This fourth instalment of Volume 34 of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs comprises six original articles centering on East Asia. The first three focus exclusively on China. First, Hong Yu explores the dynamics of city-cluster formation in China through an in-depth look at the case of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area (GBA). The case of the state plan for the GBA, Yu contends, not only furthers our understanding of the making of city-clusters as tools for economic growth; it also reveals a rescaling of state power at its various levels, whereby power is redistributed towards the central state in a top-down approach, but the implementation of the Plan eventually remains dependent on the diverse systems of governance at the local levels of government tasked with implementing it. Meanwhile, Huiyun Feng and Kai He examine China’s strategic behaviour in the South China Sea to propose an agent-driven approach to understanding state behaviour: strategic culture. The combination of ‘realpolitik’ and ‘Confucianism,’ they argue, create a specific strategic culture which informs the Chinese state’s strategic behaviour in the South China Sea, thus providing a more nuanced explanation which can in turn inform research as well as policy. Third, Xing Li draws on world-system theory to review the impact of the rise of China on the hierarchical stratification of the world economy, conventionally structured around a small core, a scattered semi-periphery and a large periphery. Given China’s demographic size, Li argues, its economic rise does not simply amount to a transfer of power between actors; it unsettles the fundamental sustainability of the world economic structure, as China’s move towards the core imbalances the traditional repartition of these hierarchies.
The three remaining articles consider foreign policy strategies within and from East Asia, including but not limited to China. Li-Chen Sim and Jonathan Fulton discuss China and Russia’s growing engagement with the United Arab Emirates. Building on domestic trends such as support for the Belt and Road Initiative in China, as well as the securitization of terrorism, ‘popular’ revolutions and energy in Russia, this step-up in the two countries’ engagement with the UAE contrasts with the relative decline of US commitment in the region. It reveals, the authors argue, not a clear-cut shift, but rather a reconfiguration of the Persian Gulf regional order. Next, Yida Zhai examines the discourses deployed by both China and Japan regarding the territorial dispute between the two countries over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands. Through these discourses, Zhai argues, ‘the construction of the islands’ social reality is underway’, as both countries compete for legitimacy and sovereignty, both offensively and defensively. Finally, Ryoko Nakano traces Japan’s demands for reforms of UNESCO’s Memory of the World programme (MOW). The Abe administration’s radical change in attitude towards UNESCO following the inscription of the ‘Documents of Nanjing’ in the MOW register, Nakano demonstrates, sheds light on a politics of memory and identity change. This politics can be understood through the concept of mnemonical security, whereby historical narrative is instrumental to ‘the continuity of a narrative of self’ and therefore contributes to a state’s pursuit for ontological security.
Finally, this issue also features two book reviews on recent contributions to the discussion about China’s role in international relations and its own internal transformations. Tim Summers’ review of Rory Medcalf’s Indo-Pacific Empire: China, America and the Contest for the World’s Pivotal Region (2020) critically contextualizes the increasing literature about the Indo-Pacific within a broader IR discourse on the assumed need to dilute China’s global influence. Chih-yu Shih’s review of China’s Infinite Transition and Its Limits: Economic, Military and Political Dimensions (Voskressenski, Karpov, and Kashin 2020) gives an intriguing overview of the book’s insights into China’s ‘cycles of recentralisation,’ highlighting the book’s approach of not adopting a binary view of state and society. We find both reviews to be timely and welcome precautions against taking the epistemology used to examine any region for granted.
As we finalize this issue, we welcome to the team Italo Brandimarte, as Managing Editor, and Edward Murambwa, as Features Editor – while his predecessor, Niyousha Bastani, becomes our new Editor-in-Chief. We wish to take this opportunity to extend our warmest thanks to Jack Brake and Hanna Corsini, who recently completed their respective tenures as Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor, for their wonderful work at CRIA over the last year.
As always, we especially thank our authors and anonymous peer reviewers for their contributions. We continue to welcome proposals for special issues and book reviews at [email protected], addressed to the Editors-in-Chief or Features Editor, respectively. Details and submission guidelines may be found at https://www.cria.polis.cam.ac.uk. We wish our readers a beautiful summer.
Editors-in-Chief
Cambridge Review of International Affairs