Circuits of Power: China's Quest for Cable Telegraph Rights 1912--1945 (original) (raw)
Related papers
China and the Global Politics of Telecommunications
Routledge Encyclopedia of Chinese Studies, 2023
This entry reviews the main issues covered in seminal articles and books written in English between 1978-2021 that examine the relation between China and the global politics of telecommunications. The first section synthesizes the literature that studied the specificities of China's telecommunications policy from the reform and opening-up until 2000. The second section summarizes key debates after China's accession to the WTO, which brought under discussion whether or not them state's telecommunications policies were techno-nationalist or techno-globalist. The third section, on the one hand, introduces literature that continued with the debates of previous years. On the other hand, it discusses new research strands exploring the internationalization of Chinese firms into developed economies and the Global South. This process was an outcome of China's rise in the global economy and its rising prowess in the telecommunications sector. Finally, the last section concludes and lists open issues for further research.
China and the International Political Economy of Information and Communication Technologies
Discussion Paper UFRN-DEPEC, 2019
ICT and its production are at the epicenter of contemporary trade wars and FDI screening mechanisms. Largely an unfolding of military demands, ICT development provoked a revolution in military affairs, subsequently spreading to civilian production. The globalization of ICT production preserved the control over technological progress and the most sophisticated productive segments between the US and military allies. Chinese industrial policies to develop integratedly the modern industrial system have unleashed a retraction of globalization by those economies previously heading it. This retreat responds for cutthroat competition for the highest value-added stages of industrial production and technological rents, but foremost for the pursuit of dominance in the new warfare battlegrounds and international surveillance systems. A new round of renovation in telecommunication infrastructure approaches with 5G, putting at stake: the deepening and spreading of great powers’ international surveillance systems, redefining their boundaries; the affirmation of critical civilian infrastructure as a central target in military calculations; the repositioning of tech firms in close alliance to their states in the different segments of the modern industrial system; and the repositioning of national economies in the overall industrial system. We aim to analyze here China’s position in the international political economy of ICT relative to the US.
English monograph: Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes: Sovereignty, Justice, and Transcultural Politics (Columbia, 2016), 2015
This book investigates how the dominant images of China or Chinese law were created and how and why they acquired extraordinary and lasting power in the context of Sino-Western encounters from approximately the 1740s through the 1840s. By studying a series of pivotal moments of Sino-Western contact and conflict during this period that culminated in the famous First Opium War, I examine the formation and transformation of Western knowledge and perception of Chinese law and society over time. I argue that the resulting Western discourse of China or Chinese law was not only central to many of the disputes that structured the trajectory of Sino-Western relations but also a key site at which the cultural or national boundaries were constructed or negotiated. Unlike many earlier studies, this book concentrates on the century-long period of Sino-Western, especially Sino-British, encounters before 1840, a formative century that has profoundly shaped modern Sino-Western relations but has received only scant attention among scholars of China since the 1930s. Moreover, instead of studying this period as a diplomatic, intellectual, or literary history, this book provides an integrative, critical analysis of the archival, popular, intellectual, and political dimensions of the Sino-Western encounter to historicize the processes of knowledge production and transcultural boundary making in the age of empire. A central concern of the study is to find out whether such a multidimensional interdisciplinary study may shed new light on the history of Sino-Western contact or other transimperial encounters. This book does not seek to offer a comprehensive coverage of this period. Rather, by using a combination of case studies and selected themes and events to slice through history temporally and spatially, it hopes to illustrate the complex power dynamics in the contact zones of empire that have created some of the still influential ideas of Sino-Western difference, identities, and modernities at a time when these ideas remained seriously underdeveloped, contradictory, or contested. This book builds on critical scholarship in multiple disciplines to explore the intersection of the discourse of Chinese law and society, Euroamerican modern transformation, and imperial ideology and practice. Table of contents: Introduction Chapter 1. Imperial Archives, History, and Origin Myths of Extraterritoriality Chapter 2. Cultural Translation of the Qing Code and Start of Comparative Chinese Law Chapter 3. Chinese Law and Society in the Formulation of European Modernity Chapter 4. Sentimental Imperialism and the Global Spectacle of Chinese Punishments Chapter 5. Law and Empire in the Making of the First Opium War Conclusion Bibliography Index The five substantive chapters of this book are organized around the interrelated archival, intellectual, popular, and official domains of the production, circulation, consumption, and codification of the knowledge of Chinese law mostly from the 1740s to the 1840s. It begins by examining the imperial archives of Sino-Western legal disputes to reinterpret the origins of foreign extraterritoriality in Chapter 1 before moving on to explore how such disputes led to the production of Western knowledge of Chinese law and society in the next chapter. Chapter 3 then analyzes the reception and multifaceted influence of such knowledge on European debates about the ideals of modern law and government in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Related to such archival and intellectual discourses was the rise of popular and sentimental representations of Chinese judicial punishments that came to redefine Chinese and Western law and subjectivity in the nineteenth century, which is the subject of Chapter 4. Chapter 5 illustrates the influence of these archival, intellectual, and popular discourses of Chinese law and society on the decision making of British diplomats, traders, and politicians in waging the First Opium War, which then established by force extraterritoriality and the credibility of earlier narratives of Chinese law. The short conclusion will provide a detailed summary of the major arguments of the book and offer reflections on the subsequent Chinese efforts to engage with the Western discourse of Chinese law and culture in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Keywords: cultural boundaries, Orientalism, contact zone, imagine community, emotional community, Chinese law, international law, imperialism, Opium War, sovereignty, Sino-Western relations, Chinese punishments, modernity, transnational relations, humanism, liberalism, sentimentalism, sympathy, spectacle, extraterritoriality, Canton,
Social-spatial logic of China's communications development since 1840
This article explains why and how China's communications was undeveloped from the late Qing Dynasty through the Civil War. The purpose is to bring into sharp focus the imprint of global capitalism and imperialism on the domestic social-spatial relations of communications. It argues that communications, shaped by a succession of historical conjunctions, domesticated in spatial terms China's peripheral position in the world capitalist system. This spatiality was never effectively addressed and even remained true for socialist modernity after the establishment of the PRC. In particular, underdevelopment in rural China, as the most lasting legacy of colonial modernity, has informed and deformed communications development into the market-reform era.
9. The Foreign Domination of People’s Republic of China.docx
This paper, as the title suggests, relates to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, being a sequel to the foreign domination of China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Here it is argued that China, as the hub of the global industrial civilization, can only lead the march towards a new order of equality, of person and worth, social justice, and freedom, an emancipatory experience of life, or life as an emancipating, liberating experience, by freeing itself from the structures and strictures of Western modernity which continue to obfuscate a deeper view of her much elongated past. Only through establishing the connection with her past the huge reservoirs of energy buried in it will be opened up and unleash the Chinese people as free agents and active participants in the realization of the colossal project of social engineering that the British Industrial Revolution commenced just over two centuries ago.