The Brown Bag Colloquium Series for academic year 2019-2020 formally started with Dylan Beatty's talk entitled Peace, Stability and Maritime Militias: New Visions of China’s Role in Maritime Southeast Asia on Thursday, 29 August 2019 at PAV 2248.
Mr Beatty - a PhD candidate from the Department of Geography and Environment from the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa and fellow at the East West Center - outlined his talk by discussing the multi-level and multi-scalar dimensions of the South China Sea/West Philippine Sea geopolitics. Deploying critical discourse analysis, Mr Beatty investigated documents and press releases of different Chinese agencies in relation to the contested waters between the Philippines and mainland Asia. These agencies include the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Foreign Ministry), Ministry of National Defense (MND) and National People’s Congress (NPC) where each institution released English-language statements. They cover the period from 2011 to 2019.
One of the key arguments of the talk is the move to use South China Sea as a site for China's history to re-situate Imperial China with the modern China's geopolitical imagination. Mr Beatty also looks at the multi-scalar, discursive, materialist and cartographic dimensions of the tenuous claims for islands in the conflict water zone. Two of the themes that emerge from the public discourse emanating from statements from three Chinese agencies, are particularly interesting: (1) Military “defense construction” in the South China Sea strengthens China’s economy and the civilian sphere, and (2) China is not militarizing the South China Sea; rather, this is being done by other countries, especially the U.S.
Mr Beatty ended his talk with argumentative points. One of which states that China’s public discourses juxtapose the concept of peace in Southeast Asia with China’s sovereignty over the South China Sea.
Photo: Dominique Amorsolo
Brown Bag Logo: Pat Algura
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