當外交困境成為道德難題
陳總統近日多次表示要以台灣的名稱申請加入聯合國，並且就入聯事宜舉辦全國公投以示民意。在野黨以及反對陳總統個人者率多以國內政治來解釋這樣的外交行為，認為加入聯合國本來就是台灣全民所望，以如此名義舉辦公投乃是畫蛇添足，其主要目的不是提升台灣的國際地位，而是要為今年底的立委選舉與明年三月的總統大選創造民進黨人捍衛台灣主權的正面形象，好鞏固選票，因此入聯公投與以台灣名義加入聯合國乃是陳總統將外交戰術轉用於國內選舉戰略的典型操作。反對人士因此嚴加譴責這種為了確保國內選舉的結果而任意消費全民外交共識與有限外交資源的做法。民進黨內的主流人士與其他以追求台灣獨立為志業者則持相反的意見，她們以為舉辦入聯公投並非僅只為了贏得選舉，而是要向國際社會展現台灣民主化的成果，以及表達台灣人民對於得到國際承認與尊重的渴望，並以此做為政府外交工作的精神後盾。國際社會的反對，特別是美國政府的反對，不應該是台灣外交改變戰術的原因，而該是我們努力改變的國際現實，因為以台灣名義申請加入聯合國實乃天經地義之事，如果我們只因美國的反對就徹頭縮尾，那台灣還是個獨立的政治實體嗎? 台灣的民主政治還算是全球政治民主化的典範嗎? 台灣的外交還能走出去嗎? 中國努力了二十一年才加入聯合國，而台灣從1991年算起，為了入聯的努力到如今只有十六個年頭，何況台灣還是個國際關係中的小國。美國政府則是認為陳總統以台灣的名稱申請加入聯合國乃是片面改變兩岸現存的政治關係，美國不只不支持，還要明確表示反對。
我們在短時間內無法得知陳總統的積極外交作為是否得到美國政府背後的默許或是諒解，也不會了解台北與北京當局是否仍然維持某種程度的秘密溝通管道。然而，倘若陳總統檯面上的外交言詞的確就是民進黨政權真正努力推動的，那麼眼下的情形已演變為一個無人願意進入，卻又是人人親手造成的道德困境。所謂的道德困境，指的是決策者陷入了一個對與對的抉擇，亦即他們所面對的外交選項都是可欲且理性的，但卻又是互相排斥的，選擇其中一個就勢必要放棄另外幾個。為了合理化他們的外交政策抉擇，政治人物遂強調所選政策的道德高度與政治正確的程度，這樣的政策辯護也許有效地鞏固了政權的合法性與選民的支持度，卻也使外交政策陷入了不能辯論，絕對主義，無可轉圜的僵局。換句話說，外交已經從可能的藝術轉變為單一的邏輯，外交若非全勝，就是大敗，其間沒有灰色地帶，人人固守在他們自己所建構的邏輯城堡裡，因而嚴重窄化了原本就已不多的討論空間。而誰是錯的呢? 沒有人是錯的。陳總統與民進黨人捍衛台灣主權與宣揚民主成就的理念錯了嗎? 沒錯。在野黨與獨立人士所強調的謹慎務實的原則錯了嗎? 當然也沒錯。那麼，錯是在美方嗎? 美國近年向中方傾斜的外交政策，與其說是布希政府與獨裁者妥協，倒不如說是美國體認到中方崛起的全球政經軍實力，在反恐戰爭曠日持久的今天，美國需要中國在東亞甚至全球秩序上扮演穩定者的角色，尤其是北韓核武，印巴爭端，蘇丹達佛衝突上，無一不需要北京的鼎力相助，或者至少不能扯華盛頓的後腿。所以誰又能指責美方為了維護東亞和平與穩定所做出不支持台灣入聯的政策決擇? 講得更極端一些，中國也可以義正詞嚴地說他們壓縮台灣外交空間的做法是在維護國際關係中不可或缺的法理規範，亦即國家主權不可分割原則。
就另一個角度而言，台灣今日的外交困境不折不扣地顯示出大國與小國在國際關係上的區別。美國政府所做的抉擇，台灣就算不喜歡，也要咬牙適應。中國在全世界各地對台灣外交所施加的強大壓力，也不是台灣政府或人民藉由通過幾項具有指標性的公民投票就能改變。台灣是個小國，世界局勢很難因為小國內部的集體願望而遽然改變國際關係的行為模式。我們不應再沉湎於六四之後十年所得的外交果實；如今的情形是對岸比我們更有錢，比我們更有談判的籌碼，還比我們更有實力堅持自己的外交政策。比錢比子彈比決心比盟邦，我們都差對岸一大截，這不是長他人志氣，這是我們外交政策的出發點。承認中國的強大與接受美國的制約不代表台灣外交的投降主義，而應該是台灣內部尋求外交共識的基礎。如果我們不願接受被中華人民共和國統治的可能，但在同時也體認到完全獨立將帶來毀滅性的後果，那麼放棄單一狹隘的道德式外交邏輯似乎就成為合理的作為。
當加入聯合國運動在九十年代初開始出現時，中國仍未走出國際社會對六四血腥鎮壓的抵制，國際環境相對地對台灣有利。其時台灣的務實外交在拉美，環太，與非洲大陸攻城略地，而台灣與美國的關係也在穩定中持續加溫，美日兩國的鼎力支持也使台灣得以加入亞太經合會和參與關貿總協的入會談判。台灣當時的外交大環境事實上是比現在還有利的。即便是如此，由李前總統所主導的重返聯合國運動也是小心翼翼，步步為營，並且是由官方與民間兩方面分進合擊。政府將較為激進、直接的訴求留予當時尚在野的民進黨人與獨派台美人社團去推動，而外交部所推出的提案則相對溫和與間接，主要是要求聯合國會員國大會同意成立一個研究台灣申請入會的研究委員會。這固然是反映台灣內部的政治版圖，但也可看作是外交行為上的一個安全閥: 把溫和穩健的政策作為運動的主軸，但也鼓勵民間與在野黨在外交體制外的發聲，如此大國不至於當面反對，而為我提案的邦交國也承擔較少的政治風險，又能彰顯我國的民主化程就。十六年之後的今天，兩岸相對的外交地位早已更易，我們的政經優勢不再，而對岸正在快速的崛起，並且他們的外交部門已能充分地吸收並活用各種公關與談判的戰術來配合其大國外交戰略。簡言之，中國外交的能耐與技巧已非吳下阿蒙，他們對國際組織的熟悉與應用國際法原則的經驗早已大大超越台灣的外交人員。如果當年國際情勢對台灣有利，而政府加入聯合國的目標與做法尚是如此謹慎溫和，我們怎能期待台灣在今日不利的國際情勢之下，還能用粗糙的方式去堅持那遠不可得且不能妥協的道德理念?
我這樣說，意思並不是要陳總統與執政黨再次使用國民黨時代加入聯合國的做法，此一時也，彼一時也，要完全移植當年的目標與做法已是不可得。但是這就是政府對外交該負的責任: 審時適度地考量每個角度，並做出在特定的政策環境裡對國家損害最小而獲益最大的外交抉擇。民進黨政府自兩千零六年陳總統元旦講話之後的外交政策乃是不斷強調外交邏輯的單一性，絕對性，道德性，與不可妥協性。然而這種對道德理念近乎崇拜式的堅持使美國感到困擾，也壓縮了台灣內部對外交戰術的討論空間，更惡化國內政黨之間非理性的相互懷疑與非建設性的惡意攻訐。而執意地凸顯公投民主理念不過顯示我們政治人物對國際關係認識的不足，也徒然加深了台美之間的裂縫。如果我們仍然希望美國是台灣軍事與外交的守護者，我們至少要善盡與這個準盟邦溝通的義務。外交就是你來我往，來而不往非禮也，美國對台灣的安全保證是有條件的，不是予取予求的。不斷地踩紅線以彰顯尊嚴，挑戰既有規範好凸顯悲情，又要求盟國無條件的支持，不是一個負責任的政府應有的作為。我們盼望陳總統在他剩下不到一年的任期裡能為下屆政府保留一些外交迴旋的餘地，盡可能地將外交政策，尤其是加入聯合國的政策，視作一個政治性與專業性兼備的問題，而不僅僅是一個絕對地道德原則。我們也期盼看到日漸邊緣化的外交專業人員能重回決策核心，對加入聯合國提供第一線與技術性的看法，也希望國安會的高級幕僚能恪盡職責，為穩健的全盤國安戰略提供多元中肯的分析。如果選舉的考量乃是任何民主國家都無法避免的政治現象，至少我們可以提醒執政黨，冒進的外交政策等於是要下一任政府背負無法估量的生存風險，這樣對勝選與繼續執政當然不是利多。
最後，我們也要提醒美日與中國，台灣作為小國固然在短期內無力撼動國際現實，但是一個深受外交挫折的台灣卻是激進獨立勢力最好的溫床。當台灣的外交困境不受重視，當他的外交承認都被切斷，連起碼的人格生存與國際地位都被拋到空中時，也就是島內溫和穩健力量失去合法性的日子。現代國際關係史已經一次又一次地證明，一個處在強權競爭之下的小國，其內政穩定與否，其外交激進與否，將會密切牽動國際權力(或是區域權力)的重分配。這不是威脅盟國，這只是善意地提醒他們，不要拒絕台灣合情合理的外交要求，因為沒有一個屢受挫折與悲情的國家會願意維持現狀。當現存東亞區域秩序不再能帶給台灣利益，當台灣的激進獨立主張成為外交與軍事政策的主流時，沒有人能置身事外不受影響，也沒有人能夠像彼拉多一樣卸責地說: 這事與我無關，是你們把耶穌釘了十字架的。
Friday, June 22, 2007
Sunday, June 10, 2007
懶了，放些照片就好
加州大學爾灣分校的Aldrich Park, 我們管她叫中央公園，因為聽說那是仿照紐約市的中央公園而建的
離爾灣僅僅十五分鐘的新港灘(Newport Beach) 與巴柏島(Balboa Island), 晚春黃昏的景色。
China's treaty revision campaigns in the 1920s: a case study of frame-genealogy approach in IR
China’s treaty revision movement in the 1920s: a case study of the revisionist-integrationist duality in foreign policy
This chapter examines the treaty revision campaign, a crucial element of China’s foreign policy in the 1920s, in order to answer one set of understudied questions of international relations: Can there be a situation wherein a state acts both as a system challenger (that endeavors to change certain elements of international order) and a system supporter (that upholds the existing international order by participating in it)? If so, what factors, material or ideational, drive the state to behave that way? Which level of analysis, systemic or unit-level, should be given more weight in accounting for the state’s seemingly paradoxical foreign policy? A complementary question would be: how to explain a phenomenon in which the demands of a state in international politics are not commensurate with her relative capabilities?
