The productive power of rising China and national identities in South Korea and Thailand

Abstract

Drawing on the insights of the constructivist school approach, this article joins the debate on the effects of rising China in Asia. The existing scholarship devoted to no-material aspects of China’s rise focused either on China’s ‘soft power’ initiatives or their reception by certain audiences. In this article, rising China and its governance model, are construed as a form of productive power, one that is expected to bring about not only shifts in material relations and perceptions but also transformations in the national identities of countries in the region. This article focuses on South Korea and Thailand, two countries with fundamentally different political systems but a similar pattern of recent interactions with China. It analyzes the policymaking elites’ discourse and public attitudes and explores the productive effects of China’s rise on national identities in the two countries. This article argues that the impact of China’s rise on elites’ discourse has been largely negligible with narratives on kinship and historical ties being used by the elites mostly for instrumental reasons. At the same time, this article suggests that the recent shifts in public attitudes towards greater acceptance of authoritarian values observed in South Korea and Thailand, may be indicative of the productive effect of rising China on national identities in both countries.

Keywords:

• Rising China
• constructivism
• productive power
• national identity
• Thailand
• South Korea

Acknowledgements

This article uses data kindly provided by the World Values Survey Project and Asian Barometer Project which was co-directed by Profs. Fu Hu and Yun-han Chu and received major funding support from Taiwan’s Ministry of Education, Academia Sinica and National Taiwan University. The Asian Barometer Project Office (www.asianbarometer.org) is solely responsible for the data distribution. The author appreciates the assistance in providing data by the institutes and individuals aforementioned. I am very grateful to my colleagues Assoc. Prof. Jana von Stein (ANU) and Dr. Matthew Castle (VUW) for their generous help in designing and conducting the quantitative analysis of the surveys’ data. The views expressed herein are the author's own. I also thank Paweenuch Wannapak and Whetani Wirunsri for their research assistance with this project and the two anonymous reviewers for valuable insight and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The historical dispute over the ancient kingdom of Goguryeo did cause some tensions in China-South Korea relations is the early 2000s, but the dispute was quickly subdued as a result of an effort of political elites in both countries (for a detailed analysis see Chung 2009.)

Additional information

Funding

Research conducted for this project was funded by Faculty Research Grant provided by my home institution. I also want to thank the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center at Hokkaido University for hosting me as a Visiting Researcher while working on this project.

Notes on contributors

Alexander Bukh

Alexander Bukh is an Associate Professor (Reader) in International Relations at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Alexander has published numerous articles on international relations in Northeast Asia. He is the author of Japan's Identity and Foreign Policy: Russia as Japan's "Other" (Routledge 2009) and These Islands Are Ours: The Social Construction of Territorial Disputes in Northeast Asia (Stanford University Press 2020).