Profiling

Ever found yourself surfing the web for no perfectly good reason? And trying to justify yourself for the countless hours you have spent. Later, you come to the realization that your justification can only truly be reasoned by procrastination. Or better yet, my favorite reasoning, which is stalking people via the net. I think it is safe to assume many of us practice this type of behavior on a daily basis and it is, sadly one of my guilty pleasures.

As a result, I often put my talents of stalking people to good use. Stalking people is never done with malicious aspirations … unless it is for defensive purposes. By the virtue of being born into a millennium generation I think many of us have perfected this skill differently. Some of us have mastered it in “Facebook stalking” people we are interested in. Others stalk famous people. One form or the other it is inherently a human characteristic of us to stalk people.

My aspiration to stalk people often manifests from my desire to emulate someone who can further my own personal development. Thus, I think I have found another blogger who shares my same interest. Although, he (I am assuming it is a he, this will surely make me look ignorant if I am wrong about this) and I are interested in the same discipline (international relations) he is a PhD student in Political Science, which means he’s more qualified to talk about my China foreign affairs. Yet even in the face of adversity (or in this case my own stupidity) I will persevere (partially because I am stubborn).

From the little I know of my anonymous PhD blogger friend I think I like him. I may not know him (and know very little about him). I think I like how he is so personable in his blog and his ideas about what a blog is. The way he sees his role in the blog is somewhat inspirational when he says:

“I understand this blog as an instrument to “archive” my ideas, both to get my head free and to lay the foundation for the development of more complex thoughts.”

After I read this I felt like it really resonated with what I want to accomplish with my own blog. I am happy to know that I am not crazy. There is someone else out there on the net that is doing something similar to me. We both have interest in international relations in East Asia. However, the only drawback about this anonymous person I am admiring from afar is that he was once active for a long time and now is just sorta just left his blog end on May 2011. I hope by me continuing my own international relations blog it will hopefully inspire him to continue being active. Because it will really a shame to let his insights go to waste, especially when a resource of his caliber is rare to find. I enjoyed to read his archive but mainly these two blogs entries (Interesting blog 1, 2). They are probably the most relevant to China’s international affairs because recently China is building up their army.

Although, I think his entries are insightful it is probably still too academic for the general audience. So I am trying to find a balance between being informal about the content of international relations but not over simplify it either. Despite, this PhD blogger is not as active as before I am pretty sure I can find him again or someone similar to him. 

Hello World!

Most blogs are just some random people telling you everything you never wanted to know about their mundane lives. To my knowledge, everyday they tell you more tedious details until you just become detached from the entire subject matter. As a result, you end up with a lot of floating blogs without much purpose or direction. My blog will attempt to be the exact opposite. I am challenging myself to write about Chinese international affairs in the most fascinating approach I can think of, which is a chronological reflection of how I understand Chinese international affairs in an anonymous blog.

By no means I am an expert on Chinese international affairs, but my credentials are sufficient enough to analyze the rapid rise of China. With a strong emphasis on the role of world affairs as a crucial part of this process, this blog is intended to explore and familiarize historical, conceptual, and contemporary issues and trends as they relate to Chinese behavior in international affairs. Furthermore, this blog will evaluate how the Chinese government approaches, internalizes and negotiates its changing role in the world. Although this blog will inevitably reference academic journals, Chinese and American media sources, and other outlets it will be explained for a general audience to understand how China perceive itself in a globalized world. The understanding and prediction of China’s current and future general behavior in international affairs as stated before will chronicle my own comprehension throughout this semester.

Under this blog experiment, I hope to gain insight on how Chinese see their foreign policy and their place in the world different from non-Chinese. The variables that will be conducted are looking at Chinese policies, principles, party congress, worldview and national identity. By understanding these variables, the potential of understanding the values China incorporated into their policies that allowed them to develop into influential juggernaut will help outsiders discover key elements necessary to understand China. This will guarantee a minimal bias perspective on Chinese international affairs. In addition, I will draw upon my own travels to China to contextualize how Chinese citizens see their place in the world and the domestic affairs.

My main goal for this blog is to create an opportunity for those who are interested in Chinese international affairs to learn about it more informally. To accomplish this, a lot of unnecessary jargon will be omitted to make it more accessible to people. In both the United States and China, the media explores the role of the Chinese government in succeeding or lacking in shaping international affairs. In the United States I will explore that further by looking at U.S. propaganda of China and vice-versa. I will be referencing both American and Chinese news articles that seem to explore the Chinese phenomena in recent years. Finally, I will get a chance to interact and ask questions of Chinese and American students and faculty, where I hope I can find out more about their perspective and their relationship China. The principal goal of this blog as commented earlier, is to sharpen the readers’ understanding of China’s present and future view on their leading role in international affairs.