Structural realism of international relations (IR) scholarship has suggested that the structure of international relations—the anarchical character of international politics and the relative distribution of state capabilities—more adequately explains and predicts the long-term development of international relations. I argue, however, that anarchy and material capabilities are necessary, but not sufficient variables, that shape the process and determine the outcome of interactions among states. I consider anarchy and material capabilities as structural parameters that externally constrain the scope of a state’s foreign policy goals and means, but they rarely directly dictate the state’s foreign policy or bear on her domestic governance. The structural realist presupposition of a “transmission belt” that automatically translates systemic pressures into the foreign policy calculation of the state’s political leadership at the unit-level does not hold in empirical studies.[i]
This project hence rests on a presupposition that is distinctive to structural realism: in addition to relative material capabilities that significantly shape power relations of states in anarchical international politics, the ways by which states perceive and interpret such “objectively” defined power relations should be an equally important focus of foreign policy analysis. Foreign policymaking, as neo-classical realism suggests, is never a mechanical reflection of the external environment; rather, it is much more a product of a dynamic process whose participants contend for the dominant interpretation of the external opportunities and challenges.[ii] The material structure of international relations is restrictive, if not decisive, of the state’s foreign policymaking and domestic institution-building—the two political phenomena whose investigation requires the inclusion of normative-ideational factors in the explanatory equation. Instead of conceptualizing international power relations as an independent variable that causes certain policy/behavior to happen as dependent variables, I consider it more appropriate to characterize international relations as a dynamic temporal-spatial context of power relations that both constrains and makes available certain foreign policy options to the foreign policy-makers of each state. A context of international power relations, as Helle Malmvig maintains, is a condition of possibility that allows multiple configurations of discourse and practice to be generated by actors, hence leading to different endpoints in history.[iii]
By suggests that history “could have been different,” this conception of historiography enables a research strategy that avoids determinism and teleology, and preserves agency and contingency, even in a historical case.[iv] Instead of emphasizing the end result of a linear and mechanic relationship between a cause and its effect, my research argues that history is not an irreversible series of events inevitably resulted in a particular outcome. Moreover, I attempt to highlight the historical process in which interactive actors or groups of actors, through their purpose-driven discourses and activities, mobilized the context-given resources (both material and ideational) to enlarge their power base and further their own political agenda that eventually led to a re-configuration of formality and content of international relations in a specified issue-area.
By stressing the process-oriented research method I am moving away from the realist IR paradigm that holds on to ontological rationalism and epistemological positivism, and lean more toward the relatively uncharted realm of constructivist ontology and interpretive epistemology. While neo-classical realism recaptures the importance of ideational variables in foreign policymaking process, the approach remains subscribed to the realist notion of international politics that treats material capabilities and national interests as pre-defined and a priori constant. At most, neo-classical realism considers the ideational factor as an intermediate variable between relative material capabilities of a state and her actual foreign policy, but the approach keeps ideas separate from capabilities as two distinct entities from each other. I argue, however, that (1) the definition and utility of material capabilities are rarely absolute and monolithic, but almost always relational and malleable; (2) national interests and the means devised to protect/maximize those interests are not constant but are constantly re-examined and re-evaluated by different groups of foreign policymakers; and (3) ideas and capabilities inter-penetrate and co-constitute each other. Ideas function more than simply a lens through which selected material capabilities are “seen” or “recovered,” as if that lens and the found capabilities are two separate entities like neo-classical realists suggest. Instead, the way policy makers perceive and interpret international politics not only constructs the way they react to external challenges and opportunities, but also defines the range of appropriate policy instruments to solve the problem lying ahead. As much as capabilities condition ideas, ideas define capabilities. This argument may be extended to the abiding debate of the agent-structure relations both in IR and political science.
The constructivist-interpretive framework I just delineated leads me to raise analytic questions different from the rationalist IR scholarship. Besides a presentation of the inter-state power relations of East Asia during the 1920s, I further ask what these power relations meant to different groups of China’s foreign policymakers who held competing understandings of Sino-Western relations and interpreted certain foreign affairs issues through those competing understandings. As Samuel H. Beer cogently suggests, human behavior “always comes with meaning, with intentions and purposes. . . . [I]f the social scientists wants to describe the sequence of the interaction, he cannot omit what it means to the actors. He studies not just behavior but action.”[v] I plan to examine the interpretive actions of foreign policymakers who attempted to make sense of particular foreign affairs issues by referring to their prior understandings of international politics, and offered foreign policy proposals accordingly. This meaning-constructing endeavor by China’s foreign policymakers cannot be overestimated, because each set of prior understandings provides a frame, or a template, that “identifies a problem and offers a solution.”[vi] Confronting the same situation, foreign policymakers with different mental constructs would frame the problem, define the situation, and devise policy proposals differently by following their previous understandings of Sino-Western relations. Hence adopting frame analysis requires “an explanation of how categories of thought work together to shape perception and define a situation. It must be illustrated how cognitive categories operate to organize, shape, and classify raw experiential material, that is make it meaningful.”[vii]
So I conceive China’s foreign policymaking during the 1920s as a deliberative and interpretive process, in which contending groups of Chinese political participants with competing frames of perception and interpretation vied for their policy proposals’ legitimation and dominance by “seeking to generate agreement and support” with a broader audience, both domestic and international.[viii] This dynamic process eventually brought about an inter-subjective and temporarily stabilized policy decision, whose persuasiveness was constantly questioned and whose legitimacy was unceasingly re-examined by contending policymakers and their ideas. Therefore this stabilized policy decision was rarely final, and was under close scrutiny by contending groups of political actors who were constituted with competing frames and different definitions of situations. A change in the membership of China’s foreign policy decision-making body (that introduced new understandings of international politics), or the way international politics unfolded in particular issue-area (that challenged the constituting logic of the decision, or falsified the predictions it suggested) would either reinforce the legitimacy of that decision, or problematize its relevance and appropriateness to that issue-area. A foreign policy decision hence is a layered composition of ruptures, contradictions and continuities of policy frames.
This chapter begins with an examination of changing power relations of East Asia in the 1920s and China’s status in that regional order. It has been a consensus among historians of modern Chinese history that, until the early 1920s, the major powers still yet defined China as an equal member in the Westphalian international system. Throughout that decade China remained an inflammatory problem, and was not considered a respectable partner, in international politics.[ix] Internally divided and materially underdeveloped, the empire-turned Republic of China was still a long way from being taken seriously with her requests for full recognition and equal membership. Although China’s material power in absolute terms was indisputably negligible compared to the capabilities of major stakeholders in East Asian geopolitics, the same region, however, had witnessed a significant shift in the balance of power in the post-WWI era: a ascending but unsecured Japan, a weakened but staying Britain, a devastated France, a revolutionary Russia, and a powerful yet un-committed America. A flux in East Asian power relations rendered obsolete the pre-war arrangement of major powers on their China policy, a destabilizing development that unexpectedly elevated China’s relative bargaining power in her bilateral relations with respective major powers.[x] But old rules died hard; a rearranged East Asian order never meant that major powers voluntarily adjust their economic, legal and territorial privileges in China; nor did it precede an automatic withdrawal of major powers from their deep intervention in China’s administration in almost every modern sector.[xi]
Following the description of shifting East Asian order as a temporal-spacial context of international politics is an analysis of China’s foreign policy with respect to her campaigns for treaty revision. Notwithstanding her structural weakness and unfavorable environment, China since the mid-1920s was becoming more relentless in her requests to abolish the “unequal treaties” system, which was tantamount to a redefinition of Sino-Western relations even before the country was administratively unified and materially strengthened. This apparently revisionist foreign policy was preceded by a heightened frequency and increasing violence in Sino-Western confrontations in Chinese territory during in the mid-1920s. Apparently the radicalization of China’s foreign policy contradicts the structural realist proposition, which suggests that distribution of relative material capabilities in international relations determines the foreign policy of each state. Structural realism can not adequately account for a conspicuous disparity between China’s miniscule capabilities and her ambitious foreign policy.
