narratives demonstrate how participation in K-pop activities facilitated adaptation to the residential, social, and academic challenges of university life, while simultaneously fostering peer networks and community belonging. Engagement in these events also enabled students to acquire leadership experience and transferable skills relevant to future employment. Face-to-face fan practices and embodied participation through dance provided an avenue for affective immersion, reinforcing identification with global fan networks. For these students, K-pop constituted both an alternative to Western popular music and a medium through which they articulated transnational identities, positioning themselves as globally connected cultural consumers.
Between the arrival of firearms in Japan in 1543 and the crushing of the Shimabara rebellion in 1638, Japan transformed from a fractured country in a permanent state of war into a centralized, peaceful era. However, this was only possible thanks to several transformations made by the Tokugawa regime, not least the firearm itself. The copious amounts of firearms existing in Japan became a domesticated and common element of the Edo period and were prevalent in the country's transformation. Rather than being just tools of war that could menace the shogunate, firearms gained a range of roles, from tools to regalia, depending on their owners' social and political context, which sheds light on their social environment.
Focusing on the strategy game The Opium War (1997), developed in mainland China, this article argues that, while designed as a patriotic product about the Opium War, the game moves beyond simple propaganda. Through its rule-based systems, it constructs a nuanced historical argument that operationalizes the tension within the Marxist concept of historical inevitability and contingency. The inevitability of the Qing Empire's structural weakness is conveyed through a high degree of difficulty and the mechanics of systemic corruption, while contingency is enabled by allowing skilled players to achieve a counterfactual victory, subverting the orthodox narrative of the Qing's inevitable defeat in the war. This subversive design was politically tenable because it operated within the accepted framework of Marxist historiography. Ultimately, this study demonstrates that video games can generate more complex historical experiences than traditional media. By analyzing this non-Western case, the article calls for a more globally conscious approach to game studies, and it recognizes games as significant sites of historical debate within politically sensitive contexts. It addresses a dual gap: the Western-centric bias in historical game studies and a lack of inquiry into the extent to which video games can engage with Chinese history.
This article examines how, since the late 1980s, Hong Kong directors have reimagined China's western frontiers in the wuxia genre through collaborations with the mainland amid a process of deepening cross-border integration. To contextualize these representations for English-language readers, this study employs a comparative lens. It first examines the cultural and historical significance of the American Old West and China's premodern western borderlands and then analyzes how Hong Kong wuxia filmmakers construct particular forms of nationalism through mythic depictions of geopolitical peripheries in dialogue with Hollywood Westerns' frontier portrayals. The analysis reveals that, as Hong Kong directors' mainland coproduction has increasingly integrated into China's film industry and cultural discourse, their depiction of frontier space has gradually shifted from an extralegal, anti-authoritarian martial world of cultural ambivalence and abstract nationalism - echoing the anti-establishment ethos characteristic of revisionist Hollywood Westerns - toward a symbol of state-centered nationalism and global cultural outreach, paralleling the golden-age Hollywood Western's construction of the American frontier as a unified national myth reinforcing U.S. exceptionalism.
