This study utilizes a wide range of new source materials to reconstruct the day-to-day operations of the port of Canton during the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. Using a ...bottom-up approach, it provides a fresh look at the successes
Guilty of indigence Chen, Janet Y
2012., 20120124, 2012, 2012-01-24, 20120101
eBook
In the early twentieth century, a time of political fragmentation and social upheaval in China, poverty became the focus of an anguished national conversation about the future of the country. ...Investigating the lives of the urban poor in China during this critical era, Guilty of Indigence examines the solutions implemented by a nation attempting to deal with "society's most fundamental problem." Interweaving analysis of shifting social viewpoints, the evolution of poor relief institutions, and the lived experiences of the urban poor, Janet Chen explores the development of Chinese attitudes toward urban poverty and of policies intended for its alleviation.
Ban Wang traces the shifting concept of the Chinese state from the late nineteenth century to the present, showing how the Confucian notion of tianxia—“all under heaven”—influences China’s dedication ...to contributing to and exchanging with a common world.
The People's Republic of China once limited its involvement in African affairs to building an occasional railroad or port, supporting African liberation movements, and loudly proclaiming socialist ...solidarity with the downtrodden of the continent. Now Chinese diplomats and Chinese companies, both state-owned and private, along with an influx of Chinese workers, have spread throughout Africa. This shift is one of the most important geopolitical phenomena of our time.China and Africa: A Century of Engagementpresents a comprehensive view of the relationship between this powerful Asian nation and the countries of Africa. This book, the first of its kind to be published since the 1970s, examines all facets of China's relationship with each of the fifty-four African nations. It reviews the history of China's relations with the continent, looking back past the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. It looks at a broad range of areas that define this relationship-politics, trade, investment, foreign aid, military, security, and culture-providing a significant historical backdrop for each. David H. Shinn and Joshua Eisenman's study combines careful observation, meticulous data analysis, and detailed understanding gained through diplomatic experience and extensive travel in China and Africa.China and Africademonstrates that while China's connection to Africa is different from that of Western nations, it is no less complex. Africans and Chinese are still developing their perceptions of each other, and these changing views have both positive and negative dimensions.
Rivers of Iron Lampton, David M; Ho, Selina; Kuik, Cheng-Chwee
10/2020
eBook
In 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping unveiled what would come to
be known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)-a global development
strategy involving infrastructure projects and associated ...financing
throughout the world, including Asia, Africa, the Middle East,
Europe, and the Americas. While the Chinese government has framed
the plan as one promoting transnational connectivity, critics and
security experts see it as part of a larger strategy to achieve
global dominance. Rivers of Iron examines one aspect of
President Xi Jinping's "New Era": China's effort to create an
intercountry railway system connecting China and its seven
Southeast Asian neighbors (Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar,
Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam). This book illuminates the
political strengths and weaknesses of the plan, as well as the
capacity of the impacted countries to resist, shape, and even take
advantage of China's wide-reaching actions. Using frameworks from
the fields of international relations and comparative politics, the
authors of Rivers of Iron seek to explain how domestic
politics in these eight Asian nations shaped their varying external
responses and behaviors. How does China wield power using
infrastructure? Do smaller states have agency? How should we
understand the role of infrastructure in broader development? Does
industrial policy work? And crucially, how should competing global
powers respond?
Following the failure of communist revolutions in Europe, in the
1920s the Soviet Union turned its attention to fostering
anticolonial uprisings in Asia. China, divided politically between
rival ...military factions and dominated economically by imperial
powers, emerged as the Comintern's prime target. At the same time,
a host of prominent figures in Soviet literature, film, and theater
traveled to China, met with Chinese students in Moscow, and placed
contemporary China on the new Soviet stage. They sought to
reimagine the relationship with China in the terms of socialist
internationalism-and, in the process, determine how
internationalism was supposed to look and feel in practice.
Internationalist Aesthetics offers a groundbreaking
account of the crucial role that China played in the early Soviet
cultural imagination. Edward Tyerman tracks how China became the
key site for Soviet debates over how the political project of
socialist internationalism should be mediated, represented, and
produced. The central figure in this story, the avant-garde writer
Sergei Tret'iakov, journeyed to Beijing in the 1920s and
experimented with innovative documentary forms in an attempt to
foster a new sense of connection between Chinese and Soviet
citizens. Reading across genres and media from reportage and
biography to ballet and documentary film, Tyerman shows how Soviet
culture sought an aesthetics that could foster a sense of
internationalist community. He reveals both the aspirations and the
limitations of this project, illuminating a crucial chapter in
Sino-Russian relations. Grounded in extensive sources in Russian
and Chinese, this cultural history bridges Slavic and East Asian
studies and offers new insight into the transnational dynamics that
shaped socialist aesthetics and politics in both countries.