But a depiction of China as a challenger of East Asian order constitutes only a half of what actually happened in the 1920s. Instead, what actually happened was that two approaches for the realization of treaty revision appeared simultaneously in China’s foreign policy, namely, revisionist demands and relentless bargaining on the one hand, and determined domestic reform and institution-building on the other. The two approaches complemented each other to squeeze out concessions from the weakened and uncoordinated imperial powers little by little. Furthermore, China’s domestic legal-political reform was devised not to discard or overthrow the existing international legal system; rather, this foreign policy-oriented domestic reform was meant to rectify the system by way of redressing issues that, in the eyes of the Chinese, had severely forestalled the constituting norms of the system, i.e., sovereign equality and territorial jurisdiction. In short, China as a weak member of international order acted as a system challenger and a system supporter almost simultaneously. This seemingly paradoxical phenomenon cannot be adequately explained until the influence of ideational factors (and their interactions with material factors), both at system and unit levels, are given due attention. This realization leads to the third section of this chapter.
China’s ostensibly incoherent foreign policy, I suggest, was a layered composition of two competing interpretive frames of Sino-Western relations that prevailed in Chinese politics throughout the 1920s. Influenced by political ideals and ideologies from abroad (Western Europe, the U.S., Russia, and Japan), Chinese intellectuals, politicians and political activists constructed and rallied around these two contending sets of arguments in order to explain China’s structural failure since the last years of her imperial past, and also to propose corresponding prescriptions. Although the two sets of arguments began from the same nationalistic baseline—China’s sense of humiliation and frustration in her foreign affairs—they diverged along different pathways by providing competing accounts of the root cause of China’s constant failure and the prescriptions for that problem.[xii] The two contending frames of interpretations are conceptualized as two ideal-types of persuasion, lest I risk reifying the 1920s Chinese foreign policy.[xiii] That is, the policy stance and preference of almost every foreign affairs participant in the 1920s China was a mixture or approximation of the two interpretations, with one dominating interpretation over the other.
The first frame of interpretation, which I term the internationalist, attributed China’s perpetual decline mainly to ineffective domestic institutions and decadent state capabilities.[xiv] For the internationalist, China’s international humiliation meant her institutional weakness from within. Of those who approximated this frame, the prescription for China’s weakness was state-building through institutional modernization: creating a capable and powerful bureaucracy in the central government, and encouraging the expansion of a modern economy in coastal and metropolitan areas to garner sufficient taxation for the regime’s administrative reform and security apparatuses. In other words, the establishment of modern technocracy in the central government, bolstered by elitist professionalism in the modern-urban setting, became the core notion of the internationalist prescription for strengthening the country. Seeing through the internationalist prism, financial and technological aid from industrially advanced states were crucial elements for the prospect of China’s administrative reform, political centralization and military modernization. Therefore, this argument held, China should concentrate on strengthening her administrative, political, and security capabilities as her first and foremost task, because it was the lack of those core capabilities that invited all the humiliations and frustrations.
China, following this argument, should avoid confrontation with major powers, especially on intractable but less urgent issues, for example the continuous practice of extraterritoriality in the form of consular justice, because those foreign privileges could be dealt with much easier when the quality of China’s domestic governance improved to a significant degree.[xv] The benefits of imperialist presence in China outweighed its costs at this stage, because China could not strengthen herself without foreign assistance.[xvi] The internationalist suasion hence urged a modest and conciliatory foreign policy that sought national security and material progress through bargaining and cooperation with major powers.
Consequently internationalists held the view that China should work closely with major powers to first reform her domestic governance and then move on to improve her international status.[xvii] In short, China could revise the legal-political terms of Sino-Western relations only after she established domestic legal-political institutions compatible with those of Western counterparts. Apparently the international normative trend of the day appealed to those who favored the internationalist argument: the emphasis on the enlargement and perfection of administrative power found theoretical endorsement in the enduring preoccupation of public administration in contemporary German and American political science. Similarly, the calling of political centralization for the making of a strong state may be traced to the political theory of organic origin of the nation-state which was then dominant in Germany, the U.S., and especially Japan.
Particularly, the post-WWI Chinese society was well receptive to Wilson’s liberal notions of national self-determination and sovereign equality, not only because those liberal ideals hinted the potential malleability of the existing international legal-political system, but even more because Wilsonian theory pre-supposed the positive relationship between the quality of public administration (both national and international) and international peace.[xviii] This putative correlation between public administration and world peace justified the internationalist agenda of reforming China’s political and judicial institutions as the most important task of Chinese government, because her self-reforming efforts would contribute to peace and justice in international relations, and hence would receive due recognition from the international society, render obsolete and unnecessary the existing legal framework of Sino-Western relations, and have it either revised or altogether repealed. [xix] Western experts of law and public administration who were either architects or proponents of the modern “administrative science,” for example Frank Goodnow and William Willoughby, had participated in administrative modernization projects of the Beijing regime (1912-1928).[xx]
The other frame of interpretation, which I call the revolutionist, contended that state-building through merit-based technocracy and international cooperation was a path leading to China’s perpetual subordination, not eventual emancipation. The root cause of China’s humiliation, the revolutionist perspective insisted, was the worldwide imperialist expansion and the accompanying imperialist aggression against China’s sovereignty.[xxi] For the revolutionist, China’s international humiliation meant imperialist hegemony from without. What the revolutionist advocated as the solution for China’s weakness was nation-building through mass mobilization and grass-roots resistance: the revolutionist championed an immediate and—if necessary—unilateral termination of “unequal” Western privileges currently exercised in China. They also favored a makeover of the existing international legal-political order, which in their eyes had functioned to justify and sustain a hegemonic and oppressive relationship between major powers and China (hence the invented term “unequal treaties” in China circa 1924). Such an ambitious strategy, the revolutionist held, should begin from grassroots campaigns that mobilized disgruntled groups of intellectuals, laborers, soldiers and radical politicians, and inculcated them with a consciousness of China as an oppressed nation vis-à-vis Western powers as imperialist oppressors. Hence the revolutionist solution for China’s structural problem relied mainly on the “enlightened” masses, mostly in urban and modern sectors.
The revolutionist ridiculed the internationalist and the Beijing regime they supported as the agent of imperialist oppressors (so the propagation of derogatory terms such as the “warlord,” “the comprador class,” and the “piggy parliamentarian” in the 1920s) who perpetuated China’s inferior status.[xxii] Also, the internationalist efforts of state-building were relegated by the revolutionist as nothing more than erecting a legal-political infrastructure that legalized and reinforced imperialist domination and that benefited the agents of the major powers (mainly the militarists and bankers in the context of the 1920s China). They argued, therefore, that China should set the eradication of the “unequal treaties” system as the top priority of foreign policy agenda. Consequently the revolutionist advocated a foreign policy that was disturbing to the vested interests of the treaty powers in China, and the revolutionist demands for a radical revision or even immediate abrogation of the “unequal treaties” was tantamount to a seismic shift of the existing international order. Based upon popular support, the revolutionist foreign policy converted what had been a manifestation of Western material superiority, i.e., the modern sector of economy in China, into a powerful weapon of an anti-imperialist movement during the 1920s, a development that was inconceivable before the tide of radical ideals rolled in.[xxiii]
However, the unilateral action and unyielding attitude of the revolutionist faction almost always invited vehement resistance of major powers, hence beginning in the mid-1920s a series of violent and consequential conflicts between China’s nationalist movement and individual major powers (Britain, Japan, Russia and the U.S.) occurred. Although the revolutionist interpretation was antithetical to its internationalist contender, neither of the arguments was of a purely indigenous origin. Whereas liberal Wilsonism and conservative statism lent support to the internationalist faction, Marxism-Leninism and (to a lesser degree) anarchism enriched the intellectual contents and empowered revolutionism in China.
It has to point out that as ideal types standing on the two ends of a conceptual continuum, the two frames of interpretation of Sino-Western relations may be found co-existed and convoluted in Chinese foreign policy, whose configuration was conditioned by the context of East Asian power relations of the 1920s. It was not the case that the prevalence of one frame of interpretation completely replaced and eradicated the presence of the other frame from policymaking process; instead, during the decade Chinese foreign policy was situated somewhere along the continuum. It should be understood that I apply a frame analysis, in a genealogical sense, to investigate the historical process in which the two frames penetrated in Chinese foreign policy and contended for predominance, and generated policy change. A genealogy approach pre-supposes that a social phenomenon comes about less as a manifestation of some indispensable, innate and coherent essences of that phenomenon, but more as a presentation of constantly evolving configuration of discontinuities and contradictions. Hence a social phenomenon is by definition inconsistent and incoherent in its content and expression. In other words, a genealogy approach suggests that a social phenomenon is made by layers and juxtaposition of contending ideas and practices.[xxiv] Rather than seeking out a linear succession of competing foreign policy proposals in Chinese politics, I trace the process of discursive transformation through which the now taken-for-granted terms and arguments, for example the concepts of warlordism and the understanding of the unequal treaties, were invented, adopted, legitimized and mobilized by China’s political activists, and eventually became orthodoxy narratives in China’s foreign policymaking. This genealogy approach is adequate in analyzing the changing configuration of the 1920s Chinese foreign policy that, due to the contention of the two frames of interpretation, seems self-contradictory, wavering and incoherent.
