This book explores how China, and especially China’s Belt and Road Initiative, is viewed in European media and by European think tanks, thereby uncovering European elites’ views of China. Looking across Europe—the European Union, Western Europe (including the United Kingdom), Central Europe, and Eastern Europe—the book reveals a complex picture, with different views in different places, and with different aspects of China disproportionately emphasized in some places. As China’s importance in the world continues to grow, it is crucial to understand how distorted views of China are shaping international relations.

This book explores the emerging EU-China relationship with a focus on the impact of the Belt and Road Initiative. It takes a narrative approach to understanding the EU-China relationship as a means to highlight how scholars in the EU and China interpret the narrativization of EU-China bilateral relations and to how this bilateral relationship is refracted through relations with third parties. The volume brings together scholars from China and Europe in the fields of Chinese foreign policy, EU studies, and strategic communication. The empirical focus cuts across policy, publics and media, and across history, political economy and diplomacy. The Belt and Road Initiative, alongside the other policy areas addressed in the chapters, offers ways for people in Europe and China to get to know one another in new ways, and for the EU and its member states and the Chinese state to forge new partnerships.

China’s meteoric rise and ever expanding economic and cultural footprint have been accompanied by widespread global disquiet. Whether admiring or alarmist, media discourse and representations of China often tap into the myths and prejudices that emerged through specific historical encounters. These deeply embedded anxieties have shown great resilience, as in recent media treatments of SARS and the H5N1 virus, which echoed past beliefs connecting China and disease. Popular perceptions of Asia, too, continue to be framed by entrenched racial stereotypes: its people are unfathomable, exploitative, cunning, or excessively hardworking. This interdisciplinary collection of original essays offers a broad view of the mechanics that underlie Yellow Peril discourse by looking at its cultural deployment and repercussions worldwide. Building on the richly detailed historical studies already published in the context of the United States and Europe, contributors to Yellow Perils confront the phenomenon in Italy, Australia, South Africa, Nigeria, Mongolia, Hong Kong, and China itself. With chapters based on archival material and interviews, the collection supplements and often challenges superficial journalistic accounts and top-down studies by economists and political scientists. Yellow Peril narratives, contributors find, constitute cultural vectors of multiple kinds of anxieties, spanning the cultural, racial, political, and economic. Indeed, the emergence of the term “Yellow Peril” in such disparate contexts cannot be assumed to be singular, to refer to the same fears, or to revolve around the same stereotypes. The discourse, even when used in reference to a single country like China, is therefore inherently fractured and multiple. The term “Yellow Peril” may feel unpalatable and dated today, but the ethnographic, geographic, and historical breadth of this collection—experiences of Chinese migration and diaspora, historical reflections on the discourse of the Yellow Peril in China, and contemporary analyses of the global reverberations of China’s economic rise—offers a unique overview of the ways in which anti-Chinese narratives continue to play out in today’s world. This timely and provocative book will appeal to Chinese and Asian Studies scholars, but will also be highly relevant to historians and anthropologists working on diasporic communities and on ethnic formations both within and beyond Asia. Contributors: Christos Lynteris David Walker Kevin Carrico Magnus Fiskesjö Romain Dittgen Ross Anthony Xiaojian Zhao Yu Qiu

Communication is central to how we understand international affairs. Political leaders, diplomats, and citizens recognize that communication shapes global politics. This has only been amplified in a new media environment characterized by Internet access to information, social media, and the transformation of who can communicate and how. Soft power, public diplomacy 2.0, network power – scholars and policymakers are concerned with understanding what is happening. This book is the first to develop a systematic framework to understand how political actors seek to shape order through narrative projection in this new environment. To explain the changing world order – the rise of the BRICS, the dilemmas of climate change, poverty and terrorism, the intractability of conflict – the authors explore how actors form and project narratives and how third parties interpret and interact with these narratives. The concept of strategic narrative draws together the most salient of international relations concepts, including the links between power and ideas; international and domestic; and state and non-state actors. The book is anchored around four themes: order, actors, uncertainty, and contestation. Through these, Strategic Narratives shows both the possibilities and the limits of communication and power, and makes an important contribution to theorizing and studying empirically contemporary international relations. International Studies Association: International Communication Best Book Award

Prasenjit Duara offers the first systematic account of the relationship between the nation-state, nationalism, and the concept of linear history. Focusing primarily on China and including discussion of India, Duara argues that many historians of postcolonial nation-states have adopted a linear, evolutionary history of the Enlightenment/colonial model. As a result, they have written repressive, exclusionary, and incomplete accounts. The backlash against such histories has resulted in a tendency to view the past as largely constructed, imagined, or invented. In this book, Duara offers a way out of the impasse between constructionism and the evolving nation; he redefines history as a series of multiple, often conflicting narratives produced simultaneously at national, local, and transnational levels. In a series of closely linked case studies, he considers such examples as the very different histories produced by Chinese nationalist reformers and partisans of popular religions, the conflicting narratives of statist nationalists and of advocates of federalism in early twentieth-century China. He demonstrates the necessity of incorporating contestation, appropriation, repression, and the return of the repressed subject into any account of the past that will be meaningful to the present. Duara demonstrates how to write histories that resist being pressed into the service of the national subject in its progress—or stalled progress—toward modernity.

Nine essays discuss the first commercial encounters between a China on the verge of systemic social change and a United States struggling to assert itself globally as a distinct nation after the Revolutionary War, from the arrival in Canton of the first American ship in the 1870s, to the 1844 Treaty of Wangxia in Macao after the First Opium War, to Secretary of State John Hay's forging of the Open Door policy in 1899. Broad in scope, the essays are attuned to the activities of competing European traders, especially the British, in Canton, Macao, and the Pearl River Delta. Kendall Johnsonis director of the American Studies Program and associate professor at the University of Hong Kong.

The end of the Cold War reshuffled the power relations between former friends and enemies. In Broken Narratives the contributors offer an account of the consequences of the end of the Cold War for the (re-)telling of history in film, literature and academic historiography in Europe and East Asia. Despite the post-modern claim that there is no need for a master-narrative, the contributions to this book show that we are in the middle of an intense and difficult search for a common understanding of the past. However, instead of common narratives polyphony and dissonances are produced which reflect a world in a period of transition. As the contributions to this volume show, the year 1989 has generated broken narratives. Contributors include: Peter Verstraten, Rotem Kowner, Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, Carsten Schäfer, Martin Gieselmann, Yonson Ahn, Chang Lung-chih, Andrea Riemenschnitter, Shingo Minamizuka, Petra Buchholz, and Tatiana Zhurzhenko.