Chinese Territorial Assemblages & The Politics Of Spatial Governance

Abstract

There are few concepts in international relations (IR) more pervasive than the theory of strong and weak states. The PRC’s lack of exclusive control over the peoples of “autonomous regions” like Tibet, the economics of “Special Administrative Regions” like Hong Kong, and the domestic space of Taiwan fit all the requirements for being a weak state. At the same time, IR scholars and practitioners agree that China is undergoing epochal economic and imperialist transformations which signal either a “peaceful rise” or a “new hegemony” as a world superpower. This project addresses the gap by applying Deleuze and Guattari’s method of assemblage thinking to answer the question: How does China produce, maintain, and hold together its multiplicity of territorial arrangements? This dissertation traces the historical development of Chinese territorial capacities in contrast to the history of Anglo-European territoriality. It begins with an analysis of tianxia or “all under heaven” as a territorial strategy developed by the first Chinese empire to centralize territorial administration, divide land, and divide the power of elites through academic competition. The project then considers China’s paradoxical governance of Hong Kong as an autonomous region allowed to manage its own international relationships while simultaneously preventing Taiwan’s international independence. Instead of dividing elites through academic competition, it finds that the British created collaborative colonial capacities to govern Hong Kong by promoting a new gentry class from the Chinese merchants who collaborated against the Qing Dynasty during the Opium Wars. The PRC’s initial decision to reclaim Hong Kong for China was accidental, but China took Hong Kong to incorporate collaborative colonial capacities into its administrative hierarchy of territorial governance. The dissertation ends with a case study of the PRC’s deployment of tianxia strategies of centralized administration, capacities of collaborative colonialization, and cultural governance to assemble Sansha City on the artificial Yongxing Island as a territory of “Greater China” in the South China Sea. This dissertation uses assemblage thinking to generate an alternative understanding of the ways China interprets and applies territoriality differently than its international counterparts.