In this article, I examine the ROC president's discursive response to PRC efforts to limit Taiwan's future possibilities and undermine confidence in Taiwan's future. I argue that the capacity to imagine the future, and perceiving agency to affect future outcomes, is crucial for national resilience. Since Taiwan is routinely exposed to factors known to cause reduced self-efficacy and morale – uncertainty, threat, marginalization, restricted agency, circumscribed action repertoires – it is crucial that Taiwanese people have a meaningful sense of “what are we striving for?” and confidence that they have the agency to realize these aspirations. The article sets out an empirical examination of discursive constructions of the future as a vector for enhancing cohesion and resolve in Taiwanese society. Foregrounding a novel dimension in the study of Taiwan, the article contributes both an interpretivist account of President Tsai Ing-wen's discourse and opens a new avenue for research on the largely neglected issue of futurity in cross-Strait relations.

This paper examines China's water governmentality in advancing the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC). It attends to how discourses, used as a political instrument, are framed, justified and contested in the reshaping of international hydrosocial territories. China's official and popular discourses present the LMC as promoting multilateral politics, economic benefits and social integration, while they obscure polarizing politics, external interventions and regional conflicts. Using strategies of positive publicity first, top-down communication and mutual empathy creation, these discourses aim to deflect attention away from controversies and geopolitics in the region to construct governable hydrosocial territories. However, in a transnational context where the Chinese state cannot unilaterally control geographical imaginaries, alternative discourses depict China as a “hydro-hegemon” that poses threats to downstream countries. The discursive dichotomy reflects multiple ontologies of water and power struggles in international river governance, bringing regional stability and sustainable development into question.

Peace and security were once marginal in Sino-African relations. Recently, however, reflecting China's more proactive role as a global security actor, they have become central. Yet while China's actions mirror this shift, the official China–Africa discourse has not changed. This article, based on fieldwork interviews and discourse analysis of official Forum on China–Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) documents, proposes a theoretically grounded study of China's Africa discourse to account for the role it plays in maintaining continuity through time. It makes a threefold claim. First, while the China–Africa discourse has not been given much attention in the literature, it is crucial to explaining the overall success of China's engagement in the continent. Second, the shift in China's policies towards greater participation in peace and security is not mirrored by changes in the official discourse. Third, and related, this is owing mostly to the successful articulation of the link between the promotion of economic growth and the achievement of stability – the security–development nexus – and to the generally positive reception the discourse has found among African leaders.

To promote a prosocial conscience and behaviour, gratitude education has long been perceived as an effective intervention in formal schooling. Built upon the Foucauldian account of the mutually constitutive relationship between knowledge and power, this paper investigates how an urban school for largely poor and low-income children of migrant workers in Beijing constructed and transmitted knowledge and discourses on gratitude. The authors argue that the students are positioned as what we term “morally captive guests”1 who possess an inferior position in the moral life compared to urbanites, and who are perceived as an instrument for attracting resources and attention to the lower-ranked school. This schooling reproduces extant class relations, whereas the student resistance questions practices of graduating citizenship and educational inequalities.

Guided by Michel Foucault's concept of “pastoral power,” this article examines the ways in which contemporary discourses within official narratives in China portray the state in a paternal fashion to reinforce its legitimacy. Employing interdisciplinary approaches, this article explores a number of sites in Urumqi, the regional capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), in order to map how a coherent official narrative of power and authority is created and reinforced across different spaces and texts. It demonstrates how both history and the present day are depicted in urban Xinjiang in order to portray the state in a pastoral role that legitimates its use of force, as well as emphasizing its core role in developing the region out of poverty and into “civilization.”