Verge: Studies in Global Asias

Convergence 2 Field Trip Yuan Shu New World Orders and the Geopolitics of the Transpacific The short essays for this Field Trip feature are drawn from an international conference titled “America’sAsia, Asia’sAmerica” that Ico-­organized with Kenneth Dean, professor and head of the Chinese Department at the National University of Singapore, during my tenure as a Fulbright scholar in Singapore in 2017–­18. By redefining and relocating the emerging field of transpacific American studies in the geostrategic space of Singapore from the diverse perspectives of North America, Oceania, and East and Southeast Asia, the conference invited speakers to reimagine transpacific space by focusing on how it operates as a site of resistance and engagement substantiated by movements of people, commodities, and ideas across the Asia Pacific region (Dirlik 1998, 4; Nguyen and Hoskins 2014, 13; Shu 2019, 12). Central to this reimagination is the notion of a post-­American world, which media critic Fareed Zakaria (2008, 5) characterizes as “the rise of the rest” rather than an “anti-­American” sentiment or “the decline of the West.” One prominent example of Zakaria’s claim is the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which President Xi Jinping of China first unveiled in his lecture at Nazarbayev University in the Kazakh capital, Astana (renamed Nur-­Sultan), and then elaborated in his address to the Indonesian parliament in Jakarta a month later in 2013. These two geopolitical locations of enunciation were carefully selected by the Chinese state to signify both land and sea components of the initiative known as the Silk Economic Belt and the Twenty-­ First-­ Century Maritime Silk Road. While the BRI has generated diverse critical responses, many agree that it instantiates China’s efforts to augment its economic and political influence via a soft power narrative that “presents China as an alternative leader to the global Field Trip 3 hegemony of the United States” (Clarke 2018, 72). Even more bluntly, “the Belt and Road is the Chinese plan to build a new world order replacing the US-­ led international system” (Maçães 2018, 5). The challenge that the BRI poses for the United States is to reverse what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) call “Empire,” which, albeit a network power, has sought to expand and implement the U.S. constitutional project on a global scale. At what Graham Allison (2017) dubs “Thucydides’s Trap,” we witness the specter of Samuel Huntington’s (1996) theory on the clash of civilizations and remaking of world order, which, according to Giovanni Arrighi, may “help humanity burn up in the horrors (or glories) of the escalating violence that has accompanied the liquidation of the Cold War world order” (Arrighi 2007, 389). Since the Trump administration has been escalating the trade war between the United States and China into a tech war and an ideological war starting in 2018, confrontation between the United States and China has again dominated the geopolitics of the transpacific, which becomes Cold War 2.0 in its full swing (Tharoor 2020). Speaking of United States–­ China tension in relation to the Asia Pacific, the prime minister of Singapore, Lee Hsien Loong (2020), cautions that “their success—­ and the prospect of an Asian century—­ will depend greatly on whether the United States and China can overcome their differences, build mutual trust, and work constructively to uphold a stable and peaceful international order. This is a fundamental issue of our time.” This is a dangerous moment, to be sure, but the contributions in this Field Trip feature collectively remind us that world orders are both politically executed and imagined into being through cultural production . Though the topics and approaches encompassed here are diverse—­ Prasenjit Duara proposes “circular history” as an alternative interpretation of the Asia Pacific; Yuan Shu analyses speculative fiction about a Third World War between the United States and China to track contemporary Cold War politics; Cathy J. Schlund-­ Vials focuses on reseeing U.S. militarization through environmental disaster in Southeast Asia; Brian Russell Roberts attends to the oceanic and the archipelagic in tracing the pasts, presents, and futures of the world; Tina Chen theorizes the “imaginable ageography” of Global Asias—­ they address conflicts of the Asia-­Pacific region...