Queer/Trans K’s

China

IR Theory is inherently western- applying it to China makes no sense and inevitably leads to policy failure.

Beeson 14 (Mark, Professor of International Politics at Murdoch University. Journal of Asian Security and International Affairs 1(1) 1–23 http://aia.sagepub.com/content/1/1/1.full.pdf)

And yet there is much about the historical East Asian experience that is significantly at odds with the notional Western template. Not only has most of 'East Asia's' history occurred in the complete absence of the Westphalian-style states that form the core of most International Relations (IR) scholarship, but ideas about international order, authority, not to mention the nature and locus of power, have also been very different from their counterparts in Europe and elsewhere. Even now, when the state has become the default expression of geographically demarcated political authority and power across the world, the role states play in Asia In underpinning national security remains different and distinct and shows few signs of disappearing. On the contrary, scholars in the Peoples' Republic of China (PRC), for example, are exploring that country's immense history to develop a very different understanding of International order (Qin, 2011 Put differently, China's material transformation, which induces such alarm amongst traditional security analysts (Mearsheimer, 2010), is also having important ideational consequences. Whether this recognition will generate more accurate explanations of international development is moot, but it does serve as a powerful reminder that our notions about the world we inhabit are socially constructed (Searle, 1995; Wendt, 1999). Some of the theoretical implications of these initial observations are developed and explained In the first part of the following discussion. The principal aim of the article, however, is to highlight some of the enduring differences that characterize thinking about security in East Asia I shall suggest that ideas about security in the region remain quite different and more broadly based than they do in much of the West, and this has important consequences for security practice and theory. Ironically, however, the preoccupation With state sovereignty that is such a feature of recent regional development threatens to send the region back to the proverbial future, as rather old fashioned-looking concerns about territory undermine the essentially liberal 'logic of interdependence ' Paradoxically therefore, East Asia continues to display some important differences, but also threatens to reproduce some earlier Western tropes—of which we might have hoped to see the last. The final section of the article details some of these problems and draws out their implications for the study of Asian security The following discussion is framed in the language of 'security governance', or the efforts by states acting alone or even cooperatively to manage or regulate security outcomes. One influential definition of security governance that has been developed in a European context suggests that it is characterized by 'heterarchy; the interaction of a large number of actors, both public and private; Institutionalization that is both formal and informal, relations between actors that are ideational in character, structured by norms and understandings as much as by formal regulations; and finally collective purpose' (Webber, Croft, Howorth, Terriff & Krahmann, 2004, p. 8). East Asia is plainly a very different place to Western Europe, but the framework usefully highlights factors that are often neglected in many accounts of the region's distinctive security practices and concerns. Even if security governance is unrealized, it is a useful reminder that 'threats' , especially in the contemporary era, are not simply about traditional military challenges to the nation-state _ On the contrary, threats are now also very much about the 'systemic or milieu goals of states, the legitimacy or authority of state structures, land / national social cohesiveness and Integrity' (Sperling, 2010, p. 5); a possibility that is especially apparent in East Asia.

A queer re-reading of Sinophone studies is key to understand Chinese policies and history – only way to take into account western imperialism in China

Yin Wang, Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages, “Unraveling the Apparatus of Domestication,” Queer Sinophone Cultures, edited by Howard Chiang, who’s research focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of the Sinophone, and edited by Ari Larissa Heinrich, who received the Master's degree in Chinese Literature from Harvard University, 2014, http://mirlyn.lib.umich.edu/Record/013795027

Rather than viewing Handong and Lan Yu as representative of an ongoing ideological struggle within the PRC’s aspiration for a socialist modernity and its contemporary investments in a neoliberal capitalist world order, a queer Sinophone reading might strategically bracket Handong, a figurative embodiment of Sinophone communities, from Lan Yu, a symbolic character of socialist China. Indeed, the relationship between the PRC and Sinophone communities is vividly captured early on in the film by the very first verbal communication between the two characters. After watching a program that introduces the city of Los Angeles on TV, Lan Yu asked: “Have you been to America?” to which Handong later replied, “You come over, I have something for you.” This scene implies that Lan Yu’s impression of the Western world is entirely mediated by what is available in Chinese mass media, and his aspirations for them are able to be realized here and now, through his affair with Handong. If Handong’s invitation is reflective of Sinophone communities self-awareness of possessing something that the PRC lacks, their very concrete alliances-economic, political, and not just ideological-with countries such as the United States, not necessarily in a hegemonic sense but in terms of minoritizing cultures, come across much clearer through this Sinophone rereading. The relationship between Lan Yu and Handong, in other words, no longer simply denotes a filmic representation of a “queer space of China,” but registers an unruly tension of cultural and visual (dis)identification that transcends the ideological and even geopolitical contours of (post-) socialist China. This strategy of rereading Lan l’u must be identified with the broader horizon of Sinophone production, because its epistemological-historical pillars come from outside the geopolitical China proper, including the legacies of British postcolonialism, American neo-imperialism, the recontextualization of the Republican state’s scientific globalism (recall my earlier argument that homosexuality emerged not in the post-Mao era but the Republican period), and Hong Kong’s cultural (which was in turn driven by economic) affiliations with other sub-regions of Cold War East Asia, such as Taiwan and Japan. As it is well known, between the end of the Korean War in the mid 1950s and the reopening of the Chinese Mainland in the late 1970s, Japan, Okinawa, South Korea, and Taiwan became U.S. protectorates. “One of the lasting legacies of this period,” according to the cultural critic Kuan-Hsing Chen, “is the installation of the anticommunism-pro-Americanism structure in the capitalist zone of East Asia, whose overwhelming consequences are still with us today.”82 Inherent in the concept of the Sinophone lies a more calculated awareness of the implicit role played by communist China in the Cold War structuration of transnational East Asia.