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While most ethnic Chinese in northern Thailand are Thai citizens now, their everyday lives are a site where we can witness the political power entanglement of China, Taiwan and Thailand. With this in mind, this paper aims to look into the relationship between global China and overseas Chinese from the perspective of the ethnic Chinese in the northern borderlands of Thailand. The purpose is not just to disclose the multiplicity of global China in people's everyday lives, but also to complicate the picture of overseas Chinese as portrayed in top-down grand narratives about global China. I argue that the ongoing re-Sinicization in South-East Asia and the territorial geopolitics among China, Taiwan and Thailand have opened a conceptual space for the ethnic Chinese in northern Thailand to flexibly articulate themselves within the changing geopolitical economy. I use tea production and related Chinese-language education programmes, two separate but intertwined cases, to address these issues. By looking beyond the competition, conflict and dilemmas between China and Taiwan, I argue that Taiwan's previous engagement with agricultural transfer to Thailand and the rooting of pro-Taiwan identity and discourse in language education have paradoxically paved a way for China to stretch its influence into the everyday lives of the Chinese communities in the northern Thai borderlands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC) (Taiwan) have taken divergent paths in the area of human rights. Since the two leaders Xi Jinping and Tsai Ing-wen came to power, the differences in the area of human rights have further increased. The paper analyses and compares their external human rights strategies based on realist assumptions and the soft and hard power resources of the PRC and the ROC. The PRC's objectives are to deflect international criticism of its human rights situation and to weaken the global human rights system and its underlying human rights norms. Taiwan's objective is to use its record as a human rights leader in Asia to expand its limited international space and to strengthen its ties with other consolidated democracies and the global civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This study explores the recent features of China's economic coercion against Taiwan by offering an up‐to‐date and in‐depth analysis of China's targeted sanctions on Taishang in Tsai Ing‐wen's first term. The paper elaborates on China's specific reasons and means for imposing informal targeted sanctions, as well as their newly observed features in comparison with the past. Heavy dependence on the Chinese economy by certain enterprises of the island has made them vulnerable to sanction targeting. Compared to the past, nationalist boycotts by Chinese consumers and online activities have had a greater influence as part of China's informal targeted sanctions. Beijing's demands for supporting the "one China" policy and the "1992 Consensus" have also become more obvious. These findings suggest that the impetus for developing the cross‐Strait economic exchanges has become more susceptible to the effects of non‐economic factors. Although Beijing's sanctions on Taishang have not yet changed Taipei's policy, they cannot be said to be ineffective. Through the tactics, Beijing definitely sends clear signals of what it wants as it advances their strategy on cross‐Strait relations to the outside world. The case studies on Taiwan provide important implications for other economies as a barometer of China's increasing economic sanction practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]