School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses
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ItemModest expectations: masculinity, marriage, and the good life in urban China( 2022)There is a sense that there is a crisis unfolding in China. Marriage rates are dropping, divorce rates are rising, the birth rate is in decline, and a new population of rural ‘bachelors’ and urban ‘leftover women’ has surfaced. This new culture of singlehood is perceived as a ‘crisis of marriage’, precipitating a moral panic over how to address a problem that is often described by the state as a threat to social stability and order, as well as the advancement of the nation. This thesis explores the intersection of these so-called ‘crises’ facing Chinese society: a crisis of marriage, a crisis of masculinity, and a crisis of mobility. Since China’s ‘opening up and reform’ in 1978, extraordinary social, economic, and political change have occurred. Gender and sexual relations have also undergone significant transformation, subsequently contributing to this ‘marriage crisis’ in China today. How single rural men living in the city respond to this marriage crisis is a core concern of this thesis. In the gendered aspects of this crisis and the associated moral panic, single rural men have become a flash point in China for discussions about marriage, social organisation, the rural–urban divide, gender relations, class, and mobility. The demise of the rural economy and the rapid transformation of the urban economy have produced significant changes in gender roles and institutions in contemporary China. This thesis focuses on the impact of these socio-economic shifts on rural men who migrate to cities. Rural to urban migration has a long and well-documented history in China. The most recent wave of migration has been accompanied by changes in the nature of work and social organisation that have exacerbated the ‘marriage crisis’ particularly for rural men in urban settings. For rural men living in urban China, marriage represents a modest aspiration for a good life, expressed through the concept guo rizi (passing the days). The desire to marry and have children is however constrained by rural men’s experiences in the city. Their occupations, lack of social networks, new forms of dating and matchmaking and increasingly unattainable ‘bride-price’ demands, work together to undermine their desirability as potential husbands and fathers and entrench inequalities of wealth and power between rural and urban men. The ways rural men struggle with, negotiate, and imagine their futures is the subject of this thesis. I argue that the increasing socio-economic precarity of rural men and their largely unrealised desires to marry and have children demonstrate a fundamental reconfiguration of Chinese masculinity and mobility in urban China today and the social impact on central Chinese institutions. This thesis explores the lives of migrant delivery drivers (kuaidi and waimai) and tertiary-educated professionals who have migrated from the countryside to the city. In this thesis, I endeavour to make these men visible by investigating how they navigate the urban marriage market and avoid becoming ‘leftover’. What I have found is that their shared struggles in the marriage market and efforts to fulfill the ideals of manhood are indicative of how rurality continues to be experienced as an inhibiting factor for single rural men in Chinese cities, regardless of their education, income, or material assets. The nature of these men’s lives led me to question how such men are affected by changing social, cultural, and economic structures within the marriage market and the broader context of crisis that currently pervades Chinese society.
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ItemA comparative analysis of the normative power of the EU and China( 2020)This thesis examines how the normative power of China compares to that of the European Union (EU). It seeks to contribute to the literature on normative power through the incorporation of interests in the analysis of normative power, the systematic examination of China’s normative power, and case studies of multilateral institutions in which multiple actors exercise normative power. This thesis examines normative power through an analytical framework comprising three core components: norms, diffusion mechanisms, and outcomes of norm diffusion. It applies this framework to the EU and China to assess whether these two actors possess normative power in global governance. It studies the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the Paris Agreement (PA) to investigate how the EU and China exercise normative power in multilateral institutions. It also examines how these two actors address their norm divergence through compromise in the AIIB and the PA and the outcomes of their compromises in these two institutions. In addition to comparing the norms, diffusion mechanisms, and outcomes of norm diffusion of the EU and China, this thesis compares the two case studies of the AIIB and the PA. It argues that both the EU and China are predominantly driven by their own interests in their exercise of normative power. It demonstrates the centrality of interests in all three core components of normative power, namely norms, diffusion mechanisms, and outcomes.
