CPSA/ISA-Canada section on International Relations

C01(b) - Chinese Politics

Date: May 30 | Time: 08:45am to 10:15am | Location: Classroom - CL 313 Room ID:15754

Chair/Président/Présidente : Stéphanie Martel (Queen's University)

Discussant/Commentateur/Commentatrice : Yvonne Su (University of Guelph)

Headbanging on the Open Door: Heavy Metal Music, Globalization, and Politics in Contemporary China: Yili Zhou (Carleton University)
Abstract: The popularity of heavy metal music in China is a striking microcosm of the paradox that China’s continuous opening of its economy and society presents with its Leninist regime. It betrays what Jeroen de Kloet (2010) calls the double bias – that “music was inherently provocative, and China was ruled by a monolithic totalitarian state without any freedom”. The literature on state-society relations in China fails to address the paradox as it focuses primarily on assessing the stake of the Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy in the hopes of locating sparks of democracy. Otherwise it pays attention to the adaptive strategy and coercive capacity of the CCP in response to sporadic political resistance and transnational social movements. My research rejects and problematizes the popular perception of politics in China as a dichotomy between the fearsome authoritative state and the politically inert society, and aims to bolster studies that shed light on the dynamism of society and render political meaning and agency in mundane, everyday life. I argue that the informal-cultural attitudes and behaviours in everyday politics that interact with the formal-structural institutions are constitutive elements of China’s political transformation. Given that heavy metal music in China is, in part, a byproduct of processes of globalization, my research also demonstrates how globalization insinuates itself into the fluid relationship between state and society in China.

989.Zhou.pdf

China’s Rise: How Might Geopolitical and Epistemological Diversity Open Up a Space for an Improved Foreign Aid Architecture?: Linda Elmose (Okanagan College)
Abstract: The paper advances the argument we can situate a new lifeline for a more self-conscious, if not more ethical, foreign aid (official development assistance) at the confluence of four interconnected developments transpiring in international development thinking and reality. The four trends to critically evaluate are as follows. First, the decline in moral authority and leadership of the United States, alongside the politico-economic ascendance of China and other emerging economies as “new donors” are two developments that set the stage for a genuine ethical debate over the principles and preferred outcomes of development assistance. As new donors– China, South Korea, Brazil, Mexico, among others -- are non-western, developing countries or semi-peripheries themselves with a history of colonial exploitation. Prima facie, these actors to bring to the aid regime divergent ideologies, discourses, values and development paths that could inspire, in unprecedented fashion, a genuine conflict of values and approaches to aid and development policy and practice. The third and fourth global developments concern the Sustainable Development Goals (SGDs), which along with the discourses on the Post-Aid World, constitute driving factors behind new approaches to aid and development. While, a sure-fire normative argument about a more ethical aid and development regime cannot be ascertained by these four developments, nevertheless, the geopolitical and epistemic tensions produced by this broader context might stimulate ethically self-conscious reflection of donors in a multi-perspectival policy space.