Sinology during the Cold War


Book Description

This volume provides the first study of the history of sinology (aka China studies) as charted across several communist states during the Cold War. The People’s Republic of China was created in the first years of the Cold War, with its early history and foreign policy intimately bound up in that larger geopolitical fight. All the seismic changes in China’s geopolitical landscape—from its emergence and close relationship with the Soviet Union, to the Sino–Soviet split and the eventual rapprochement with the United States—resulted in a great deal of interest by journalists, politicians, and scholars. Yet, although scholars across the Soviet Bloc produced an impressive body of work on a range of sinological studies, with rare exceptions most of those scholars and their work remains unknown outside their own intellectual circles. This book redresses this dearth of knowledge of sinological scholarship, providing invaluable and unique glimpses of Soviet Bloc sinologists and their work during the Cold War, including cutting-edge research on lesser-studied communist states such as Poland, Hungary, Mongolia, and others. International in scope, this book is ideal for scholars and researchers of modern history, Chinese studies, sinology, and the Cold War.




Mao's China and the Cold War


Book Description

This comprehensive study of China's Cold War experience reveals the crucial role Beijing played in shaping the orientation of the global Cold War and the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. The success of China's Communist revolution in 1949 set the stage, Chen says. The Korean War, the Taiwan Strait crises, and the Vietnam War--all of which involved China as a central actor--represented the only major "hot" conflicts during the Cold War period, making East Asia the main battlefield of the Cold War, while creating conditions to prevent the two superpowers from engaging in a direct military showdown. Beijing's split with Moscow and rapprochement with Washington fundamentally transformed the international balance of power, argues Chen, eventually leading to the end of the Cold War with the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the decline of international communism. Based on sources that include recently declassified Chinese documents, the book offers pathbreaking insights into the course and outcome of the Cold War.




Sinologism


Book Description

This book is a study of knowledge production about China and the Chinese civilization and as such it is a critique of the ways in which knowledge about the Chinese civilization is produced. It is not primarily intended as one that sets out to expose biases and prejudices against China, correct errors and misrepresentations of Chinese civilization, and dispute misperceptions and misinterpretations of Chinese materials, although all these issues do occur in the book. The overall objective is to get behind and beneath all these problems in order to uncover the motivations, mental frameworks, attitudes, and reasons for the abovementioned phenomena, which the author terms "Sinologism".




A Time for Change?


Book Description




The Empire of the Text


Book Description

This unique study argues that in the Qin-Han period, there arose in China a regime of textual authority_one that overlapped but did not coincide with imperial authority. Drawing on a wide range of research and theory, Connery makes an original contribution to the analysis of early imperial elite culture, particularly in the fields of literature and linguistics, intellectual, and institutional history. The author provides new contexts for thinking about canonization and textual transmission systems, an innovative framework for analysis and discussion of the early imperial elite, a socio-ideological exploration of one strand of late Han 'Confucian' thought, and a critique of the concepts of subjectivity and the 'birth of lyricism' in China.




Chinese Culture in the 21st Century and its Global Dimensions


Book Description

This book investigates the internationalization of Chinese culture in recent decades and the global dimensions of Chinese culture from comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives. It covers a variety of topics concerning the contemporary significance of Chinese culture in its philosophical, literary and artistic manifestations, including literature, film, performing arts, creative media, linguistics, translations and philosophical ideas. The book explores the reception of Chinese culture in different geographic locations and how the global reception of Chinese culture contrasts with the local Chinese community. The chapters collectively cover gender studies and patriarchal domination in Chinese literature in comparison to the world literature, explorations on translation of Chinese culture in the West, Chinese studies as an academic discipline in the West, and Chinese and Hong Kong films and performances in the global context. The book is an excellent resource for both scholars and students interested in the development of Chinese culture on the global stage in the 21st Century.




Overcoming the Two Cultures


Book Description

This book tells the story of how the very idea of two cultures-the so-called divorce between science and the humanities-was a creation of the modern world-system. The contributors, working from a common research framework, trace the divorce of "facts" and "values" as part of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. This led to a polarization between universalist "science" and the particularist "humanities" and finally to the creation of the social sciences as an uneasy intermediary in this epistemological debate. The book addresses the contemporary attempts to overcome the division between the two cultures that emerge from science, feminism, race and ethnic studies, cultural studies, and ecology, ending with an analysis of the culture wars and the science wars. Contributors: Volkan Aytar, Ay,se Betul Celik, Mauro Di Meglio, Mark Frezzo, Ho-fung Hung, Biray Kolloupglu K3/4rl3/4, Agustin Lao- Montes, Eric Mielants, Boris Stremlin, Sunaryo, Norihisa Yamashita, Deniz Yukeseker.




The City and the Railway in the World from the Nineteenth Century to the Present


Book Description

This volume explores the relationship between cities and railways over three centuries. Despite their nearly 200-year existence, The City and the Railway in the World shows that urban railways are still politically and historically important to the modern world. Since its inception, cities have played a significant role in the railway system; cities were among the main reasons for building such efficient but lavish and costly modes of transport for persons, goods, and information. They also influenced the technological appearance of railways as these have had to meet particular demands for transport in urban areas. In 25 essays, this volume demonstrates that the relationship between the city and the railway is one of the most publicly debated themes in the context of daily lives in growing urban settings, as well as in the second urbanisation of the global South with migration from rural to urban landscapes. The volume’s broad geographical range includes discussions of railway networks, railway stations, and urban rails in countries such as India, Japan, England, Belgium, Romania, Nigeria, the USA, and Mexico. The City and the Railway in the World will be a useful tool for scholars interested in the history of transport, travel, and urban change.




Displaced Persons, Resettlement and the Legacies of War


Book Description

This book provides a case study on the ongoing impact of displacement and encampment of refugees who do not have access to resettlement support services or are resettled in locations of low cultural and linguistic diversity. Following the journeys of displaced families and children who left Europe after the Second World War to seek resettlement in Queensland, Australia, this book brings together the rarely heard voices of these refugees from written archives, along with material from more than 50 oral history interviews. It thoroughly explores the impacts of displacement, encampment, and eventually resettlement in locations without resettlement facilities or support networks. In so doing, the book brings to light important findings that can be used to help understand the experiences of those impacted by contemporary refugee crises and can be considered when developing responses and assistance in locations where there is a lack of diversity or support for refugees. This book will be of interest to scholars and students studying and researching the history of migration, sociology of migration, psychological effects of migration and displacement, as well as demography. Practitioners and policymakers will also be able to draw from this book when considering the long-term impacts of responses to contemporary refugee crises.




Inside China's Cold War


Book Description

"Featuring new evidence on: Mao, Stalin, and the road to the 1950 Summit; The 1954 Geneva Conference; Sino-Albanian summits 1961-67; Mongolia and the Cold War; North Korea in 1956; Romania and the Sino-US opening."--Cover