Florian Schneider

The year 2013 saw the launch of the largest, most influential investment initiative in recent memory: China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This globe-spanning strategy has reshaped local economies and regional networks, and it has become a contested subject for scholars and practitioners alike. How should we make sense of the complex interactions that the BRI has enabled? Understanding these processes requires truly global perspectives alongside careful attention to the role that local actors play in giving shape to individual BRI projects. The contributions in Global Perspectives on China's Belt and Road Initiative: Asserting Agency through Regional Connectivity provide both 'big picture' assessments of China's role in regional and global interactions and detailed case studies that home in on the role agency plays in BRI dynamics. Written by leading area studies scholars with diverse disciplinary expertise, this book reveals how Chinese efforts to recalibrate the world are taken up, challenged, revamped, and reworked in diverse contexts around the world.

Asserting Agency through Regional Connectivity

Global Perspectives on China's Belt and Road Initiative

Nationalism, in China as much as elsewhere, is today adopted, filtered, transformed, enhanced, and accelerated through digital networks. And as we have increasingly seen, nationalism in digital spheres interacts in complicated ways with nationalism "on the ground". If we are to understand the social and political complexities of the twenty-first century, we need to ask: what happens to nationalism when it goes digital? In China's Digital Nationalism, Florian Schneider explores the issue by looking at digital China first hand, exploring what search engines, online encyclopedias, websites, hyperlink networks, and social media can tell us about the way that different actors construct and manage a crucial topic in contemporary Chinese politics: the protracted historical relationship with neighbouring Japan. Using two cases, the infamous Nanjing Massacre of 1937 and the ongoing disputes over islands in the East China Sea, Schneider shows how various stakeholders in China construct networks and deploy power to shape nationalism for their own ends. These dynamics provide crucial lessons on how nation states adapt to the shifting terrain of the digital age and highlight how digital nationalism is today an emergent property of complex communication networks.

China's Digital Nationalism

Michael Neumann

Anna-Maria Post

Marcus Twellmann

Der Band entwirft Umrisse einer neuen Literaturgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Die Aktualität des 19. Jahrhunderts geht weit über die geteilten Erfahrungen radikaler Modernisierungsschübe, sozialer Unsicherheiten und globaler Erschließungsbewegungen hinaus. Sie betrifft die Genese neuer Artikulationsformen politischen Selbstbewusstseins und gesellschaftlicher Vorstellungsbildungen, sie erfasst die Wechselwirkungen zwischen politischen Entwürfen, fragilen Traditionsbezügen und beschleunigten ökonomischen Zyklen. Die Parallelen zu gegenwärtigen Entwicklungen liegen damit auf der Hand. Das 19. Jahrhundert hat uns weitaus mehr zu sagen, als die Literaturgeschichtsschreibung in ihrem ästhetischen Vorbehalt gegenüber den Rücksichtnahmen und Stabilisierungsversuchen des Realismus bisher zuzugestehen bereit war.

Florian Schneider

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