The fact that Snow did not sneak into “red China" to gather information constituting the basis of his Red Start over China all alone is in many instances misunderstood even by scholars.Mao Zedong’s ...biography has been the subject of an international mountain of commentary in China and elsewhere. Biographies praising Mao and those slandering him are all based on the American journalist Edgar Snow’s (1905–1972) account in Red Star over China for the route Mao traveled from early childhood through his youth.How the “Red Star" Rose introduces the image of Mao and the biographical information made known to the world through the publication of Red Star, and with its publication the circumstances which they fundamentally undermined. Ishikawa Yoshihiro uses Mao Zedong as raw material to examine from whence and how ordinary historical information and images which we habitually use unconsciously come into being. He desires to help readers to reconsider the historicity of the generation of not only Mao’s image but of that of “historical materials."---With a title that evokes Gao Hua’s seminal study of Mao Zedong’s rise in the Chinese Communist Party, Ishikawa Yoshihiro asks two critical questions—What did the world know of Mao before the publication of Edgar Snow’s Red Star over China? How did Red Star change that understanding? With the meticulous research, careful documentation, and fair-minded judgment that characterizes all of Ishikawa’s work, he shows how little even Moscow and the Communist International knew about Mao before 1936. This study is full of unexpected insights into the origins of early visual images of Mao, the background to Snow’s historic trip to northern Shaanxi, and the evolution of the classic study that he left. In a world where balanced judgment of the rise of Mao is increasingly difficult to find, Ishikawa’s scholarship stands out as a rare model of judicious balance.—Joseph W. Esherick, Emeritus Professor, Hwei-chih and Julia Hsiu Chair in Chinese Studies, University of California, San DiegoThis book is, first, an exquisite excavation on the enabling infrastructures in the writing and publishing of one of the most iconic works in journalistic interviews in the 20th century, a text that broke through a wall of intelligence blockade to give to the world, in an autobiographical voice and with a striking image, the debut of the revolutionary Mao while holed up in a mountain base area. It is, in addition, a history of the reading of the book in multiple languages including Chinese that is indexed to the rise of the Mao cult thereafter. Ishikawa captures a moment of a past gearing up in anticipation of a future that never came. This book is a must-read for all with an interest in Mao, journalism, and the history of books.—Wen-hsin Yeh, Richard H. and Laurie C. Morrison Chair Professor in History, University of California, BerkeleyIshikawa offers a challenging reflection on how historical information and images that we take for granted come into being through the twin case studies of images of Mao Zedong before Edgar Snow’s famous biography in 1936 and then how Snow’s images of Mao were translated, and transmuted, into Chinese, Russian and Japanese. Joshua Fogel’s careful translation brings this impeccable example of Japanese sinology to the English reading public. —Timothy Cheek, Professor and Louis Cha Chair in Chinese Research, University of British Columbia
The traditional Chinese notion of itself as the “middle kingdom"—literally the cultural and political center of the world—remains vital to its own self-perceptions and became foundational to Western ...understandings of China. This worldview was primarily constructed during the earliest imperial unification of China during the Qin and Han dynasties (221 BCE–220 CE). But the fragmentation of empire and subsequent “Age of Disunion" (220–589 CE) that followed undermined imperial orthodoxies of unity, centrality, and universality. In response, geographical writing proliferated, exploring greater spatial complexities and alternative worldviews.This book is the first study of the emergent genre of geographical writing and the metageographies that structured its spatial thought during that period. Early medieval geographies highlighted spatial units and structures that the Qin–Han empire had intentionally sought to obscure—including those of regional, natural, and foreign spaces. Instead, these postimperial metageographies reveal a polycentric China in a polycentric world. Sui–Tang (581–906 CE) officials reasserted the imperial model as spatial orthodoxy. But since that time these alternative frameworks have persisted in geographical thought, continuing to illuminate spatial complexities that have been incompatible with the imperial and nationalist ideal of a monolithic China at the center of the world.
This report looks at crucial elements of reforms to growth-friendly recurrent taxes on immovable property. Tax design practices in place in OECD and partner countries are compared and analysed ...through the lenses of economic theory and empirical analysis.
