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van Dongen, Els and Yuan Chang, eds. After Revolution: Reading Rousseau in 1990s China. Special issue of Contemporary Chinese Thought 48.1 (Dec 2017).

Abstract:

This issue contains an introduction to and a translation of Zhu Xueqin’s 朱学勤 (b. 1952) writings on Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

The introduction reviews Zhu Xueqin’s writings on Jean-Jacques Rousseau against the background of the reception of Rousseau in China since the late nineteenth century. Rousseau was both an advocate and critic of the Enlightenment, and his work hence appealed to many Chinese intellectuals who struggled with the conundrum of how to modernize. During the late nineteenth century, Chinese supporters of Rousseau drew on his work to defend the viability of revolution. During the 1990s, following the tragedy of Tiananmen and the decline of socialism, Rousseau served to reflect on China’s twentieth-century trajectory and the disastrous political consequences of collective moral idealism. For Zhu Xueqin, a key question was: Why were the French Revolution and the Cultural Revolution so similar?

DOI: 10.1080/10971467.2017.1383805

The first article of the issue contains the preface, introduction, and epilogue of Zhu Xueqin’s influential book The Demise of the Republic of Virtue: From Rousseau to Robespierre. In the preface, Zhu describes Chinese and international scholarship on Rousseau, his own intellectual formation as a member of the Cultural Revolution generation, and the overall purpose of the book. In the introduction, Zhu briefly outlines the transformation of medieval “theological politics” into modern “political theology,” or his central concern of the merger between moral idealism and the political state. Finally, in the epilogue, Zhu nevertheless still seeks to rescue Rousseau by arguing that history is created by both a priori and empirical forces and that a dialogue between deconstruction and construction is required. However, for “political theology” to end, boundaries have to be set to moral idealism and it needs to be disconnected from the political state.

DOI: 10.1080/10971467.2017.1383806

In the second article of the issue, “The Institution of Church and State as One—An Analysis of Rousseau’s Political Philosophy,” Zhu Xueqin provides an overall view of Rousseau’s political philosophy as he discusses Rousseau’s notion of the general will, the social contract, and the differences between Rousseau and thinkers such as Hobbes and Locke. Zhu argues that Rousseau’s political philosophy is deeply flawed as it advocates a moralization of politics that seeks to build a heavenly kingdom on earth, an ideal that has left a significant imprint on the modern world.

DOI: 10.1080/10971467.2017.1383807

Liu, Hong and Els van Dongen, eds. Reconsidering Sustainability: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Asia. Theme Issue of Nature and Culture. Oxford; New York: Berghahn (2015). 

Abstract:

The main themes in the articles of this special issue revolve around the three pillars of sustainability (economic, social, and ecological) and include urbanization, disaster vulnerability, resource consumption, and land use. The themes are approached from different levels of agency and structure, including intellectual debates, government responses, social and political structures, economic models, and community practices. The approach is highly interdisciplinary: contributors are from the fields of architecture and urban planning, environmental studies, history, economics, sociology, area studies, and development studies. The articles engage with the relation between nature and society in the form of how both specific Asian nation-states and cities deal with sustainability challenges, but also in the form of how the question of sustainability relates to Asia as a region, thereby including both developing and developed countries.

The issue opens with two articles that provide historical insight into the question of sustainability and resilience, using the level of the city as an entry point. Andrea Flores Urushima discusses postwar city making and urbanization and the creation of the “megalopolis” in Japan (the Tokaido megalopolis or Pacific Belt) through the official debate on urban development between 1967 and 1972. Her focus is on the 1960s, when the most crucial shift from a rural to an urban-based society occurred. Those who engaged in the debate attempted to balance the contradictory requirements of natural preservation and economic development. Interestingly, advocates of the importance of natural landscapes emphasized both their intrinsic aesthetic value and their environmental value, thereby vastly differing from the contemporary emphasis on human needs. At the same time, however, the debate also reflected the concern with continued growth that still characterizes current policy discourses on sustainability. The debate was visionary in its focus on the increased importance of leisure and tourism and its advocacy of “free-time cities”. Finally, the preservation of “cultural landscapes” that featured in these debates still figures prominently in debates held by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) World Heritage Centre today.

