York Center for Asian Research

The decline of a hegemon can create openings for lesser powers to expand their influence in the world-system. Is this what China is currently attempting to do? This paper contributes to this ongoing debate by examining China's arms transfer activities from a historical perspective. Using data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute arms transfer database and the World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers database, I argue that the Chinese arms transfer regime has evolved through three phases. In Phase One, China used gifts of arms to compete with the Soviet Union and to expand influence among Third World countries. In Phase Two, China used arms exports mainly to assist national developmental projects. Only evidence in Phase Three supports the emergence of a global strategy that attempts to extend China's economic, political, and possibly military outreach. This paper suggests that though China has not yet become a contender for world hegemony as Arrighi argues (2007), China has formulated a globally-focused agenda which, in the medium-term, could extend its influence in regions where U.S. domination is relatively weak.

In recent years China has positioned itself as a global economic leader, working through its "Belt and Road" initiative (BRI) and Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), to not only expand its global economic reach, but to organize and lead global economic relations. China's rise is largely understood in economic terms, but the history of global power dynamics suggests that such leadership is built on both economic and political-military foundations. This paper explores the structural relationship between China's economic and political-military relationships with other states over the period 1993 to 2015. Drawing on a wide variety of data sources, we present a multi-dimensional analysis that measures the changing size of China's economic and political-military networks, their shifting regional distribution, and the degree of coupling, or decoupling of economic ties from political-military ties. In describing these patterns, we conduct a similar analysis for the United States. This allows us to situate Chinese trends in the context of the structures of U.S. global power. Our analysis points to ways in which China's global rise has been shaped through navigating U.S. global power. Our analysis also shows that China's growing leadership in the global economy builds upon a set of existing political-military relationships that, while their scope and form are quite different from those that the United States built to support its hegemonic ascendency, are nevertheless critical for understanding the mechanisms by which Chinese power and influence has grown in the global political economy.

After decades of military reform, how does the Chinese military justify its persistent role in politics and social life? This mixed-methods study examines the discursive strategies used by military deputies to understand how a semi-professional military speak to its relations to the Party, its own organizational missions and goals, and potential conflicts between them. Computer-assisted text analysis is combined with targeted deep reading to identify and examine latent topics in comments made by military deputies between 2001 and 2017. The findings show that the military deputies simultaneously mobilize a political discourse and a discourse of professionalism. This duality of discourse constitutes a source of legitimacy for the military's pursuit of corporate interests.

How were the post-Deng educational activities tied toand different fromthe rectification campaigns in the earlier periods? What does this mean for the future of intra-Party governance in China? Through a comparison of rectification campaigns in the 1940s-1980s and intra-Party 'educational activities' thereafter, the author concluded that the campaign method had been institutionalized as an integral instrument of intra-Party governance, forging a three-stage procedure to fulfil the dual aims of education and deterrence. Consequently, the Chinese Communist Party discarded extreme sanctions in the post-Deng era but reinforced authoritative and distributive power through lesser forms of sanctions.

The divides between social groups in American society today extend from political opinion to lifestyle and emotions. A less explored area, however, is how these divides relate to potential divides in morality. The Habermasian conceptualization of the public sphere prioritizes deliberative reasoning as a way to solve moral conflicts. In contrast, this study argues that divides in reasoning and opinion are associated with divides in morality. To make the argument, this study focuses on the case of public debates over whether social media companies should deplatform Trump and his supporters in the aftermath of the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection. Public comments were obtained from a dataset compiled and released by Facebook Oversight Board. First, I used structural topic modeling to identify the reasoning and used the dictionary based on the Moral Foundations Theory to gauge moral foundations in each document. Then, I used statistical analysis to examine whether there was a correlation between specific reasoning and moral foundations. The results show that the pro-and anti-deplatforming camps in the debate are divided not only in reasoning, but also in morality. Supporters of deplatforming argue that it would fulfill tech companies' public responsibility, and protect society at large. These arguments are correlated with the care foundation. In contrast, opponents argue that deplatforming Trump violated freedom of speech. This argument is correlated with the fairness, loyalty, and authority foundations, but not the care foundation. The findings support my argument that divides in reasoning should be analyzed with consideration of morality.

