This book offers a new perspective on the connected histories of Spain, China, and Japan as they emerged and developed following Manila’s foundation as the capital of the Spanish Philippines in 1571. ...Examining a wealth of multilingual primary sources, Birgit Tremml-Werner shows that crosscultural encounters not only shaped Manila’s development as a “Eurasian” port city, but also had profound political, economic, and social ramifications for the three premodern states. Combining a systematic comparison with a focus on specific actors during this period, this book addresses many long-held misconceptions and offers a more balanced and multifaceted view of these nations’ histories.
China's sense of today and its view of tomorrow are both rooted in the past--and we need to understand that connection, says China scholar Charles Horner. In Rising China and Its Postmodern Fate, ...Horner offers a new interpretation of how China's changed view of its modern historical experience has also changed China's understanding of its long intellectual and cultural tradition. Spirited reevaluations of history, strategy, commerce, and literature are cooperating--and competing--to define the future. The capstone of modern China was the founding of the People's Republic in 1949 and its rejection of Confucianism, capitalism, and modernity. Yet today's rising China retains few vestiges of what Mao wrought. What then, Horner asks, is post-Mao, postmodern China? Where did it come from? How did it get here? Where is it going? Contemporary views of the great periods in Chinese history are having a significant influence on the development of rising China's national strategy, says Horner. He looks at the revival of interest in, and changing interpretations of, three dynasties--the Yuan (1272-1368), the Ming (1368-1644), and the Qing (1644-1912)--that, together with the People's Republic of China, provide examples of great power success. The future of every major country is now connected to China's, and this book explains how China, now seeing itself as the complex and thriving result of the old and the new, is poised to change the world.
This translation of the introduction to Wang Hui'sRise of Modern Chinese Thought(2004) makes part of his four-volume masterwork available to English readers for the first time. A leading public ...intellectual in China, Wang charts the historical currents that have shaped Chinese modernity from the Song Dynasty to the present day.
China is among a number of large developing country or new powers on the ascendance in the international system, all of which are deepening their economic relations with Africa However, China is the ...largest and most powerful of this group. it has sought closer economic relationships with other developing country regions and continents such as Latin America and Central Asia, but it is with Africa – the continent that hosts more developing countries than any other – that China has fostered the closest links.
This book provides an overview of how the China – Africa relationship has evolved over the last few decades and examines whether it presents a new paradigm of ‘development relations’ in the international system. The contributors investigate what is particularly special about the emerging development partnership between Africa and China, and how it may evolve in the future. The contributors focus on various development capacity issues – infrastructural, industrial, technocratic, institutional, human capital, sustainable economic practices – and consider various debates on ‘development’ and development ideologies, including whether China’s practices in Africa pose a challenge to Western conventions on development assistance.
China-Africa Development Relations will be of interest to those students and scholars of African studies, Chinese studies, international development and development studies.
Christopher M. Dent is a Professor in East Asia's International Political Economy at the University of Leeds, UK.
Part 1: China, Africa and International Development 1. Africa and China: A New Kind of Development Partnership? Christopher M. Dent 2. China-Africa and the West: Ideology, Conditionality, Realpolitik: What is New in South–South Co-operation? Uwe Wissenbach 3. Towards a Critical Geo-Politics of China’s Engagement with African Development Marcus Power and Giles Mohan 4. Chinese Soft Power, Insecurity Studies, Myopia and Fantasy Shogo Suzuki Part 2: Country Case Study Perspectives 5. The End of Abstraction: China’s Development Relations With Sudan Daniel Large 6. Chinese Development Co-operation and Africa: The Case of Tembisa’s Friendship Town Chris Alden and Anna Ying Chen Part 3: Resource Sector Perspectives 7. China’s Structural Demand and the Commodity Super Cycle: Implications for Africa Masuma Farooki 8. China’s Energy Diplomacy in Africa: The Convergence of National and Corporate Interests Zhang Chi Part 4: Conclusion: Africa, China and Development Relations 9. China, Africa and Conceptualising Development Relations Christopher M. Dent
Since 2005, a series of significant developments has been unfolding in the area of the Tongking Gulf under the rubric of an ambitious project called "Two Corridors and One Rim." Proposed by Vietnam ...in 2004 and enthusiastically embraced by China, the project is designed to link their shared shores and hinterlands by superhighways and high-speed rail. An area that had seemed a backwater for two hundred years has suddenly become a dynamic engine of growth. Yet how innovative are these developments? Drawing on fresh historical insights and recent archaeological research in northern Vietnam and southern China,The Tongking Gulf Through Historyreveals that this region has long been a center of cultural, political, and economic exchange. From a historical point of view, contributors argue, the Gulf of Tongking has come full circle. Inspired by the Braudelian vision that regionality arises from long-term human interactions, essays avoid state-centered approaches of nationalist histories to focus on local communities throughout the Gulf. In doing so, they reveal a complex pattern of interrelationships and geopolitical factors that has shaped the gulf region for over two millennia. The first half of the volume covers the era from the Neolithic to the tenth century, when an independent state emerged from old Chinese Jiaozhi, or modern northern Vietnam; the second surveys the nine centuries that followed, in which only two states came to share the maritime shores of the Tongking Gulf. Together, the essays illuminate how millennia of recurring human interactions within this geographical space have created a regional ensemble with its own longstanding historical integrity and dynamics.
This postmodern study of the Chinese Cultural Revolution examines the inner mechanism of the mass movement.Utilizing methodologies of cultural anthropology, linguistics, acting theory, and literary ...criticism, it reveals how people's performances of their everyday lives functioned as mechanisms of social control.
"From the cry of a tiny insect, one can hear the sound of a vast world. . . ."
So begins Zhang Daye's preface toThe World of a Tiny Insect, his haunting memoir of war and its aftermath. In 1861, when ...China's devastating Taiping rebellion began, Zhang was seven years old. The Taiping rebel army occupied Shaoxing, his hometown, and for the next two years, he hid from Taiping soldiers, local bandits, and imperial troops and witnessed gruesome scenes of violence and death. He lost friends and family and nearly died himself from starvation, illness, and encounters with soldiers on a rampage.
Written thirty years later,The World of a Tiny Insectgives voice to this history. A rare premodern Chinese literary work depicting a child's perspective, Zhang's sophisticated text captures the macabre images, paranoia, and emotional excess that defined his wartime experience and echoed through his adult life. The structure, content, and imagery ofThe World of a Tiny Insectoffer a carefully constructed, fragmented narrative that skips in time and probes the relationships between trauma and memory, revealing both history and its psychic impact. Xiaofei Tian's annotated translation includes an introduction that situatesThe World of a Tiny Insectin Chinese history and literature and explores the relevance of the book to the workings of traumatic memory.
Using stories and interesting examples, this book depicts the process of the internationalization of the main global currencies. After that, it systematically analyzes the future pattern of the ...internalization of the Chinese currency, the Renminbi (RMB), and its possible influence on world trade and global finance. The book will be useful in understanding the future of the RMB, as well as its process of becoming a global currency. With the boom of China's economy, the RMB is becoming a regional currency gradually, though still at a low level. Some predict that it will even change into a global currency. But, this process cannot be easy. There are many financial problems for the government and private sectors to deal with. The book provides a systematic analysis of the problems, especially those that emerged after the global financial crisis.
In The Allure of the Nation, Tze-ki Hon offers an account of early twentieth-century China where the nation was understood as a cluster of spatial-temporal relations that link individuals to a native ...place, a social network, and a territorial state.