The overall aim of this doctoral dissertation is to make a critical contribution to the discourse of the ‘rise’ of the People’s Republic of China (PR China), which is a part of the all-encompassing fears about ‘the Chinese, who are coming’ and contradictory in itself. On the one hand, PR China is considered to be the promised land for more or less ambitious capitalist appropriation and enrichment; on the other hand it is painted as an immoral and secretive so-urce of cheap and toxic products that destabilise ‘western’ markets through dumping prices and taking away jobs. A further view argues that PR China refuses to introduce almost any kind of labour and environmental standards that would improve the dangerous work condi-tions in its domestic factories. It is also argued that PR China provides state subsidies for technological innovations and an unfair advantage to the Chinese companies – the very com-panies that are becoming increasingly competitive in the global markets of the most sophistica-ted products, which until recently had been the domain of companies from developed coun-tries, and ones that are, ostensibly, depleting the natural resources of the newly re-colonised Africa. We want to intervene in that kind of polarised thinking and its (conscious or un-conscious) racist undertones, which, if we decide to observe its logics through discourse the-ory, cannot be hidden in political correctness.
We take as our starting point the post-structuralist and post-Marxist discourse theory of Erne-sto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, which includes Lacanian theory of the subject. These scholars oppose determinism and any principle of an a priori societal logic underlying or preceding the construction of social and political identities. This is why, they argue, any identity or society can no longer be individuated on the grounds of positively attributed characteristics. This approach is influenced principally by Heidegger, Lacan, Foucault, Wittgenstein and Derrida, and proposes an ‘ontology of lack’, which is premised on the radical contingency of social relations. It thus offers novel ways to think about the relationship between social structures and political agency, the role of interests and identities explaining social action, the entangle-ment of meanings and practices, and the logics of societal and historical change. Discourse theory investigates the way social practices systematically form the identities of subjects and objects by articulating together a series of contingent signifying elements available in the discursive field or the field of discursivity. It is crucial that while there is an ultimate contin-gency of all social identity, partial fixations of meaning are both possible and necessary. The fixation is a function of the intervention of the so-called nodal point, in relation to which the elements are transformed into never fully fixed moments of a discourse, until the force of dis-location forces disintegration of the discourse and/or re-articulation through re-identification. In this way, the discourse theory provides an account of social change that doesn’t deny any continuity of meaning whatsoever, which is one of the main advantages of the chosen approach.
Discourse theory is critical of simplistic behavioural, rationalist and positivist approaches to social science research in general, and to international relations and diplomacy specifically. This also entails a consideration of the special sensitivity of researching ‘non-Western’ societi-es/policies/practices and the inbuilt bias, which originates in the embeddedness of the resear-cher and their methodological tools in different traditions than their studied object. In a nutshell, there is a necessity for the awareness of historicity, socio-political construction and discursive placement of our activity. In the light of this bias, the dissertation includes the work of several scholars of international relations from China, where the discipline is still emerging ambiguously between ‘international relations with Chinese characteristics’, ‘Chinese theory of international relations’ and ‘international relations theory from China’.
Such approach provides us with much more than (just) a critique of formerly described ‘double standards’ when thinking of the identity/foreignness of China (or, in China, that of the USA or ‘the West’) and its effect on the world, and the ‘Eurocentrism’ on the one hand and ‘Sinicizing’ international relations on the other hand. It poses a question of how and also why such bias came to be, and that entails the paradoxical dimension of political identity and the complexities of identity formation in general.
In view of such considerations, we pursue the following goals. Firstly, we take note of the contingency of economic diplomacy of the PR China and its historic, political-economic and discursive construction. Secondly, we provide a critical assessment of the logics of Chinese economic diplomacy and identify the dominant discourses of development, ‘peaceful deve-lopment’, popular sustainable development and their relationship towards GDP – what kind of actions such constructions enable and which ones they exclude, and whether there are any possible alternative constructions in the discursive economy of PR China. Thirdly, we take note of contingency, ideology and vulnerability of the hegemonic articulation of a particular economic neoliberalism, human rights and democracy into a common discourse, posing as the universal solution for the development of the so-called developed, undeveloped and develo-ping countries.