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ItemHealth and business in China’s state-led economy: the social construction of pharmaceuticals in China’s economic and healthcare reforms( 2018)In this thesis, I position Chinese health and medicine within the ongoing conceptualisation and practices of Chinese capitalism and socialism. Health care and medicine are important components of social welfare and, simultaneously, promising businesses in both the domestic and global markets. China's transformation from the socialist revolution to the capitalist reformation has been comprehensive and penetrating. Conversely, it has been inevitably fragmented and incomplete in the contradictory coexistence between market-oriented reform and the remaining socialist-oriented system. China's curious mixture of socialism and capitalism, or in China's own term, socialism with Chinese characteristics, has brought about institutional, ideological and practical contradictions, which have thus often been involved in informal/illegal variations in social and institutional relations. This complication has also permeated into the healthcare system, including pharmaceutical medicine. In this thesis, I firstly describe the historical transformation of China's healthcare system from China's Communist Revolution to the economic reform period beginning in the 1980s and on to the present. These historical transformations have impacted the pharmaceutical practices, the focus of my thesis, particularly as they are played out in hospitals and people's experiences therein. Following from these changes, I focus upon the following three aspects of China's pharmaceutical industry. Firstly, I examine the rise of economic nationalism in the Chinese pharmaceutical industry. China has maintained its strict approval control particularly on foreign generics' registration for sale in China to protect domestic pharmaceutical companies against foreign ones. Secondly, I point out the recent strategic change of China's pharmaceutical industry. The Chinese Government has stimulated industrial restructuring, which has given birth to giant Chinese pharmaceutical companies. As Chinese giants have acquired meaningful hold over both the domestic and global markets, they have built concrete consolidations involving Western multinational pharmaceutical companies that retain advanced products, rather than investing in the development of advanced products on their own. The third point is the widespread corruption, which has often been associated with the Chinese practice of guanxi. I argue, however, that its primary reason should be found firstly in the unfledged regulations and the government's loose law enforcement. Later chapters deal mostly with public hospitals and various experiences of doctors and patients in hospitals. The differentiated hospital market is closely related to hospitals' financial management. Compared to tertiary hospitals, smaller hospitals are relatively free from profit-oriented management and rely more on the government subsidy. I found that, in return, they are used to display government propaganda. Various political propaganda phrases mixed with public health education are displayed on the electric billboards, walls and ceilings of the hospitals. Since the Communist Revolution, Chinese public hospitals have played a role not only as therapeutic places but also as politically disciplinary places. Hospitals' profit-oriented management has led to doctors' increased prescriptions, resulting in an increase in patients' out-of-pocket payment. In this situation, China plans to make public health more affordable and accessible through the new healthcare reform. However, there are various complications in the way of the reform which I discuss in my thesis.
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ItemWhen deliberative democracy travels to China: an example of cultural exceptionalism( 2018)Global interdependence has stimulated the necessity of establishing the conversation between the Western traditions and non-Western traditions. Political concepts developed in one society, for example in the West, may have different implications in another society, such as in non-Western contexts. The meaning of political theory is constantly transformed and show different interpretations from the trajectory that we used to know. One example will be the use of deliberative democracy which is a concept developed from the West. On the one hand, the development of deliberative democracy in China is deeply connected with the contexts of its culture, institution, socio-political traditions, and its local experiment. On the other hand, the adoption of deliberative democracy in China shows signs and conditions of democratization brought by incremental changes due to the cultivation of the deliberative capacity. The duality between the local contexts and the universal trend of democratization constitutes the basic theme of deliberative democracy in China. With the inspiration from Edward Said’s Traveling Theory and Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of exception and example, this dissertation will discuss why and how the development of deliberative democracy in China is heading toward cultural exceptionalism rather than embracing the universalism prescribed in the normative goal of deliberative democracy.
