Chinese Territorial Assemblages & the Politics of Spatial Governance a Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Division of Th
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CHINESE TERRITORIAL ASSEMBLAGES & THE POLITICS OF SPATIAL GOVERNANCE A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN POLITICAL SCIENCE JULY 2018 By Guanpei Troumbley Ming Dissertation Committee: Kathy Ferguson, Chairperson Michael J. Shapiro Jairus Grove Kate Zhou Reece Jones Abstract There are few concepts in international relations (IR) more pervasive than the theory of strong and weak states. The PRC’s lack of exclusive control over the peoples of “autonomous regions” like Tibet, the economics of “Special Administrative Regions” like Hong Kong, and the domestic space of Taiwan fit all the requirements for being a weak state. At the same time, IR scholars and practitioners agree that China is undergoing epochal economic and imperialist transformations which signal either a “peaceful rise” or a “new hegemony” as a world superpower. This project addresses the gap by applying Deleuze and Guattari’s method of assemblage thinking to answer the question: How does China produce, maintain, and hold together its multiplicity of territorial arrangements? This dissertation traces the historical development of Chinese territorial capacities in contrast to the history of Anglo-European territoriality. It begins with an analysis of tianxia or “all under heaven” as a territorial strategy developed by the first Chinese empire to centralize territorial administration, divide land, and divide the power of elites through academic competition. The project then considers China’s paradoxical governance of Hong Kong as an autonomous region allowed to manage its own international relationships while simultaneously preventing Taiwan’s international independence. Instead of dividing elites through academic competition, it finds that the British created collaborative colonial capacities to govern Hong Kong by promoting a new gentry class from the Chinese merchants who collaborated against the Qing Dynasty during the Opium Wars. The PRC’s initial decision to reclaim Hong Kong for China was accidental, but China took Hong Kong to incorporate collaborative colonial capacities into its administrative hierarchy of territorial governance. The dissertation ends with a case study of the PRC’s deployment of tianxia strategies of centralized administration, capacities of collaborative colonialization, and cultural governance to assemble Sansha City on the artificial Yongxing Island as a territory of “Greater China” in the South China Sea. This dissertation uses assemblage thinking to generate an alternative understanding of the ways China interprets and applies territoriality differently than its international counterparts. 1 Table of Contents Abstract ...................................................................................................................... 1 Introduction Chinese Territorial Assemblages ......................................................... 3 Methodology and Scope .............................................................................................................. 9 Chinese Contributions to Assemblage Theory .......................................................................... 13 Contributions to the Study of Chinese Territoriality ................................................................. 20 Organization of the Dissertation ............................................................................................... 27 Chapter 1 Tianxia Territoriality: ............................................................................35 Tianxia Capabilities for “Cherishing Men from Afar” ............................................................. 39 Foreign and “Overseas” Chinese Relations .............................................................................. 49 The “One Country, N Systems” Territorial Arrangement ......................................................... 56 Chapter 2 Reassembling Hong Kong and Taiwan: .................................................68 Developing Collaborative Colonial Capacities ......................................................................... 72 Territorializing and Reterritorializing Hong Kong ................................................................... 83 Chinese Deterritorializations and Tianxia Cultural Governance .............................................. 90 Chapter 3 Tacky Territorial Assemblages: ...........................................................104 City-Power in the Chinese Administrative Hierarchy............................................................. 109 The Tacky Territoriality of Indisputable Disputes .................................................................. 114 Tianxia Cultural Governance and the “Greater China” Assemblage ...................................... 118 Conclusion: “China” .............................................................................................128 2 Introduction Chinese Territorial Assemblages In our traditional imaginary, the Chinese culture is the most meticulous, the most rigidly ordered, the one most deaf to temporal events, most attached to the pure delineation of space; we think of it as a civilization of dikes and dames beneath the eternal face of the sky; we see it, spread and frozen, over the entire surface of a continent surrounded by walls. ―Michel Foucault, Preface to The Order of Things1 There are few ideas in international relations (IR) more pervasive than the theory of strong and weak states, and the term “failed states” has become one of the most popular contributions IR has made to public discourse and public policy. Reporters from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and other prominent news media continually discuss contemporary states in these terms. Practitioners from the United Nations to the U.S. Department of State have also deployed the strong, weak, and failed state categories when creating policies for addressing everything from the violent rise of the Islamic State of Iraq to the nuclear posturing of North Korea. States are considered strong or weak often depending upon their capabilities to regulate society, manage social relationships, extract resources, and use resources in a determined way.2 Strong states are characterized by a powerful ability to regulate social relations and administrative boundaries under a relatively uniform system of government, 1 Foucault, The Order of Things, xix. 2 Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States. 3 maintain obvious territorial distinctions over legal jurisdiction, and have clearly defined boundaries between those within the state and those outside its authority. In the geographical terms of Robert Rotberg, failed states are characterized by their inability to control borders and their loss of “authority over sections of territory” where “the extent of a state’s failure can be measured by how much of its geographical expanse is genuinely controlled…by the official government.”3 Additionally, over the past several decades many scholars of globalization have argued that any state, strong or weak, will necessarily suffer a degradation of authority and sovereignty as a result of recent events like advances in communications technology, global flows of financial capital, and the effects of climate change.4 China has no shortage of territorial disputes, both inside and outside the country. The authority of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), or the “Central Government,” over the territories of Tibet and Xinjiang is regularly challenged. Similarly, the PRC has never managed to “genuinely control” the territory of Taiwan, despite decades of military threats and diplomatic negotiations. China’s racially and ethnically diverse population, its exotic territorial arrangements, and its authoritarian governance system fit all of the requirements for being a weak and failed state or, following Kenneth Waltz,5 an empire. Samuel Huntington famously argued that “third world” states like China need to become strong states before they can develop economically6 and many IR scholars have argued weak states need authoritarian governance because they are too ethnically diverse. Even prominent 3 Rotberg, State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror, 5–6. 4 Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld; Strange, “The Defective State”; Strange, The Retreat of the State; Ohmae, The End of the Nation State. 5 Waltz, “The Emerging Structure of International Politics.” 6 Huntington, The Third Wave. 4 specialists in Chinese politics like Lucian Pye have described China as “a civilization pretending to be a state.”7 More recently, IR scholars and practitioners have proposed democratic remedies to the problem of weak states. Scott Moore, Michael C. Davis, and Yongnian Zheng have all recently suggested the United States as a model China should emulate, especially the process by which the early U.S. state managed to confederate, and later federate, territories by combining multiple nations under one governmental system and economically develop.8 However, these proposals for a Chinese federation insist that China conform to the strong and weak/failed theoretical model of territorial control rather than develop an alternative account of Chinese territoriality. These proposals often fail to mention that China has, in fact, established a federal form of government on several occasions with limited success. For instance, after fourteen provinces claimed independence from the last imperial dynasty