Placing emphasis on the genealogy of interaction of the two contending frames of interpretation during the 1920s would help better explain the radicalization of China’s foreign policy. Internationalism as the predominant interpretation of Sino-Western relations came under severe challenges after the Paris Peace Conference and the Washington Conference, because in the eyes of Chinese political activists (and potentially active ones) the internationalist explanations and prescriptions of China’s weakness floated farther and farther away from what they perceived as the embarrassing reality of China’s humiliating status in world politics. Given the frustration with China’s structural weakness and the infuriating disillusionment with the internationalist policy proposals, Chinese political activists since the early 1920s began to seek and devise alternative interpretations and prescriptions that would make sense of China’s frustration in her foreign affairs. While the revolutionist interpretation was well received and gaining the upper hand among Chinese political activists at the grassroots level, the internationalist frame did not phase out from Chinese official declarations (although the interpretation indeed suffered a blow of legitimacy crisis) but went through a metamorphotic ordeal (that took off the liberal constitutionalist trait and put on an authoritarian statist attribute), and later regained prestige in the foreign policy of the Nationalist regime based at Nanjing (1928-1937).
In the meantime, East Asian power relations were changing, with a war-devastated Britain retreating and a victorious but insecure Japan marching in to assure and expand her interests in mainland Asia. This simultaneous flux of ideational and material structures co-developed into the treaty revision movement in the 1920s, which was executed by successive Chinese regimes (the Beijing, Canton, Wuhan, and eventually the Nanjing governments), and by the early 1930s had made uneven achievements in reclaiming tariff autonomy, recovering several territorial concessions, and abolishing extraterritorial justice.
In summary, let us be reminded again of the analytic question at the outset of this chapter: is it possible for a state to simultaneously challenge and support the existing international legal-political order? My tentative answer is a conditioned yes because the case of the 1920s Chinese foreign policy clearly presents an example.
[i] Gideon Rose, “Neoclassical Realism and Theories of Foreign Policy” World Politics 51(1): pp. 144-172.
[ii] The loosely defined label of neo-classical realism recaptures the importance of meaning, ideas, intentions and perceptions in foreign policymaking process while retains the fundamental notions of realism. To understand the appearance and agenda of the approach, read Gideon Rose, “Neoclassical Realism and Theories of Foreign Policy” World Politics 51(1): pp. 144-172; Colin Elman and Miriam Fendius Elman, “Negotiating International History and Politics” in Bridges and Boundaries: Historians, Political Scientists, and the Study of International Relations, edited by Colin Elman and Miriam Fendius Elman, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2001), pp. 1-36; Randall L. Schweller, “The Twenty Year’ Crisis, 1919-39: Why a Concert Didn’t Arise”, in Bridges and Boundaries, pp. 181-212; Randall L. Schweller, “The Progressiveness of Neoclassical Realism” in Progress in International Relations Theory: Appraising the Field, edited by Colin Elman and Miriam Fendius Elman (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003), pp. 311-348; John A. Vasquez, “Kuhn or Lakatos? The Case for Multiple Frames in Appraising IR Theory” in Progress in International Relations Theory, pp. 419-454; and Jeffrey Taliaferro, “Neoclassicla Realism: The Psychology of Great Power Intervention” in Making Sense of International Relations Theory, edited by Jennifer Sterling-Folker (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner, 2006), pp. 38-53. Three recent articles that exemplify the empirical neo-classical realist approach are: S. G. Brooks and W. C. Wolfforth, “Power, Globalization, and the End of the Cold WAR: Reevaluating the Landmark Case for Ideas”, International Security 25(3): 5-53; Jason W. Davidson, “The Roots of Revisionism: Fascist Italy, 1922-39”, Security Studies 11(4): pp. 125-159; and David M. Edelstein, “Managing Uncertainty: Beliefs about Intentions and the Rise of Great Powers”, Security Studies 12(1): 1-40.
[iii] Helle Malmvig, State Sovereignty and Intervention: A Discourse Analysis of Interventionary and Non-Interventionary Practices in Kosovo and Algeria (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 30.
[iv] Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, “Making Sense of Making Sense: Configurational Analysis and the Double Hermeneutic”, in Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn, edited by Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea (Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2006), pp. 267.
[v] Samuel H. Beer, “Letter to a Graduate Student”, in Perestroika! The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science, edited by Kristen Renwick Monroe (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 58.
[vi] Audie Klotz and Cecelia Lynch, Strategies for Research in Constructivist International Relations (Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2007), pp. 53.
[vii] Pamela Brandwein, “Studying the Careers of Knowledge Claims”, in and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn, pp. 232.
[viii] Audie Klotz and Cecelia Lynch, Strategies for Research in Constructivist International Relations, 53.
[ix] Edmund S.K. Fung, The Diplomacy of Imperial Retreat: Britain’s South China Policy, 1924-1931, ch. 2.
[x] Zhang Yongjin, China in the International System 1918-1920, 100-101.
[xi] Zhang Yongjin, China in the International System 1918-1920, 102.
[xii] Marie-Claire Bergere, The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911-1937, translated by Janet Lloyd, 209.
[xiii] Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, “Making Sense of Making Sense: Configurational Analysis and the Double Hermeneutic”, 267-9.
[xiv] Marie-Claire Bergere, The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911-1937, translated by Janet Lloyd, 246.
[xv] Marie-Claire Bergere, The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911-1937, translated by Janet Lloyd, 248-9.
[xvi] Marie-Claire Bergere, The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911-1937, translated by Janet Lloyd, 211-2.
[xvii] Marie-Claire Bergere, The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911-1937, translated by Janet Lloyd, 211.
[xviii] Ido Oren, Our Enemies and US: America’s Rivalries and the Making of Political Science (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 34-8.
[xix] Zhang Yongjin, China in the International System 1918-1920, ch. 2. Marie-Claire Bergere, The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911-1937, translated by Janet Lloyd, 249-250.
[xx] Ernst P. Young, The Presidency of Yuan Shih-k’ai: Liberalism and Dictatorship in Early Republican China, pp. 171-5; Marie-Claire Bergere, The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911-1937, translated by Janet Lloyd, 220.
[xxi] Marie-Claire Bergere, The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911-1937, translated by Janet Lloyd, 230.
[xxii] Marie-Claire Bergere, The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911-1937, translated by Janet Lloyd, 243.
[xxiii] Marie-Claire Bergere, The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911-1937, translated by Janet Lloyd, 254-8.
[xxiv] James Der Derian, On Diplomacy (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1987), pp. 76, 79-80.
This chapter examines the treaty revision campaign, a crucial element of China’s foreign policy in the 1920s, in order to answer one set of understudied questions of international relations: Can there be a situation wherein a state acts both as a system challenger (that endeavors to change certain elements of international order) and a system supporter (that upholds the existing international order by participating in it)? If so, what factors, material or ideational, drive the state to behave that way? Which level of analysis, systemic or unit-level, should be given more weight in accounting for the state’s seemingly paradoxical foreign policy? A complementary question would be: how to explain a phenomenon in which the demands of a state in international politics are not commensurate with her relative capabilities?
Structural realism of international relations (IR) scholarship has suggested that the structure of international relations—the anarchical character of international politics and the relative distribution of state capabilities—more adequately explains and predicts the long-term development of international relations. I argue, however, that anarchy and material capabilities are necessary, but not sufficient variables, that shape the process and determine the outcome of interactions among states. I consider anarchy and material capabilities as structural parameters that externally constrain the scope of a state’s foreign policy goals and means, but they rarely directly dictate the state’s foreign policy or bear on her domestic governance. The structural realist presupposition of a “transmission belt” that automatically translates systemic pressures into the foreign policy calculation of the state’s political leadership at the unit-level does not hold in empirical studies.[i]
This project hence rests on a presupposition that is distinctive to structural realism: in addition to relative material capabilities that significantly shape power relations of states in anarchical international politics, the ways by which states perceive and interpret such “objectively” defined power relations should be an equally important focus of foreign policy analysis. Foreign policymaking, as neo-classical realism suggests, is never a mechanical reflection of the external environment; rather, it is much more a product of a dynamic process whose participants contend for the dominant interpretation of the external opportunities and challenges.[ii] The material structure of international relations is restrictive, if not decisive, of the state’s foreign policymaking and domestic institution-building—the two political phenomena whose investigation requires the inclusion of normative-ideational factors in the explanatory equation. Instead of conceptualizing international power relations as an independent variable that causes certain policy/behavior to happen as dependent variables, I consider it more appropriate to characterize international relations as a dynamic temporal-spatial context of power relations that both constrains and makes available certain foreign policy options to the foreign policy-makers of each state. A context of international power relations, as Helle Malmvig maintains, is a condition of possibility that allows multiple configurations of discourse and practice to be generated by actors, hence leading to different endpoints in history.[iii]
By suggests that history “could have been different,” this conception of historiography enables a research strategy that avoids determinism and teleology, and preserves agency and contingency, even in a historical case.[iv] Instead of emphasizing the end result of a linear and mechanic relationship between a cause and its effect, my research argues that history is not an irreversible series of events inevitably resulted in a particular outcome. Moreover, I attempt to highlight the historical process in which interactive actors or groups of actors, through their purpose-driven discourses and activities, mobilized the context-given resources (both material and ideational) to enlarge their power base and further their own political agenda that eventually led to a re-configuration of formality and content of international relations in a specified issue-area.