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ItemStranded world: crisis in the West in the age of radical modernity( 2013)The thesis examines why liberal markets and liberal democracies are functioning sub-optimally in the 21st century. Far from being the gold standard of contemporary political and economic organisation as predicted in the wake of communism’s collapse in the early 1990s, the thesis highlights how these systems are becoming increasingly stranded from the world around them. This is because liberalism is a Modernity-derived ideology whose linear assumptions and organising principles about how the world works no longer accord with new, de-linear configurations of political and economic activity that have emerged in the 21st century. These new configurations, the thesis argues, have been created by a combination of globalisation and the rapid rollout of the internet and associated virtual information and communication technologies (ICT) over the past two decades. The result of what the thesis describes as the transition to Radical Modernity is an intensifying pattern of deep dysfunction for the liberal order, highlighted by a series of financial and economic crises and escalating volatility within liberal markets, as well the deteriorating functionality and legitimacy of liberal democracies. However, liberalism, as a Modernity ideology which believes itself to be optimally functional at all times and all places, cannot see, understand nor adequately respond to the functional problems these new configuration of political and economic activity create for its systems. Instead, its contemporary narratives seeks to blame poor errant political and business leadership. Liberal markets and democracies also respond to their escalating pattern of dysfunctionality by increasingly retreating into their linear assumptions and organising principles, thereby compounding their stranding from the de-linear world. The thesis goes on to examine how Radical Modernity’s new configurations of activity are impacting on the political and economic systems of the most populous country in the world, China. It argues that China’s one-party led systems organise themselves around highly linear organising principles and are therefore exposed to the same functional problems created by Radical Modernity as the liberal order. But having distanced itself from the highly-linear ‘stiff’ assumptions inherent in Modernity ideology, the CCP, and China generally, appears to be rescuing a greater degree of functionality, compared to the liberal order, from the bonfire lit under all linear-oriented systems by the increasingly de-linear character of Radical Modernity.
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ItemNo strings attached? Chinese foreign aid and its implications for the international aid regime( 2012)The emergence of China as a significant provider of development assistance operating outside the dominant aid system has prompted heightened interest within academic, public, and policymaking circles. This increased presence in many developing countries is changing the dynamics of ‘development’ and foreign aid provision, in ways that are only beginning to be seen and understood. There is a tension between the call for China to become a ‘responsible stakeholder’, and thus play by and reinforce the existing norms, rules and expectations, and the increasing pressure for the international system, including the international aid regime, to be reformed. China’s foreign aid approach and policies, and how it engages with the aid regime, if at all, will therefore be significant in this regard. At the same time, China’s foreign aid provision has been subject to much critique – in the Western discourse and also from within recipient communities. This thesis examines the role of China as a provider of foreign aid and the implications this has for traditional donors and for the dominant international aid regime. It critically analyses of the international aid regime that currently shapes the provision of aid, arguing that the impact of Chinese aid should be viewed against the backdrop of imperatives to reform current aid institutions and practices. Drawing upon field research in the South Pacific and China this thesis provides detailed analysis of Chinese aid norms, practices, and mechanisms, enabling comparison with traditional donor aid and providing a significant contribution to the currently limited data on Chinese aid. Through examination of how China is perceived and received within ‘recipient’ countries, including critical analysis of the notion of a ‘China model’, this thesis demonstrates that China is generally viewed as a complement rather than an alternative to traditional donor aid. It also analyses the processes of engagement and interaction between China and traditional donors, particularly the role of South-South Cooperation (SSC), and provides empirical evidence of the impact of the regime on China’s aid policies and practices and the ways in which China is having an effect on traditional donors. It argues that China is using the SSC framework in seeking to maintain its identity as a ‘developing’ country and as a way to distinguish itself from traditional donors, but at the same time the aid regime is expanding to (try to) incorporate South-South Cooperation to assist in maintaining its relevance. This thesis finds that whilst there is evidence of China’s increased engagement with the aid regime and the beginnings of internalisation of some of its components, China currently remains resistant to deeper involvement. Traditional donors and aid regime institutions are, however, continuing efforts to ‘engage’ with China in an attempt to both socialise Chinese actors and become more inclusive, representative, and thus legitimate. This thesis argues that China’s decision to continue to operate outside the regime is affecting the relevance and legitimacy of the aid regime, but the perception that China is ‘undermining’ aid regime norms and standards does not, at this stage, match reality.