As a specially comprehensive operationalisation of discourse theory that lives up to the chal-lenges of its supposed methodological deficit and its (in)ability to provide us with critique and normative evaluation, we engage the logics of critical explanation, as developed by Jason Glynos and David Howarth. The concept of logics was developed in contrast with contextua-lised self-interpretations (critique of hermeneutic approaches, which share a lot in common with discourse theory) and causal mechanisms (critique of the naturalistic response to causal laws, with which discourse theory agrees on some points). Social logics enable us to characte-rise practices in a particular social domain or an entire regime of practices. Political logics pro-vide the means to explore the conditions of possibility and vulnerability of social practices and regimes by focusing on their contestation and institution. Fantasmatic logics are closely linked to the ideological dimension of social relations. The logic of fantasy is predicated on the La-canian category of enjoyment (jouissance) and it shows how subjects are made complicit in concealing and covering over the radical contingency of social relations. Logics provide us with the content of future explanation and they need to be articulated together to account for the constructed explanandum. Critique and evaluation are not something that comes before or after problematisation, description and explanation, but are intimately connected to them.
The use of logics is particularly important in the second half of the dissertation. After presen-ting the theoretical framework of our dissertation in the first half, investigating what discourse theory means for the concepts that make up its title, and presenting conventional accounts of our chosen topic in the discipline of international relations and diplomatic studies, we focus on three imperfect case studies. They were the analysis of the dominant discourse, which ma-kes sense of/contests the membership of PR China in the World Trade Organisation (WTO), discourses of ‘outward’ expansion of the Chinese development model within the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, and discourses around the accusations alleging that the Chinese multinational company Huawei is guilty of cyber espionage. As explained, the three cases can simultaneously be viewed as aspects of a singular regime of practices, that of the titular eco-nomic diplomacy of the PR China.
After examining selected primary documents in Chinese and English for this regime, we iden-tify social logics of harmony, development, leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (as both the historically predetermined maker of high GDP and its technocratically ingenious faci-litator) and Chinese national and popular exceptionalism. Social logics also represent the desi-rable status quo, which has and needs to be protected. Political logics of equivalence and dif-ference work together to protect it and with it the (always precarious) identity of PR China and Chinese people. An ‘us’, which means PR China and Africa or the global South, posi-tioned together and in opposition to the unjust global order, so it gives meaning to the de-mands for increased influence over it and the proposals for alternative (economic, social) prac-tices. An ‘us’, which means PR China as part of the international community and even general humanity, enables PR China to take part in globalisation and join international economic insti-tutions like the WTO. That these practices are constitutively dependent on horrific fantasies of victimisation and beatific fantasies of harmonious fullness, is especially evident in the case of Huawei. The reality of omnipresent cyber espionage (mostly, but not at all exclusively betwe-en the USA and PR China) makes once more visible the constitutive nature of this illegal prac-tice for (economic and commercial and trade) diplomacy. The threat of invasion of foreign, non-Chinese elements (foreign technology, regular diplomatic institutions, the media, ‘misled’ Chinese, etc.) into otherwise healthy social body of the developing PR China is obviously one of the variations of the ‘great dragon fantasy’, as named in the work of the psychoanalyst and political analyst Wu Guanjun.
The answer to the first part of the research question, is and how is the economic diplomacy of (PR) China discursive political practice, which plays a role in the constitution, production and maintenance of the identity of (PR) China, was tentatively affirmed in the first half of disser-tation. The task of the second half of dissertation was to answer ‘how’ and ‘why’ it is so. With this we, again temporarily and cautiously (with the remark, that ‘development’ is an obvious empty signifier in the international realm, because it motivates catching up and sur-passing the desired development of developed countries through GDP growth and makes possible the articulation of the untouchable ‘indigenous’ and particular developmental paths), can also affirm the thesis, that the economic diplomacy of (PR) China depends on the suc-cessful (re)articulation of ‘development’, where ‘development’ functions as the empty signifi-er and nodal point for the partial fixation of ‘science’, ‘social justice’, ‘economic growth’, ‘harmony’, ‘peaceful development’, ‘sustainable development’, and ‘Chinese characteristics’.
|
