In their introduction to a survey of contemporary Chinese intellectual debate, Timothy Cheek, David Ownby and Joshua Fogel (2020, pp 15– 16) write that ‘China has achieved modernity in the form of wealth and power … We have entered the Chinese century.’ In the 2020s it is commonplace to describe China as a major power and its rise as an established phenomenon (Breslin, 2021; Brown, 2023). Not long ago, however, China's rise was a significantly contested topic, both inside and outside China (Glaser and Medeiros, 2007), and just how influential and powerful the country has become remains the subject of some debate today.

The aim of this chapter is to engage in an inter-disciplinary review of secondary literature which seeks to explain the contested phenomena of China's rise, its growing global power and influence, and its domestic socio-economic transformations, in order to establish a framework for subsequent analysis and to contextualize the present study. The chapter is structured around two main questions: first, the reasons for China's rise as a comparative international political– economic process (explaining how we got here); and second, how to characterize the politics, economy and society of a transformed China (understanding where we are now). Answers to the second question depend somewhat on the first, as they require interpretation of the process of China's rise.

Prelude

At the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC or CCP)1 in Beijing in October 2017, Party General Secretary Xi Jinping declared on behalf of the gathered political elites that China was entering a ‘new era’ of socialism with Chinese characteristics. Among the many points made at the Congress was an affirmation that ‘peace and development remain irreversible trends’, a reference to a central notion in the Party's public assessment of the global context within which the People's Republic of China (PRC) had developed since the 1980s. However, China's external political environment was changing. A year later, this was made clear when then United States (US) Vice President Mike Pence elaborated on a different ‘new era’, one of great power competition, in a speech which set out a confrontational policy of strategic rivalry with China (Pence, 2018). It followed the publication in December 2017 of the first National Security Strategy of the US administration led by President Donald Trump, which described the return of ‘great power competition’, with China and Russia ‘contesting [the US’s] geopolitical advantages and trying to change the international order in their favor’ (National Security Strategy, 2017, p 27).

The extent of the deterioration in US– China relations and the changes in China's external environment have become more apparent over time.

This book has engaged debates about China as a risen, global power. Bringing together work in China Studies with scholarship from the ‘international disciplines’, it offers a critical analysis of the interplay of Chinese official and scholarly views and Anglophone discussions. By critiquing three dominant narratives of China – the return of geopolitics, contesting liberal order and collaborative governance – it highlights a much greater congruence between many Chinese and Anglophone Western perspectives than is found in most mainstream analyses, while exploring the implications and diversity of Chinese alternatives and ‘will to difference’. Moving beyond both ‘the quest for certainty rooted in the Western self-imagination’ (Pan, 2012, p 53) and existing binary ‘geo-narratives’ – market/state, east/west, authoritarian/liberal and fetishization of China's capitalist model as something entirely new requiring ‘radical countermeasures’ (Zhang and Lan, 2022, p 202) – requires us to take China seriously on its own terms as a distinctive entity but one whose visions emerge in dialectical relationships with many existing features of the international system and global order. There is deliberate tension or contradiction in this statement, a conclusion which emerges from the key insights of the ‘global China’ literature from which the book takes its title, and which underpins its analysis.

This concluding chapter summarizes the main findings and arguments of the book and comments briefly on some other contemporary policy themes which can shed further light on its conclusions.

Today, conflicting understandings of China jostle for attention, as dominant Anglophone narratives contrast with mainstream Chinese discourses. Across much of the West, perceptions of China have changed markedly, from assumptions about China's ‘convergence’ through engagement to a politics of irreconcilable difference and confrontation. This book examines how views of China as a risen, global power have shifted by critiquing three dominant narratives: the return of geopolitics, contesting liberal order and collaborative governance. While the first two narratives are strongest in the West, the third is primarily embedded in Chinese global visions. Based on this critique, and responding to the notion that ‘it is probably time to use the language of China risen’ (Breslin, 2021, p 2), the book sets out a nuanced account of China as a major global power, with its main focus on the period of Xi Jinping's leadership (2012– ).