By stressing the process-oriented research method I am moving away from the realist IR paradigm that holds on to ontological rationalism and epistemological positivism, and lean more toward the relatively uncharted realm of constructivist ontology and interpretive epistemology. While neo-classical realism recaptures the importance of ideational variables in foreign policymaking process, the approach remains subscribed to the realist notion of international politics that treats material capabilities and national interests as pre-defined and a priori constant. At most, neo-classical realism considers the ideational factor as an intermediate variable between relative material capabilities of a state and her actual foreign policy, but the approach keeps ideas separate from capabilities as two distinct entities from each other. I argue, however, that (1) the definition and utility of material capabilities are rarely absolute and monolithic, but almost always relational and malleable; (2) national interests and the means devised to protect/maximize those interests are not constant but are constantly re-examined and re-evaluated by different groups of foreign policymakers; and (3) ideas and capabilities inter-penetrate and co-constitute each other. Ideas function more than simply a lens through which selected material capabilities are “seen” or “recovered,” as if that lens and the found capabilities are two separate entities like neo-classical realists suggest. Instead, the way policy makers perceive and interpret international politics not only constructs the way they react to external challenges and opportunities, but also defines the range of appropriate policy instruments to solve the problem lying ahead. As much as capabilities condition ideas, ideas define capabilities. This argument may be extended to the abiding debate of the agent-structure relations both in IR and political science.
The constructivist-interpretive framework I just delineated leads me to raise analytic questions different from the rationalist IR scholarship. Besides a presentation of the inter-state power relations of East Asia during the 1920s, I further ask what these power relations meant to different groups of China’s foreign policymakers who held competing understandings of Sino-Western relations and interpreted certain foreign affairs issues through those competing understandings. As Samuel H. Beer cogently suggests, human behavior “always comes with meaning, with intentions and purposes. . . . [I]f the social scientists wants to describe the sequence of the interaction, he cannot omit what it means to the actors. He studies not just behavior but action.”[v] I plan to examine the interpretive actions of foreign policymakers who attempted to make sense of particular foreign affairs issues by referring to their prior understandings of international politics, and offered foreign policy proposals accordingly. This meaning-constructing endeavor by China’s foreign policymakers cannot be overestimated, because each set of prior understandings provides a frame, or a template, that “identifies a problem and offers a solution.”[vi] Confronting the same situation, foreign policymakers with different mental constructs would frame the problem, define the situation, and devise policy proposals differently by following their previous understandings of Sino-Western relations. Hence adopting frame analysis requires “an explanation of how categories of thought work together to shape perception and define a situation. It must be illustrated how cognitive categories operate to organize, shape, and classify raw experiential material, that is make it meaningful.”[vii]
So I conceive China’s foreign policymaking during the 1920s as a deliberative and interpretive process, in which contending groups of Chinese political participants with competing frames of perception and interpretation vied for their policy proposals’ legitimation and dominance by “seeking to generate agreement and support” with a broader audience, both domestic and international.[viii] This dynamic process eventually brought about an inter-subjective and temporarily stabilized policy decision, whose persuasiveness was constantly questioned and whose legitimacy was unceasingly re-examined by contending policymakers and their ideas. Therefore this stabilized policy decision was rarely final, and was under close scrutiny by contending groups of political actors who were constituted with competing frames and different definitions of situations. A change in the membership of China’s foreign policy decision-making body (that introduced new understandings of international politics), or the way international politics unfolded in particular issue-area (that challenged the constituting logic of the decision, or falsified the predictions it suggested) would either reinforce the legitimacy of that decision, or problematize its relevance and appropriateness to that issue-area. A foreign policy decision hence is a layered composition of ruptures, contradictions and continuities of policy frames.
This chapter begins with an examination of changing power relations of East Asia in the 1920s and China’s status in that regional order. It has been a consensus among historians of modern Chinese history that, until the early 1920s, the major powers still yet defined China as an equal member in the Westphalian international system. Throughout that decade China remained an inflammatory problem, and was not considered a respectable partner, in international politics.[ix] Internally divided and materially underdeveloped, the empire-turned Republic of China was still a long way from being taken seriously with her requests for full recognition and equal membership. Although China’s material power in absolute terms was indisputably negligible compared to the capabilities of major stakeholders in East Asian geopolitics, the same region, however, had witnessed a significant shift in the balance of power in the post-WWI era: a ascending but unsecured Japan, a weakened but staying Britain, a devastated France, a revolutionary Russia, and a powerful yet un-committed America. A flux in East Asian power relations rendered obsolete the pre-war arrangement of major powers on their China policy, a destabilizing development that unexpectedly elevated China’s relative bargaining power in her bilateral relations with respective major powers.[x] But old rules died hard; a rearranged East Asian order never meant that major powers voluntarily adjust their economic, legal and territorial privileges in China; nor did it precede an automatic withdrawal of major powers from their deep intervention in China’s administration in almost every modern sector.[xi]
Following the description of shifting East Asian order as a temporal-spacial context of international politics is an analysis of China’s foreign policy with respect to her campaigns for treaty revision. Notwithstanding her structural weakness and unfavorable environment, China since the mid-1920s was becoming more relentless in her requests to abolish the “unequal treaties” system, which was tantamount to a redefinition of Sino-Western relations even before the country was administratively unified and materially strengthened. This apparently revisionist foreign policy was preceded by a heightened frequency and increasing violence in Sino-Western confrontations in Chinese territory during in the mid-1920s. Apparently the radicalization of China’s foreign policy contradicts the structural realist proposition, which suggests that distribution of relative material capabilities in international relations determines the foreign policy of each state. Structural realism can not adequately account for a conspicuous disparity between China’s miniscule capabilities and her ambitious foreign policy.
But a depiction of China as a challenger of East Asian order constitutes only a half of what actually happened in the 1920s. Instead, what actually happened was that two approaches for the realization of treaty revision appeared simultaneously in China’s foreign policy, namely, revisionist demands and relentless bargaining on the one hand, and determined domestic reform and institution-building on the other. The two approaches complemented each other to squeeze out concessions from the weakened and uncoordinated imperial powers little by little. Furthermore, China’s domestic legal-political reform was devised not to discard or overthrow the existing international legal system; rather, this foreign policy-oriented domestic reform was meant to rectify the system by way of redressing issues that, in the eyes of the Chinese, had severely forestalled the constituting norms of the system, i.e., sovereign equality and territorial jurisdiction. In short, China as a weak member of international order acted as a system challenger and a system supporter almost simultaneously. This seemingly paradoxical phenomenon cannot be adequately explained until the influence of ideational factors (and their interactions with material factors), both at system and unit levels, are given due attention. This realization leads to the third section of this chapter.
China’s ostensibly incoherent foreign policy, I suggest, was a layered composition of two competing interpretive frames of Sino-Western relations that prevailed in Chinese politics throughout the 1920s. Influenced by political ideals and ideologies from abroad (Western Europe, the U.S., Russia, and Japan), Chinese intellectuals, politicians and political activists constructed and rallied around these two contending sets of arguments in order to explain China’s structural failure since the last years of her imperial past, and also to propose corresponding prescriptions. Although the two sets of arguments began from the same nationalistic baseline—China’s sense of humiliation and frustration in her foreign affairs—they diverged along different pathways by providing competing accounts of the root cause of China’s constant failure and the prescriptions for that problem.[xii] The two contending frames of interpretations are conceptualized as two ideal-types of persuasion, lest I risk reifying the 1920s Chinese foreign policy.[xiii] That is, the policy stance and preference of almost every foreign affairs participant in the 1920s China was a mixture or approximation of the two interpretations, with one dominating interpretation over the other.
The first frame of interpretation, which I term the internationalist, attributed China’s perpetual decline mainly to ineffective domestic institutions and decadent state capabilities.[xiv] For the internationalist, China’s international humiliation meant her institutional weakness from within. Of those who approximated this frame, the prescription for China’s weakness was state-building through institutional modernization: creating a capable and powerful bureaucracy in the central government, and encouraging the expansion of a modern economy in coastal and metropolitan areas to garner sufficient taxation for the regime’s administrative reform and security apparatuses. In other words, the establishment of modern technocracy in the central government, bolstered by elitist professionalism in the modern-urban setting, became the core notion of the internationalist prescription for strengthening the country. Seeing through the internationalist prism, financial and technological aid from industrially advanced states were crucial elements for the prospect of China’s administrative reform, political centralization and military modernization. Therefore, this argument held, China should concentrate on strengthening her administrative, political, and security capabilities as her first and foremost task, because it was the lack of those core capabilities that invited all the humiliations and frustrations.
China, following this argument, should avoid confrontation with major powers, especially on intractable but less urgent issues, for example the continuous practice of extraterritoriality in the form of consular justice, because those foreign privileges could be dealt with much easier when the quality of China’s domestic governance improved to a significant degree.[xv] The benefits of imperialist presence in China outweighed its costs at this stage, because China could not strengthen herself without foreign assistance.[xvi] The internationalist suasion hence urged a modest and conciliatory foreign policy that sought national security and material progress through bargaining and cooperation with major powers.