After decades of military reform, how does the Chinese military justify its persistent role in politics and social life? This mixed-methods study examines the discursive strategies used by military deputies to understand how a semi-professional military speak to its relations to the Party, its own organizational missions and goals, and potential conflicts between them. Computer-assisted text analysis is combined with targeted deep reading to identify and examine latent topics in comments made by military deputies between 2001 and 2017. The findings show that the military deputies simultaneously mobilize a political discourse and a discourse of professionalism. This duality of discourse constitutes a source of legitimacy for the military’s pursuit of corporate interests.

How were the post-Deng educational activities tied toand different fromthe rectification campaigns in the earlier periods? What does this mean for the future of intra-Party governance in China? Through a comparison of rectification campaigns in the 1940s-1980s and intra-Party 'educational activities' thereafter, the author concluded that the campaign method had been institutionalized as an integral instrument of intra-Party governance, forging a three-stage procedure to fulfil the dual aims of education and deterrence. Consequently, the Chinese Communist Party discarded extreme sanctions in the post-Deng era but reinforced authoritative and distributive power through lesser forms of sanctions.

Despite the recent surge in scholarly attention to anti-Asian racism, what is largely missing in this growing body of literature is a bridge connecting studies on this subject to the broader field of race and ethnicity studies. In this special issue, we propose to use the concept of transculturality, which is defined as the process of cultural interaction, interpenetration, and hybridization that transcends the traditional borders of individual cultures, to establish this connection. In this introductory article, we first critically review the concepts of culture, interculturality, and multiculturality in the studies of race and ethnicity. Upon this review, we explain how transculturality advances the knowledge of racial and ethnic identity, ideas, and practices. This introduction concludes with an overview of each contribution, setting the stage for a comprehensive exploration of this complex and multifaceted issue. Collectively, this special issue aims to not only provide theoretical and empirical insights into the transculturality of anti-Asian racism but also build a bridge between the studies of the Asian diaspora and the general research on race and ethnicity.

This article proposes the 'second face of censorship', emphasizing how states use censorial institutions to reinforce their value system and moral authority. It argues that censorship involves an interactive power dynamic between state censors and society, posing the question of legitimacy in censorial power dynamics, which is crucial for authoritarian resilience. To investigate this interactive process and the possibility of legitimacy, this article conducted a case study of public reactions to the takedown of a drama series in China. It examines how public sentiment and state responses intertwined in censorial practice, revealing the construction of descriptive legitimacy through negotiation.

This paper examines the combative benefits of lion dance training in the curriculum of a traditional Chinese martial arts school. It is one result of an ongoing ethnographic study at a Chinese- Canadian kung fu club that is investigating the importance and uses of music in the martial arts. A brief description of the blurred genre combining two dancers in a stylized lion costume and an accom- panying percussion ensemble is provided, before proceeding to a discussion of transferable skills de- velopment. The approach is ethnomusicological, therefore the focus is on rhythm, tempo, and entrain- ment in lion dancing and homologous principles in martial arts. The value of this study is to be found in making explicit the implicit ties between musical proficiencies and combat sport effectiveness, in order to enhance the efficiency of rhythm skills acquisition and application for kung fu practitioners.

Electronic dance music (EDM), in all its myriad genre stratifications, is subject to an interesting dichotomy as a result of being a studio-based practice. On the one hand, the standard currency of the style is the finished recording. It is released by producers to be manipulated by DJs and disseminated to listeners through a wide variety of channels, but is essentially fixed. On the other hand, the processes of studio production that are used to create these recordings have an ephemerality that belies the concreteness of their product.
In my fifteen plus years of experience as a producer, I have worked with a variety of gear from analogue to digital and hardware to software. As technology changes, so does studio technique. The creative possibilities that are afforded by the latest piece of equipment or software are intimately linked to the evolution of EDM genres. This forward drive in studio technology is also a key factor in a finished track being, in some ways, un-reproducible.
When I started producing music, it was in a hybrid hardware/software studio. Working with tape delays  or programming analogue synthesizers meant that each pass of a recording was often different. Lately I have been using a totally software-based studio, which is more sonically stable. Nonetheless, there is now the risk of programs being vulnerable to obsolescence as computer hardware and operating systems change. While finished recordings can be exactly and infinitely duplicated, the studio environments used to created them are actually quite ephemeral.

