Chinese Intellectuals and China`s Policy toward Japan

This dissertation aims at integrating two scholarships: state-society relation studies and Chinese foreign policy analysis. I created Two-level Perception Gap Model to analyze different intellectual groups' relations with party-state by confirming Chinese intellectuals play a role in CFP making in general, China's Japan policy in particular. This model is an alternative approach, instead of conventional wisdom patron-client approach, to explain and analyze the pluralized intellectual-state relations in China. This model first analyzed the role of two intellectual groups, namely think tank scholars and popular nationalist, in China's Japan policy making, and then based on these analyses it explains the interactional patterns between these two intellectual groups and party-state. I used three case studies, which represented different types of issue, Chinese attitude toward the U.S.-Japan alliance and the Japanese defense policy, the controversy over the Yasukuni Shrine Visit, and the territorial dispute over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, to examine this model. First, I examined think tank scholar groups and the extent they influenced "core interest issue and sensitive issue (Issue 1)," Chinese attitude toward the U.S.-Japan alliance and the Japanese defense policy, and their international patterns with party-state. Chapter 3 compares the responses of Chinese officials to the changes in the defense policy of Japan to the analyses from the think tank scholars. As the model assumes, results show that think tank scholars' analyses are consistent with China's policy position; nevertheless, it is difficult to confirm their analyses have influence on Chinese attitude toward the U.S.-Japan alliance and the Japanese defense policy. Based on the analysis of journal articles, most articles do not provide policy suggestions or simply provide suggestions that do not deviate from the policy. As Gu's theory of pluralist institutionalism and my hypothesis points out, most think tank scholars are establishment intellectuals so they tend to be self-disciplined. Second, this model provide a new concept "patriotic dilemma" for analyzing the challenge and constraints brought by popular nationalist discourses and public mobilization to Chinese foreign policy decision makers. Chapter 4 investigated the cases study of the controversy over the Yasukuni Shrine Visit, defined as "major/minor interest issue/ sensitive issue (Issue 3)," and the discourses from the popular nationalist, mainly focusing on anti-Japanese activists. The chapter also observes their influence on nationalist public opinions and analyzes how the nationalist public opinions constrain the policy choices among decision makers. Results strongly supported the hypothesis of patriotic dilemma that, although the popular nationalist group and public opinions constrained the policy choices of Chinese decision makers in the short term, they were unable to change the fundamental policy direction. Third, chapter 5 also focuses on anti-Japanese activists and examines the model with the case of the territorial dispute over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands. The result supported that hypothesis that China's policy change was not because of the influence from popular nationalist's discourses or public opinions but because of the change of priority of this issue, from major/minor interest issue to core interest issue. These two chapters also indicate that the patron-client model is unable to describe the popular nationalist. An alternative approach, such as the concept "patriotic dilemma" is needed to describe the relations between the popular nationalist and the government.

Rotten Symbol Mongering: Scapegoating in Post-9/11 American War Literature

A rhetorical approach to the fiction of war offers an appropriate vehicle by which one may encounter and interrogate such literature and the cultural metanarratives that exist therein. My project is a critical analysis—one that relies heavily upon Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic method and his concepts of scapegoating, the comic corrective, and hierarchical psychosis—of three war novels published in 2012 (The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers, FOBBIT by David Abrams, and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain). This analysis assumes a rhetorical screen in order to subvert and redirect the grand narratives the United States perpetuates in art form whenever it goes to war. Kenneth Burke’s concept of ad bellum purificandum (the purification of war) sought to bridge the gap between war experience and the discourse that it creates in both art and criticism. My work extends that project. I examine the symbolic incongruity of convenient symbols that migrate from war to war (“Geronimo” was used as code for Osama bin Laden’s death during the S.E.A.L team raid; “Indian Country” stands for any dangerous land in Iraq; hajji is this generation’s epithet for the enemy other). Such an examination can weaken our cultural “symbol mongering,” to borrow a phrase from Walker Percy. These three books, examined according to Burke’s methodology, exhibit a wide range of approaches to the soldier’s tale. Notably, however, whether they refigure the grand narratives of modern culture or recast the common redemptive war narrative into more complex representations, this examination shows how one can grasp, contend, and transcend the metanarrative of the typical, redemptive war story.

Conceptual Decolonization of Space: Worldview and Language in Anishinaabe Akiing

This dissertation examines the role of worldview and language in the cultural framework of American Indian people. In it I develop a theory of worldview which can be defined as an interrelated set of logics that orients a culture to space (land), time, the rest of life, and provides a prescription for understanding that life. Considering the strong links between language and worldview, it is methodologically necessary to focus on a particular language and culture to decolonize concepts of and relationships to land. In particular, this dissertation focuses on an Anishinaabe worldview as consisting of four components, which are; (1) an intimate relationship to a localized space; (2) a cyclical understanding of time; (3) living in a web of relatedness with all life, and (4) understanding the world around us in terms of balance. The methodological approach draws from Anishinaabemowin, the traditional Anishinaabe language, as a starting place for negotiating a linguistic-conceptual analysis of these logics to decolonize the understandings of land, time, relatedness and balance. This dissertation helps to demonstrate that the religious language as codified in the 1st Amendment to the United States Constitution as religious freedom is unable to carry the meaning of the fundamental relationships to land that are embedded in Anishinaabemowin and culture. I compare the above Anishinaabe worldview to that of the eurowestern culture in America, which is; (1) the domination of space; (2) a linear progression of time; (3) a hierarchical organization of life; and (4) understanding the world as a Manichean battle of good versus evil. This dissertation seeks to decolonize American Indian translational methodologies and undermine the assumptions of eurowestern cultural universality.