Consequently internationalists held the view that China should work closely with major powers to first reform her domestic governance and then move on to improve her international status.[xvii] In short, China could revise the legal-political terms of Sino-Western relations only after she established domestic legal-political institutions compatible with those of Western counterparts. Apparently the international normative trend of the day appealed to those who favored the internationalist argument: the emphasis on the enlargement and perfection of administrative power found theoretical endorsement in the enduring preoccupation of public administration in contemporary German and American political science. Similarly, the calling of political centralization for the making of a strong state may be traced to the political theory of organic origin of the nation-state which was then dominant in Germany, the U.S., and especially Japan.
Particularly, the post-WWI Chinese society was well receptive to Wilson’s liberal notions of national self-determination and sovereign equality, not only because those liberal ideals hinted the potential malleability of the existing international legal-political system, but even more because Wilsonian theory pre-supposed the positive relationship between the quality of public administration (both national and international) and international peace.[xviii] This putative correlation between public administration and world peace justified the internationalist agenda of reforming China’s political and judicial institutions as the most important task of Chinese government, because her self-reforming efforts would contribute to peace and justice in international relations, and hence would receive due recognition from the international society, render obsolete and unnecessary the existing legal framework of Sino-Western relations, and have it either revised or altogether repealed. [xix] Western experts of law and public administration who were either architects or proponents of the modern “administrative science,” for example Frank Goodnow and William Willoughby, had participated in administrative modernization projects of the Beijing regime (1912-1928).[xx]
The other frame of interpretation, which I call the revolutionist, contended that state-building through merit-based technocracy and international cooperation was a path leading to China’s perpetual subordination, not eventual emancipation. The root cause of China’s humiliation, the revolutionist perspective insisted, was the worldwide imperialist expansion and the accompanying imperialist aggression against China’s sovereignty.[xxi] For the revolutionist, China’s international humiliation meant imperialist hegemony from without. What the revolutionist advocated as the solution for China’s weakness was nation-building through mass mobilization and grass-roots resistance: the revolutionist championed an immediate and—if necessary—unilateral termination of “unequal” Western privileges currently exercised in China. They also favored a makeover of the existing international legal-political order, which in their eyes had functioned to justify and sustain a hegemonic and oppressive relationship between major powers and China (hence the invented term “unequal treaties” in China circa 1924). Such an ambitious strategy, the revolutionist held, should begin from grassroots campaigns that mobilized disgruntled groups of intellectuals, laborers, soldiers and radical politicians, and inculcated them with a consciousness of China as an oppressed nation vis-à-vis Western powers as imperialist oppressors. Hence the revolutionist solution for China’s structural problem relied mainly on the “enlightened” masses, mostly in urban and modern sectors.
The revolutionist ridiculed the internationalist and the Beijing regime they supported as the agent of imperialist oppressors (so the propagation of derogatory terms such as the “warlord,” “the comprador class,” and the “piggy parliamentarian” in the 1920s) who perpetuated China’s inferior status.[xxii] Also, the internationalist efforts of state-building were relegated by the revolutionist as nothing more than erecting a legal-political infrastructure that legalized and reinforced imperialist domination and that benefited the agents of the major powers (mainly the militarists and bankers in the context of the 1920s China). They argued, therefore, that China should set the eradication of the “unequal treaties” system as the top priority of foreign policy agenda. Consequently the revolutionist advocated a foreign policy that was disturbing to the vested interests of the treaty powers in China, and the revolutionist demands for a radical revision or even immediate abrogation of the “unequal treaties” was tantamount to a seismic shift of the existing international order. Based upon popular support, the revolutionist foreign policy converted what had been a manifestation of Western material superiority, i.e., the modern sector of economy in China, into a powerful weapon of an anti-imperialist movement during the 1920s, a development that was inconceivable before the tide of radical ideals rolled in.[xxiii]
However, the unilateral action and unyielding attitude of the revolutionist faction almost always invited vehement resistance of major powers, hence beginning in the mid-1920s a series of violent and consequential conflicts between China’s nationalist movement and individual major powers (Britain, Japan, Russia and the U.S.) occurred. Although the revolutionist interpretation was antithetical to its internationalist contender, neither of the arguments was of a purely indigenous origin. Whereas liberal Wilsonism and conservative statism lent support to the internationalist faction, Marxism-Leninism and (to a lesser degree) anarchism enriched the intellectual contents and empowered revolutionism in China.
It has to point out that as ideal types standing on the two ends of a conceptual continuum, the two frames of interpretation of Sino-Western relations may be found co-existed and convoluted in Chinese foreign policy, whose configuration was conditioned by the context of East Asian power relations of the 1920s. It was not the case that the prevalence of one frame of interpretation completely replaced and eradicated the presence of the other frame from policymaking process; instead, during the decade Chinese foreign policy was situated somewhere along the continuum. It should be understood that I apply a frame analysis, in a genealogical sense, to investigate the historical process in which the two frames penetrated in Chinese foreign policy and contended for predominance, and generated policy change. A genealogy approach pre-supposes that a social phenomenon comes about less as a manifestation of some indispensable, innate and coherent essences of that phenomenon, but more as a presentation of constantly evolving configuration of discontinuities and contradictions. Hence a social phenomenon is by definition inconsistent and incoherent in its content and expression. In other words, a genealogy approach suggests that a social phenomenon is made by layers and juxtaposition of contending ideas and practices.[xxiv] Rather than seeking out a linear succession of competing foreign policy proposals in Chinese politics, I trace the process of discursive transformation through which the now taken-for-granted terms and arguments, for example the concepts of warlordism and the understanding of the unequal treaties, were invented, adopted, legitimized and mobilized by China’s political activists, and eventually became orthodoxy narratives in China’s foreign policymaking. This genealogy approach is adequate in analyzing the changing configuration of the 1920s Chinese foreign policy that, due to the contention of the two frames of interpretation, seems self-contradictory, wavering and incoherent.
Placing emphasis on the genealogy of interaction of the two contending frames of interpretation during the 1920s would help better explain the radicalization of China’s foreign policy. Internationalism as the predominant interpretation of Sino-Western relations came under severe challenges after the Paris Peace Conference and the Washington Conference, because in the eyes of Chinese political activists (and potentially active ones) the internationalist explanations and prescriptions of China’s weakness floated farther and farther away from what they perceived as the embarrassing reality of China’s humiliating status in world politics. Given the frustration with China’s structural weakness and the infuriating disillusionment with the internationalist policy proposals, Chinese political activists since the early 1920s began to seek and devise alternative interpretations and prescriptions that would make sense of China’s frustration in her foreign affairs. While the revolutionist interpretation was well received and gaining the upper hand among Chinese political activists at the grassroots level, the internationalist frame did not phase out from Chinese official declarations (although the interpretation indeed suffered a blow of legitimacy crisis) but went through a metamorphotic ordeal (that took off the liberal constitutionalist trait and put on an authoritarian statist attribute), and later regained prestige in the foreign policy of the Nationalist regime based at Nanjing (1928-1937).
In the meantime, East Asian power relations were changing, with a war-devastated Britain retreating and a victorious but insecure Japan marching in to assure and expand her interests in mainland Asia. This simultaneous flux of ideational and material structures co-developed into the treaty revision movement in the 1920s, which was executed by successive Chinese regimes (the Beijing, Canton, Wuhan, and eventually the Nanjing governments), and by the early 1930s had made uneven achievements in reclaiming tariff autonomy, recovering several territorial concessions, and abolishing extraterritorial justice.
In summary, let us be reminded again of the analytic question at the outset of this chapter: is it possible for a state to simultaneously challenge and support the existing international legal-political order? My tentative answer is a conditioned yes because the case of the 1920s Chinese foreign policy clearly presents an example.
[i] Gideon Rose, “Neoclassical Realism and Theories of Foreign Policy” World Politics 51(1): pp. 144-172.
[ii] The loosely defined label of neo-classical realism recaptures the importance of meaning, ideas, intentions and perceptions in foreign policymaking process while retains the fundamental notions of realism. To understand the appearance and agenda of the approach, read Gideon Rose, “Neoclassical Realism and Theories of Foreign Policy” World Politics 51(1): pp. 144-172; Colin Elman and Miriam Fendius Elman, “Negotiating International History and Politics” in Bridges and Boundaries: Historians, Political Scientists, and the Study of International Relations, edited by Colin Elman and Miriam Fendius Elman, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2001), pp. 1-36; Randall L. Schweller, “The Twenty Year’ Crisis, 1919-39: Why a Concert Didn’t Arise”, in Bridges and Boundaries, pp. 181-212; Randall L. Schweller, “The Progressiveness of Neoclassical Realism” in Progress in International Relations Theory: Appraising the Field, edited by Colin Elman and Miriam Fendius Elman (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003), pp. 311-348; John A. Vasquez, “Kuhn or Lakatos? The Case for Multiple Frames in Appraising IR Theory” in Progress in International Relations Theory, pp. 419-454; and Jeffrey Taliaferro, “Neoclassicla Realism: The Psychology of Great Power Intervention” in Making Sense of International Relations Theory, edited by Jennifer Sterling-Folker (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner, 2006), pp. 38-53. Three recent articles that exemplify the empirical neo-classical realist approach are: S. G. Brooks and W. C. Wolfforth, “Power, Globalization, and the End of the Cold WAR: Reevaluating the Landmark Case for Ideas”, International Security 25(3): 5-53; Jason W. Davidson, “The Roots of Revisionism: Fascist Italy, 1922-39”, Security Studies 11(4): pp. 125-159; and David M. Edelstein, “Managing Uncertainty: Beliefs about Intentions and the Rise of Great Powers”, Security Studies 12(1): 1-40.