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ItemManaging the globalisation of ideas: propaganda, power, and cohesion in Chinese domestic and international politics( 2012)As China becomes more engaged with the outside world through the process of globalisation, the party-state actively attempts to use domestic and foreign policies to manage China’s global interactions in ways that work to its advantage. The party-state manages the transnational exchange of information and ideas using the practices associated with its propaganda system. This simultaneously occurs within China and internationally, as the party-state uses both domestic and foreign propaganda practices in order to maximise the benefits and minimise the risks of this aspect of globalisation. This thesis investigates the relationship between the party-state’s use of propaganda practices to manage the forces of globalisation within the country and its use of such practices at the international level. It does so in order to generate a better understanding of how China’s domestic political system, and especially the power practices embedded in that system, shapes the way that China engages with the rest of the world. This thesis argues that the party-state’s desire for political and social unity and cohesion within China, combined with the specific way in which it exercises power through the use of propaganda practices at the domestic level, fundamentally shapes how it uses propaganda practices to try to increase China’s global influence. The party-state’s emphasis on the importance of national cohesion means that foreign propaganda practices involve the party-state exercising power not only to influence the views of international actors but also to discipline the discourse that Chinese actors articulate internationally. The party-state sees the generation of domestic cohesion using propaganda practices as a necessary prerequisite to China’s international rise. Its strategic approach to foreign propaganda involves increasing the variety of Chinese voices that are available to foreign audiences, as long as they maintain propaganda discipline and do not challenge the official discourse. When it comes to practical propaganda responses to domestic and international challenges the party-state is primarily concerned with establishing and defending an official “truth” around which it can unite Chinese public opinion, even when this stokes anti-foreign nationalism. The ability of Chinese actors to articulate a discourse to overseas audiences is thereby limited by the party-state’s focus on the use of propaganda practices to consolidate political consensus at home.
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ItemContainment and cooperation: continuity in U.S. policy toward the People's Republic of China during the Cold War( 2004)President Nixon's 1972 visit to the People's Republic of China (P.R.C.) was a critical milestone in the history of Sino-U.S. relations. The move put an end to two decades of mutual hostility and opened up a period of strategic cooperation between the two countries. The significance of the event is so often stressed that it creates an impression that there are two distinct periods of U.S. policy toward the P.R.C. - containment during the 1950s and 1960s and strategic cooperation in the 1970s and 1980s. This thesis challenges this conventional wisdom. It finds that the United States has continuously contained the P.R.C. throughout the Cold War but it has also been willing to cooperate to achieve important interests. Of course there are differences of emphasis that allow us to distinguish the period before the Nixon visit from the period that followed after, but American strategists have never regarded the choice between cooperation and containment as mutually exclusive. Both goals have been pursued simultaneously. The thesis is structured around the following key arguments relating to the relationship between the United States and the P.R.C.: • During the 1950s and 1960s, containment was the dominant dimension in U.S. Asian policy but cooperation between the two states to achieve specific objectives was also important. • During the 1970s and 1980s, the United States viewed the P.R.C. as a strategic partner and worked closely with it in confronting the Soviet Union; nevertheless, containment was an important U.S. goal during this period and remained an integral part of its calculations in its dealings with the communist state. • Overall, throughout the Cold War, containment and cooperation were pursued together as part of a continuous U.S. strategy in confronting the Chinese communism. The thesis shows the importance of the relationship between the United States, a world superpower with interests in the Asian region, and the P.R.C., a regional communist power that is able to do both harm and good to the former's interests.