This dissertation is an investigation of the percussion used to accompany Chinese martial arts and lion dancing at Toronto, Canada’s Hong Luck Kung Fu Club. It is based on six years of participant-observation and performance ethnography there, as well as a nine-month period of comparative fieldwork in Hong Kong. The diasporic environment presented questions of identity, and the research also engaged with the emerging field of martial arts studies. The discussion’s primary lines of inquiry are the use of percussion-accompanied lion dance and kung fu in the construction of identity for performers and audiences in a multicultural context; embodied knowledge in the movement and music that undergirds a Chinese, martial way of being-in-the-world; and the experience of learning, performing, and observing these practices. This study draws on phenomenology, semiotics, practice theory, and cognitive semantics, which have been tempered by discipleship at Hong Luck. The primary argument of this dissertation is that, despite the challenges of diaspora, Hong Luck’s transmission process uses intense physical training to engrain a distinctly Chinese, martial habitus onto practitioners; this set of dispositions is the prerequisite for becoming a drummer and is sonically—and physically—manifested in percussion-accompanied kung fu and lion dancing with important implications for the identity of performers and patrons. The main thesis is augmented by an argument for experiencing combat skills through music. With over fifty years of history, the ideals of self-strengthening, resistance to domination, and respect for Chinese culture that are embodied in Hong Luck’s practices have had a lasting impact on not only the local Chinatown community, but also the Greater Toronto Area and beyond.

This paper is about a suite of electroacoustic music inspired by multiculturalism and DNA.  Samples, live playing, and synthetic sounds were combined using digital technology into a dance-informed, world-flavored, concert-oriented, acousmatic music.  Musique concrète, minimalism, rave, and hip hop all influenced the techniques, theories, and aesthetics used in composing the suite.  The decision to use the Ten Oxherding Pictures of Zen Buddhist fame as a non-diegetic enhancement of concert presentations impacted the poetics and provides a means by which to analyze the author’s own compositional process.  First the inspiration and potential issues are outlined, then the aesthetics are contextualized, the techniques used are described, and finally, the individual pieces of the suite are discussed.

This Asia Research Brief was written for the knowledge mobilization program of the York Centre for Asian Research (YCAR). It looks at some of the ways that the Chinese lion dance operates as an embodied form of resistance in Canada's Chinese diaspora. Using the example of Toronto’s Hong Luck Kung Fu Club in the Spadina/Dundas Chinatown, the brief provides an analysis of how music, ritual, dance, and martial arts come together to create a unique form of resistance to racial discrimination.

Toronto's Hong Luck Kung Fu Club has promulgated martial arts, lion dance and percussion music since 1961. Drawing on my fieldwork there, this paper argues that these practices structure—and are structured by—a combative approach to rhythm. Students begin with martial arts and train without music, but percussion accompanies public demonstrations, creating an unfamiliar situation that I position as a distinct phase of the transmission process. Martial arts performances are both fuelled by musical energy and challenged by the requirement of remaining asynchronous to it. Lion dancers, however, treat drum patterns like signals coordinating manoeuvres on the performance battlefield.

Résumé: Le club de kung fu Hong Luck de Toronto met de l'avant, depuis 1961, les arts martiaux, la danse du lion et la musique à base de percussions. À partir du travail de terrain que j'y ai effectué, j'avance dans cet article que ces pratiques structurent—et sont structurées par—une approche combattive du rythme. Les étudiants commencent par les arts martiaux et s'entraînent sans musique, mais les percussions qui accompagnent les démonstrations publiques créent une situation inédite que je situe comme une phase distincte du processus de transmission. Les performances d'arts martiaux sont alimentées par l'énergie de la musique en même temps qu'elles sont contrariées par l'exigence de rester asynchrones à celle-ci. Par contre, ceux qui effectuent la danse du lion se servent des schémas rythmiques comme de signaux pour coordonner leurs manoeuvres sur ce champ de bataille qu'est la représentation.