Also at the level of the city, but making connections to nation-state building and the role of communities, Kah Seng Loh and Michael D. Pante offer a comparative and historical approach to flood management in Asia through the case studies of Metro Manila and Singapore. Discussing the history of floods and flood management between the post-WWII period and the 1980s, the authors look at both national and local specificities to determine which efforts have been successful. A key point the authors make is that floods are not just the result of natural processes such as topography, climate, and tidal influences—they are also the result of political, demographic, and socioeconomic changes during this period. The authors argue that flood management was as much about taming nature as it was about disciplining human nature through the promotion of civic-minded and socially responsible behavior. The authors emphasize the top-down and technocratic approach to flood management in both Metro Manila and Singapore, but they also discuss the role of communities as both assets and liabilities. As the article demonstrates, flood management also involves issues of land use, development, and housing.

The next two articles deal with sustainability in Asia from a broad and theoretical perspective, covering a number of selected Asian countries and fusing theory with empirical research. Md Saidul Islam and Si Hui Lim use an integrated sociological framework in their analysis of disaster management in Asia with data obtained from seven countries, namely, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Thailand, Taiwan, and Vietnam. Relying on the pressure and release model and the theory of the double-risk society, the authors take into account wider political, economic, and social factors in their discussion of disaster management. Emphasizing the social construction of vulnerability, the authors argue that disaster mitigation and adaptation strategies in Asia have too narrowly focused on disasters as the result of “natural” hazards. In addition, the social construction of vulnerability also leads to the question of the capacity-building dimension of sustainability. Analogous to the highly lucrative “green technologies” discussed earlier, the authors suggest that disaster management partnerships could be the next lucrative business that governments would want to compete for. Regional partnerships, however, can only be a solution if there is a move away from mere financial aid disbursement toward long-term mitigation efforts and knowledge sharing.

Youngho Chang, Jiesheng Tan, and Letian Chen discuss the concept of sustainability from an economics perspective and offer a survey of both weak (economic) and strong (ecological) sustainability approaches. This relates back to the question of how we measure sustainability and whether weak sustainability is sufficient as a concept for the twenty-first century; the question of whether there can be an unlimited trade-off between man-made and natural capital has been highly debated (Seghezzo 2009). Using a sample of countries located in Asia that are characterized by different levels of development, availability of resources, and development strategies—China, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE)—the underlying question that the authors address is whether or not these countries can at least be weakly sustainable. The authors propose a modified version of the Solow-Hartwick model, which relaxes the conditions of constant population and technology—both of which are highly relevant in an Asian context—present in the original model. This adapted model, the authors argue, is hence more inclusive and reliable than existing models such as the genuine savings (GS) model or the more inclusive, but also more abstract, Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI) model.

Finally, Adrian Albano, Els van Dongen, and Shinya Takeda take us to the local level in their discussion of land ownership, land use and forest conservation in the indigenous territory of Tinoc, Ifugao, the Philippines. Through a case study of the Kalanguya indigenous people, the authors deconstruct simplistic binary models of “traditional” sustainable land use and communal ownership versus “modern” destructive land use and private ownership. The Kalanguya, the authors argue, are “indigenous capitalists”: not only did they know the materialist use of nature in the past; today, they also voluntarily participate in a competitive market for profit-earning purposes through the cultivation and trading of cash crops. The study’s findings reveal both the heterogeneous and dynamic nature of indigenous peoples’ land use and the implications of the lack of de facto land security that comes with communal ownership in the current system of legal pluralism. Within Asia, the case study is also significant in a Southeast Asian context in particular, where palm oil monoculture cropping has led to unprecedented levels of deforestation through slash-and-burn tactics, often involving indigenous peoples’ territories.

Reports, Policy Papers and Non-refereed Publications