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ItemConsuming trust: herbal food and drink and its place in contemporary China( 2011)Deeply grounded in the traditional notions of health and medicine, herbal food and drink have been used in China for centuries. Being part of its ‘traditional’ approach to well-being, however, the consumption of herbal food and drink is increasing in contemporary Chinese society and further reflects various meanings and perceptions relating to individual's engagement with modernity and their places in the rapidly changing social and cultural context. This thesis investigates the meanings of herbal food and drink in contemporary China and the extent to which it is reinvigorated by, and reflective of, the rapidly changing circumstances that the country finds itself in. By drawing on results of fieldwork in China across ten cities/ regions, the thesis identifies and relates consumption patterns in association with herbal food and drink with meanings attached to modernity, well-being, and both collective and individual Chinese identity. The findings of the research revealed a recurrent reference by people to ‘trust’, ‘intimacy’, and ‘natural’, which are not only grounded in the particular Chinese cultural imagination in relation to food, but, more importantly also indicative of how people’s perception on the contemporary cultural and social context and their place within it. To this end, the argument presented in this thesis is that the symbiotic relationship between ‘trust’, ‘intimacy’ and herbal food and drink is a resource for people to cope with anxieties brought on by rapid change in contemporary Chinese society because of the inherent links people make between herbal food and drink and notions of stability, tradition and their ‘unique’ Chinese identity. Given that there has been a series of food scandals in the past decade, coinciding with China’s policy of opening up to economic development, that a ‘moral panic’ over food safety emerged , it is not surprising that perceived risks of health are connected to much broader and significant concerns relating to the modern condition. Moreover, continual reference to the well-being of the body, ‘trust’, ‘intimacy’, and the ‘naturalness’ of herbal food and drink have been excessively employed as a kind of coping strategy for the anxieties that contemporary life poses for people as they navigate rapid change by drawing on the familiar and trusted symbols of balance and well being that are traditionally associated with Chinese food. That is, the call for well-being and a ‘balance’ of body is symbolic of a call for a similar kind of balance in life in a rapidly changing society and embeds with political economy implication. To reiterate, the linkage between knowledge and practice of herbal food and drink with ‘traditional’ Chinese culture is extensive, and, at the individual level, demonstrates a lived-experience associated with a particular way of being, identity and family belonging. Further, the prosperity of the herbal industry is indeed built on exploiting such close associations with intimacy, trust and continuity. As such, the interplays among tradition and modernity, collective and individual identities, and the patterns of herbal food and drink are enormous. This study on herbal food and drink can contribute to a better appreciation of how consumption serves as a linkage between agency and structure, between that in the hands of people to navigate, challenge or reject such as what they consume as opposed to that which lies beyond their influence.
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ItemShadows and substance: the formation of a radical perspective in American China studies, 1968-1979( 1987)American perceptions of China, according to Stanford Professor Harry Harding, were subject to “regular cycles of romanticism and cynicism, of idealization and disdain”. A quick glance at the American record does confirm that the Chinese have been repeatedly described as the most remarkable people on earth; or, in their faceless mass, the most fearful monsters. Despite American China specialists continuously confessing that China is “dim, distant and very little known,” American images of China keep flickering between the good and the evil. Just within the past fifty years, this perceptual pendulum has had several dramatic swings. From the faith expressed in Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Kuomintang (KMT), as a “sage” and a “man of destiny” and that the KMT was China’s last chance in the 1930s, to President Harry Truman’s final description of the KMT elite (including Chiang) as being “all thieves”; from the initial empathy which many China specialists felt for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a possibly better alternative for China in the 1940s to their later insistence that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was extreme, irrational and a dangerous enemy to the so-called “free-world”; from the unanticipated infatuation with the PRC in the early 1970s, which quickly replaced two decades of American hostility, to the new wave of negativism, which arrived at the end of the 1970s and loudly proclaimed “China stinks!” in the early 1980s. It is difficult to believe that China could actually have undergone such diverse changes to fit these various American descriptions. Given the fact that large-scale American China studies did not really take shape until the 1950s, and very little in the way of reliable data was available to the United States after it broke off diplomatic relations with the PRC in 1950, it is justifiable to argue that American perceptions of China might have less to do with the empirical reality of China at any given time than with that of the United States itself. This thesis analyses the swing of U.S. Sinophila and the beginning of disillusion which took place in the field of American China studies from 1968 through 1979. The author attempts to explain how different circumstances, frames of mind and sets of values which American scholars brought to their studies shaped their approaches and coloured their judgement. This inquiry had its initial genesis in an interest in the ideology and politics of American Sinology. However, given the scope and complexity of the issue, such a project is beyond a single person’s ability to comprehend, especially when working under an academic deadline. The task of a thorough study of all American China scholars who had romanticized the PRC in the 1970s also seemed impossible without making some very broad generalizations. Hence, the scope of this work is narrowed to simply focusing on the formation, growth and dissolution of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS) from 1968 to 1979.