[iii] Helle Malmvig, State Sovereignty and Intervention: A Discourse Analysis of Interventionary and Non-Interventionary Practices in Kosovo and Algeria (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 30.
[iv] Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, “Making Sense of Making Sense: Configurational Analysis and the Double Hermeneutic”, in Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn, edited by Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea (Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2006), pp. 267.
[v] Samuel H. Beer, “Letter to a Graduate Student”, in Perestroika! The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science, edited by Kristen Renwick Monroe (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 58.
[vi] Audie Klotz and Cecelia Lynch, Strategies for Research in Constructivist International Relations (Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2007), pp. 53.
[vii] Pamela Brandwein, “Studying the Careers of Knowledge Claims”, in and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn, pp. 232.
[viii] Audie Klotz and Cecelia Lynch, Strategies for Research in Constructivist International Relations, 53.
[ix] Edmund S.K. Fung, The Diplomacy of Imperial Retreat: Britain’s South China Policy, 1924-1931, ch. 2.
[x] Zhang Yongjin, China in the International System 1918-1920, 100-101.
[xi] Zhang Yongjin, China in the International System 1918-1920, 102.
[xii] Marie-Claire Bergere, The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911-1937, translated by Janet Lloyd, 209.
[xiii] Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, “Making Sense of Making Sense: Configurational Analysis and the Double Hermeneutic”, 267-9.
[xiv] Marie-Claire Bergere, The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911-1937, translated by Janet Lloyd, 246.
[xv] Marie-Claire Bergere, The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911-1937, translated by Janet Lloyd, 248-9.
[xvi] Marie-Claire Bergere, The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911-1937, translated by Janet Lloyd, 211-2.
[xvii] Marie-Claire Bergere, The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911-1937, translated by Janet Lloyd, 211.
[xviii] Ido Oren, Our Enemies and US: America’s Rivalries and the Making of Political Science (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 34-8.
[xix] Zhang Yongjin, China in the International System 1918-1920, ch. 2. Marie-Claire Bergere, The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911-1937, translated by Janet Lloyd, 249-250.
[xx] Ernst P. Young, The Presidency of Yuan Shih-k’ai: Liberalism and Dictatorship in Early Republican China, pp. 171-5; Marie-Claire Bergere, The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911-1937, translated by Janet Lloyd, 220.
[xxi] Marie-Claire Bergere, The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911-1937, translated by Janet Lloyd, 230.
[xxii] Marie-Claire Bergere, The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911-1937, translated by Janet Lloyd, 243.
[xxiii] Marie-Claire Bergere, The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911-1937, translated by Janet Lloyd, 254-8.
[xxiv] James Der Derian, On Diplomacy (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1987), pp. 76, 79-80.
Genealogy analysis: a presentation and illustration
Step-by-step examples of how genealogy approach goes about. (Titus)
What is genealogy approach?
Genealogy approach investigates the evolution of our understandings of certain concepts, terms, conditions, etc, in a particular fashion.
Genealogy approach presupposes that concepts and phenomena that we find today come about less as a manifestation of certain indispensable, innate essences that upholds the concept, but more as a constantly evolving presentation of discontinuities and contradictions. Hence a phenomenon is inevitably inconsistent and incoherent in its expression.
So one presupposition of genealogy approach is that both the concept and the phenomenon are not always as it is; they are never constant but are made by layers and juxtaposition of history.
Der Derian:
A genealogy of diplomacy is not an enquiry into accumulated influences but of recurring configurations of conflict.
Genealogy is a history of present in the sense of discovering the transformations engendered by the instability and violent contests which diplomacy had mediated with discontinuous success.
For example, our understandings of God or deity, our concepts of justice or just war, our definition of democracy and good governance, our conceptualization of unequal treaty
A genealogy of diplomacy reveals how it has been formed and may be transformed by religious, ideological, and other disorderly and unconscious forces which stand outside the pale of modern 'common sense'.
Why is genealogy approach important? Or, why is genealogy approach relevant to political science and IR?
It's important because so many concepts that we take for granted or 'naturalize' in IR are actually intellectual products of a particular time-space (or multiple of them); for example, our definition of democracy has changed over time.
Der Derian:
To theorize, we must make strange what we have accommodated ourselves to. And that can include ourselves.
A genealogical approach to diplomatic theory allows us to challenge its traditional state-centricity without denying the centrality of power politics in IR.
An essential substance in diplomacy. The spirit which gave diplomatic institutions life.
We tend to do social scientific studies with the presupposition that the concepts are constant, but actually they are not.
The idea of democracy, just war, the importance of public administration, etc.
Then we end up judging the pre-modern phenomena with the modern concepts.
The notion of modernity is another example.
Oren:
Changing historical and cultural circumstances supply social science with its objects of investigation and shape "the construction of conceptual scheme which will be used in the investigation."
The enemy's image has shifted in a decidedly negative direction, and the shift has coincided with the onset of conflict.
The changes have been driven as much by America's changing rivalries as by the emergence of new facts about the regimes.
The fact that American political science have a record of holding an uncritical attitude toward foreign tyrannies raises doubts about the purported bond between political science and democracy
It supports Max Weber's claim that social science is always written from a particular point of view.
The pattern of correspondence between America's wars and changes in political scientists' portrayals of America's own image, and the effect of those wars on the relations between political science and the American state.
Just as major wars leave what Isaacs called "scratches" on the minds of Americans in general, they leave marks on the knowledge produced by American political scientists.
Focus on international context of intellectual development of American political science.
Theoretical presupposition of genealogy approach:
We live in the definition of political concepts, but we change them as well.
Steps:
I start by questioning the presupposition of objectivity in a discipline, or by challenging the taken-for-granted descriptions of a phenomenon.
That is, I re-examine a meta-theory or meta-narrative in a certain discipline or sub-field, like IR.
Then I trace the evolution of the meta-theory. Who created the theory in the beginning, who enriched it or revised it down the road, and who challenged the mainstream…plus changes in the environment as well.
Classical vs. contemporary examples of doing genealogy approach (Nate & Jason)
James Der Derian questions the Enlightenment definition of diplomacy as the practice of common sense. He defines diplomacy as diplomatic culture that is composed of various contradictory elements ingrained through different eras and cultures. So he highlights ruptures and disruptions rather than an essential continuity within diplomacy.
Common sense is as much a product of history as religion and culture are.
He proposes a multi-paradigmatic approach in recognition of multiplicity of discourses subsumed in the study of diplomacy.
Six inter-penetrating paradigms.
Theory of alienation
Reflexivity: We have seen how the relationship of the thinkers to the reality they wish to describe or explain through the use of alienation determines the critical, subjective nature of the concept.
Diplomacy should be understood as a Western diplomatic culture, and a study of diplomacy should be conceptualized as a historical study of Western diplomatic culture, a study of cultural history.
Alienation, estrangement, and mediation. From Old Testament, Augustinian to Machiavellian paradigms
Diplomacy will be investigated as the mediation of estranged peoples organized in states which interact in a system.
The diplomatic culture will be studied as the mediation of estrangement by symbolic power and social constraints. The diplomatic culture begins as a neutral link between alien quarters, but with the disintegration and diffusion of a common Latin power, it becomes a cluttered yet protected enclave, a discursive space where representatives of sovereign states can avoid the national tolls of the embryonic international society while attempting to mediate its systemic alienation.
John Gunnell started out with the following research questions: Why political theory in the American political science is the way it is now? Why has political theory become a distant relative to, and semi-autonomous from, mainstream positivist political science? Has the relationship between political theory and political science been like this without evolution? In short, he tried to address the identity problem of political theory in the context of American political science.
Gunnell is equally interested in explaining the evolution of the discourse of relationship between knowledge and power, that is, the discourse about the relationship between academic and public discourse of politics. Should the two be separate from each other, or should the former try to influence the contours of the latter?
He attempts to explain the evolution of political theory in American political science (both as a intellectual discipline and as an higher educational institution) by examining the "internal history" of the discourse of political theory since the mid-1800s.
Ido Oren challenged the notion of objectivity and universality of political science in the context of U.S. foreign relations.
Oren argues that our understanding of fundamental political concepts, like democracy, justice, and good government, are actually influenced by U.S. foreign policy with regard to enemy-making.
So our knowledge is always put in perspective, as Max Weber and Karl Mannheim suggest. As far as IR in American social sciences is concerned, its development (professionalization and compartmentalization) is closely connected and tailored to U.S. foreign policy,
Political science is actually an ideology originated in American nationalism.
When we debate abstract analytical concepts we actually debate America's identity, and what it should be.
American political scientists continually negotiate the identity of US by way of direct or indirect comparisons with foreign regimes.
What research questions are appropriate for genealogy?
Subjects that re-examine the taken-for-granted understanding or
Subjects that involve a critical self-reflection of intellectual development within certain discipline, political science, anthropology, sociology, IR, etc.