The book bridges work in China Studies and International Relations, Global Political Economy and critical geopolitics to examine the three narratives using the lens of the politics of knowledge production and discourse, based on a foundational comprehensive review of relevant academic literatures which explain and conceptualize China's rise. Rejecting simplistic perspectives and the idea that China is a completely different ‘other’, it argues that China as a global power needs to be understood in all its contested complexity and to be taken seriously on its own terms as a distinctive entity, but one whose development and visions have emerged in dialectical, intertwined relationships with many existing features of global order.

The Indian writer Upamanyu Chatterjee, whose debut novel English, August, published in 1988, examined the coming of age of Agastya Sen, a disenchanted junior civil servant in a moffusil Indian town, returns to examine bureaucratic power in his recent novella titled The Revenge of the Non-Vegetarian. Published in 2018, the novella features Agastya's father, Madhusudan Sen, as a budding officer of the Indian Civil Services posted in the fictional north Indian state of Narmada Pradesh in newly independent India. Sen's proclivity for beef and his difficulty in sourcing meat in a predominantly Hindu town serve as a fertile ground for debates around the politics of food choices – who gets to choose, who bears the burden to service that choice, the cost of consuming meat in a geographically ‘vegetarian’ region and the larger ethics of a non-vegetarian diet. While Sen clandestinely ropes in a Muslim subordinate, Nadeem Dahlvi, to replenish his appetite for beef, in particular, this secret contract is sundered when Dahlvi and his family are murdered. This crime echoes the escalating violence of ‘gau rakshaks’, or self-styled cow protectors, mostly male and always Hindu, who assault and sometimes lynch those who belong to historically marginalised religious and caste communities, especially Muslims and Dalits, for consuming or simply possessing beef. The lynching of Mohammed Akhlaq by upper-caste Hindu Thakurs in Dadri, a village in Uttar Pradesh, in 2015 is one of the few cases of lynching that has garnered attention, with the perpetrators still left free. The novella exposes the slow judicial process in postcolonial India, the impossibility of an equitable punishment for crime, and the idea of revenge as a stand-in and an instantaneous substitute for justice.

Introduction

How do we explore the relationalities of an animal that is believed to be a heavenly body, a symbol of purity, power, identity and life – an animal that is also at once social, sacrificial, economically valuable and consumed? This chapter is based on my research in the hill forests of Arunachal Pradesh in northeastern India where I explore human–animal relations – more specifically, the ways in which the mithun (Bos frontalis) is entangled in the everyday lives and practices of many tribes in the region. Mithuns are semi-domesticated animals found in India's northeast – sparsely distributed across Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram – Bhutan, the Chin State in Myanmar and the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. Also known as the ‘ceremonial ox’1 of northeast India, the mithun is the most culturally, socially and economically valuable animal among many indigenous people in the region extending to southeast Asia. Festivals are celebrated and rituals are performed keeping the mithun at the centre of familial and spiritual relationships. The life and the existence of the mithun, thus, have become congruent with not only the structures of a village, tribe or community but also its forests, agriculture and people's food habits. Given the animal's significance in many tribal societies of the region, the focus in the chapter remains not on the practices of any specific tribe but on the connectedness of the narratives of different tribes across Arunachal Pradesh.

Introduction

There are various ways to view tribal communities and their relations with animals, both domesticated and wild animals. The worldview of tribal communities is incomplete without the presence of animals. This chapter discusses the exceptional human–animal relations of a tribe, the Bodo, from northeast India. Among all the tribal societies, the Bodo are known as the largest tribe in the plains of the northeast region. However, this community has a few characteristics that make them different from others. For example, pigs, known as oma in Bodo language, are an important part of the Bodo community, reflecting a strong human–animal bond, which is the focus of the chapter. The relationship between humans and animals in Bodo society has its own value for defining the community as an inimitable tribal group in the world. In this chapter, I look at the Bodoland Territorial Region (BTR) and examine (a) the everyday lives of the Bodo with respect to pigs, (b) the importance of pigs in the sociocultural milieu, (c) pigs as an economy and livelihood and (d) the transformation in Bodo–pig relations.

The BTR is an autonomous area in Assam, India, and a proposed state in northeast India. It consists of five districts situated on the northern bank of the Brahmaputra river, at the foothills of Bhutan and Arunachal Pradesh. It is a subdivision of the government established in accordance with the Sixth Schedule of the Indian Constitution. It was formerly known as the Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC) when it was a separate region.