Conceptual range of genealogy (Nate, Jason, Titus)
Genealogy maybe a roof-top approach that examines historical layering of different discourses, rhetoric, practices and their configuration in the present.
So genealogy is compatible with other interpretive approaches, like ethnography or narrative analysis
Is it appropriate to apply genealogy approach to your research project?
Partially.
The concept of unequal treaty is a historical artifice that contains layers of understanding of international law, international relations, and Sino-Western relations.
Co-existence of contending and contradictory discourses/practices within the argument of abolishing unequal treaty. It's not one approach after the other, but they may be found in the same time in Nationalist regime's declarations and actions.
What is genealogy approach?
Genealogy approach investigates the evolution of our understandings of certain concepts, terms, conditions, etc, in a particular fashion.
Genealogy approach presupposes that concepts and phenomena that we find today come about less as a manifestation of certain indispensable, innate essences that upholds the concept, but more as a constantly evolving presentation of discontinuities and contradictions. Hence a phenomenon is inevitably inconsistent and incoherent in its expression.
So one presupposition of genealogy approach is that both the concept and the phenomenon are not always as it is; they are never constant but are made by layers and juxtaposition of history.
Der Derian:
A genealogy of diplomacy is not an enquiry into accumulated influences but of recurring configurations of conflict.
Genealogy is a history of present in the sense of discovering the transformations engendered by the instability and violent contests which diplomacy had mediated with discontinuous success.
For example, our understandings of God or deity, our concepts of justice or just war, our definition of democracy and good governance, our conceptualization of unequal treaty
A genealogy of diplomacy reveals how it has been formed and may be transformed by religious, ideological, and other disorderly and unconscious forces which stand outside the pale of modern 'common sense'.
Why is genealogy approach important? Or, why is genealogy approach relevant to political science and IR?
It's important because so many concepts that we take for granted or 'naturalize' in IR are actually intellectual products of a particular time-space (or multiple of them); for example, our definition of democracy has changed over time.
Der Derian:
To theorize, we must make strange what we have accommodated ourselves to. And that can include ourselves.
A genealogical approach to diplomatic theory allows us to challenge its traditional state-centricity without denying the centrality of power politics in IR.
An essential substance in diplomacy. The spirit which gave diplomatic institutions life.
We tend to do social scientific studies with the presupposition that the concepts are constant, but actually they are not.
The idea of democracy, just war, the importance of public administration, etc.
Then we end up judging the pre-modern phenomena with the modern concepts.
The notion of modernity is another example.
Oren:
Changing historical and cultural circumstances supply social science with its objects of investigation and shape "the construction of conceptual scheme which will be used in the investigation."
The enemy's image has shifted in a decidedly negative direction, and the shift has coincided with the onset of conflict.
The changes have been driven as much by America's changing rivalries as by the emergence of new facts about the regimes.
The fact that American political science have a record of holding an uncritical attitude toward foreign tyrannies raises doubts about the purported bond between political science and democracy
It supports Max Weber's claim that social science is always written from a particular point of view.
The pattern of correspondence between America's wars and changes in political scientists' portrayals of America's own image, and the effect of those wars on the relations between political science and the American state.
Just as major wars leave what Isaacs called "scratches" on the minds of Americans in general, they leave marks on the knowledge produced by American political scientists.
Focus on international context of intellectual development of American political science.
Theoretical presupposition of genealogy approach:
We live in the definition of political concepts, but we change them as well.
Steps:
I start by questioning the presupposition of objectivity in a discipline, or by challenging the taken-for-granted descriptions of a phenomenon.
That is, I re-examine a meta-theory or meta-narrative in a certain discipline or sub-field, like IR.
Then I trace the evolution of the meta-theory. Who created the theory in the beginning, who enriched it or revised it down the road, and who challenged the mainstream…plus changes in the environment as well.
Classical vs. contemporary examples of doing genealogy approach (Nate & Jason)
James Der Derian questions the Enlightenment definition of diplomacy as the practice of common sense. He defines diplomacy as diplomatic culture that is composed of various contradictory elements ingrained through different eras and cultures. So he highlights ruptures and disruptions rather than an essential continuity within diplomacy.
Common sense is as much a product of history as religion and culture are.
He proposes a multi-paradigmatic approach in recognition of multiplicity of discourses subsumed in the study of diplomacy.
Six inter-penetrating paradigms.
Theory of alienation
Reflexivity: We have seen how the relationship of the thinkers to the reality they wish to describe or explain through the use of alienation determines the critical, subjective nature of the concept.
Diplomacy should be understood as a Western diplomatic culture, and a study of diplomacy should be conceptualized as a historical study of Western diplomatic culture, a study of cultural history.
Alienation, estrangement, and mediation. From Old Testament, Augustinian to Machiavellian paradigms
Diplomacy will be investigated as the mediation of estranged peoples organized in states which interact in a system.
The diplomatic culture will be studied as the mediation of estrangement by symbolic power and social constraints. The diplomatic culture begins as a neutral link between alien quarters, but with the disintegration and diffusion of a common Latin power, it becomes a cluttered yet protected enclave, a discursive space where representatives of sovereign states can avoid the national tolls of the embryonic international society while attempting to mediate its systemic alienation.
John Gunnell started out with the following research questions: Why political theory in the American political science is the way it is now? Why has political theory become a distant relative to, and semi-autonomous from, mainstream positivist political science? Has the relationship between political theory and political science been like this without evolution? In short, he tried to address the identity problem of political theory in the context of American political science.
Gunnell is equally interested in explaining the evolution of the discourse of relationship between knowledge and power, that is, the discourse about the relationship between academic and public discourse of politics. Should the two be separate from each other, or should the former try to influence the contours of the latter?
He attempts to explain the evolution of political theory in American political science (both as a intellectual discipline and as an higher educational institution) by examining the "internal history" of the discourse of political theory since the mid-1800s.
Ido Oren challenged the notion of objectivity and universality of political science in the context of U.S. foreign relations.
Oren argues that our understanding of fundamental political concepts, like democracy, justice, and good government, are actually influenced by U.S. foreign policy with regard to enemy-making.
So our knowledge is always put in perspective, as Max Weber and Karl Mannheim suggest. As far as IR in American social sciences is concerned, its development (professionalization and compartmentalization) is closely connected and tailored to U.S. foreign policy,
Political science is actually an ideology originated in American nationalism.
When we debate abstract analytical concepts we actually debate America's identity, and what it should be.
American political scientists continually negotiate the identity of US by way of direct or indirect comparisons with foreign regimes.
What research questions are appropriate for genealogy?
Subjects that re-examine the taken-for-granted understanding or
Subjects that involve a critical self-reflection of intellectual development within certain discipline, political science, anthropology, sociology, IR, etc.
Conceptual range of genealogy (Nate, Jason, Titus)
Genealogy maybe a roof-top approach that examines historical layering of different discourses, rhetoric, practices and their configuration in the present.
So genealogy is compatible with other interpretive approaches, like ethnography or narrative analysis
Is it appropriate to apply genealogy approach to your research project?
Partially.
The concept of unequal treaty is a historical artifice that contains layers of understanding of international law, international relations, and Sino-Western relations.
Co-existence of contending and contradictory discourses/practices within the argument of abolishing unequal treaty. It's not one approach after the other, but they may be found in the same time in Nationalist regime's declarations and actions.
Friday, June 01, 2007
As if it was just yesterday/彷彿就像在昨日
終於，在離開整整五年之後，我們回到Maryland。八年前來到這裡，兩個皮箱一條人影；五年前離開華府前往加州，乃是半個貨櫃加上嬌妻。今日回到馬里蘭州，已是三人同行，還有無限的責任。
周日下午我們重返綠環鎮(Greenbelt)與大學城(College Park)，往昔再熟悉不過的路程，如今必須藉著全球定位儀方能確保不致迷路。這既熟悉又陌生的感覺在我們從495號高速公路下來後格外明顯，我知道離舊家很近了，可就是沒了方向感，心裡又是莫名的激動。
周日下午我們重返綠環鎮(Greenbelt)與大學城(College Park)，往昔再熟悉不過的路程，如今必須藉著全球定位儀方能確保不致迷路。這既熟悉又陌生的感覺在我們從495號高速公路下來後格外明顯，我知道離舊家很近了，可就是沒了方向感，心裡又是莫名的激動。
湖北社區(Lake Side North) 就在眼前。我們下車來到那棟印著414號的公寓，一切都沒有改變，只有遠方原先的草場被犁平。我走上台階，進到第七室的門口，所有的回憶猛地衝上腦門。就在這裡，我曾有三年的時光在此，多麼熟悉的晚春時分，悶熱的下午與蒼鬱的林道，我們五年前的離去彷彿就像是昨日才發生的事。我好像才離開不久，只是出去寄封信加個油，桌上的咖啡還熱著，妻子做的午餐仍然蒸氣上騰。三年的記憶壓縮成一霎那，我縮回本要碰觸到門鎖的左手，告訴自己，我現在是客旅了。
女兒興奮地跑來走去，年幼的她還不知道父親的惆悵。妻悠悠地說，回到馬里蘭，一切似乎都變的簡單了，一切都是如此自然。我知道她是喜歡這裡的；她與我一樣，從來沒把南加州當坐久居的地方。但是未來誰知道呢? 我們也許還要流浪許久。
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