Download or read book The Troublesome Legacy of Commissioner Lin written by Joyce A. Madancy and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-23 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In 1908, a very public crusade against opium was in full swing throughout China, and the provincial capital and treaty port of Fuzhou was a central stage for the campaign. This, the most successful attempt undertaken by the Chinese state before 1949 to eliminate opium, came at a time when, according to many historians, China’s central state was virtually powerless. This volume attempts to reconcile that apparent contradiction.The remarkable, albeit temporary, success of the anti-opium campaign between 1906 and 1920 is as yet largely unexplained. How these results were achieved, how that progress was squandered, and why China’s opium problem proved so tenacious are the questions that inspired this volume. The attack on this social problem was led by China’s central and provincial authorities, aided by reformist elites, and seemingly supported by most Chinese. The anti-opium movement relied on the control and oversight provided by a multilayered state bureaucracy, the activism and support of unofficial elite-led reform groups, the broad nationalistic and humanitarian appeal of the campaign, and the cooperation of the British government. The extent to which the Chinese state was able to control the pace and direction of the anti-opium campaign and the evolving nature of the political space in which elite reformers publicized and enforced that campaign are the guiding themes of this analysis."
Download or read book The Money Doctors from Japan written by Michael Schiltz and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Money and finance have been among the most potent tools of colonial power. This study investigates the Japanese experiment with financial imperialism—or “yen diplomacy”—at several key moments between the acquisition of Taiwan in 1895 and the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. Through authoritarian monetary reforms and lending schemes, government officials and financial middlemen served as “money doctors” who steered capital and expertise to Japanese official and semi-official colonies in Taiwan, Korea, China, and Manchuria. Michael Schiltz points to the paradox of acute capital shortages within the Japan’s domestic economy and aggressive capital exports to its colonial possessions as the inevitable but ultimately disastrous outcome of the Japanese government’s goal to exercise macroeconomic control over greater East Asia and establish a self-sufficient “yen bloc.” Through their efforts to implement their policies and contribute to the expansion of the Japanese empire, the “money doctors” brought to the colonies a series of banking institutions and a corollary capitalist ethos, which would all have a formidable impact on the development of the receiving countries, eventually affecting their geopolitical position in the postcolonial world."
Download or read book Battle for Beijing 1858 1860 written by Harry Gelber and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-09-16 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ‘battle for Beijing’ is universally – and quite wrongly – believed to have been about opium. This book argues that it was about freedom to trade, Britain’s demands for diplomatic equality, and French demands for religious freedom in China. Both countries agreed that their armies, which repeatedly prevailed over Chinese ones that were numerically superior, would stay out of Beijing itself, but were infuriated by China’s imprisonment, torture and death of British, French and Indian negotiators. At the same time, the British and French also helped the empire to battle rebels and to pocket port and harbour dues. They steered carefully between their political and trading demands, and navigated the danger that undue stress would make China’s fragile government and empire fall apart. If it did, there would be no one to make any kind of agreement with; much of East Asia would be in chaos and Russian power would soon expand. Battle for Beijing, 1858–1860 offers fresh insights into the reasons behind the actions and strategies of British authorities, both at home and in China, and the British and French military commanders. It goes against the widely accepted views surrounding the Franco-British conflict, proposing a bold new argument and perspective.
Download or read book The Korean Economy written by Barry Eichengreen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-05-11 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "South Korea has been held out as an economic miracle—as a country that successfully completed the transition from underdeveloped to developed country status—and as an example of how a middle-income country can continue to move up the technology ladder into the production and export of more sophisticated goods and services. But with these successes have come challenges, among them poverty, inequality, long work hours, financial instability, and complaints about the economic and political power of the country’s large corporate conglomerates, or chaebol.The Korean Economy provides an overview of Korean economic experience since the 1950s, with a focus on the period since democratization in 1987. Successive chapters analyze the Korean experience from the perspectives of political economy, the growth record, industrial organization and corporate governance, financial development and instability, labor and employment, inequality and social policy, and Korea’s place in the world economy. A concluding chapter describes the country’s economic challenges going forward and how they can best be met.The volume also serves to summarize the findings of companion volumes in the Harvard–Korean Development Institute series on the Korean economy, also published by the Harvard University Asia Center."
Download or read book Proving the Way written by Mark McNally and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Kokugaku, or nativism, was one of the most important intellectual movements from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century in Japan, and its worldview continues to be influential today. This scholarly endeavor represented an attempt to use Japanese antiquity to revitalize what many saw as a society in decline. One important figure in this movement was Hirata Atsutane (1776-1843), a center of controversy in his own lifetime. Even though Atsutane’s version of nativism came to be the standard form, many modern scholars dismiss him because of his scholarly shortcomings. The primary goal of this book is to restore historicity to the study of nativism by recognizing Atsutane’s role in the creation and perpetuation of an intellectual tradition that remains a significant part of Japanese history and culture. Arguing that conflict among scholars and intellectuals begets ideas, Mark McNally shows that nativism was rife with internal competition. The mid-nineteenth-century suppression of this multiplicity of views led to the emergence of what we now think of as ""nativism."" By focusing on the competition among the rival strands of nativism, McNally demonstrates that nativism resulted not from Atsutane’s conscious attempt to formulate a new intellectual tradition but from his greater political skills at putting his views across. "
Download or read book Daoist Modern written by Xun Liu and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book explores the Daoist encounter with modernity through the activities of Chen Yingning (1880–1969), a famous lay Daoist master, and his group in early twentieth-century Shanghai. In contrast to the usual narrative of Daoist decay, with its focus on monastic decline, clerical corruption, and popular superstitions, this study tells a story of Daoist resilience, reinvigoration, and revival. Between the 1920s and 1940s, Chen led a group of urban lay followers in pursuing Daoist self-cultivation techniques as a way of ensuring health, promoting spirituality, forging cultural self-identity, building community, and strengthening the nation. In their efforts to renew and reform Daoism, Chen and his followers became deeply engaged with nationalism, science, the religious reform movements, the new urban print culture, and other forces of modernity. Since Chen and his fellow practitioners conceived of the Daoist self-cultivation tradition as a public resource, they also transformed it from an “esoteric” pursuit into a public practice, offering a modernizing society a means of managing the body and the mind and of forging a new cultural, spiritual, and religious identity."
Download or read book Lost and Found written by Hiraku Shimoda and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-05-11 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Lost and Found offers a new understanding of modern Japanese regionalism by revealing the tense and volatile historical relationship between region and nation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Aizu, a star-crossed region in present-day Fukushima prefecture, becomes a case study for how one locale was estranged from nationhood for its treasonous blunder in the Meiji Restoration, yet eventually found a useful place within the imperial landscape. Local mythmakers—historians, memoirists, war veterans, and others—harmonized their rebel homeland with imperial Japan so as to affirm, ironically, the ultimate integrity of the Japanese polity. What was once “lost” and then “found” again was not simply Aizu’s sense of place and identity, but the larger value of regionalism in a rapidly modernizing society. In this study, Hiraku Shimoda suggests that “region,” which is often regarded as a hard, natural place that impedes national unity, is in fact a supple and contingent spatial category that can be made to reinforce nationalist sensibilities just as much as internal diversity."
Download or read book Significant Soil written by Emer O'Dwyer and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-05-11 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Like all empires, Japan’s prewar empire encompassed diverse territories as well as a variety of political forms for governing such spaces. This book focuses on Japan’s Kwantung Leasehold and Railway Zone in China’s three northeastern provinces. The hybrid nature of the leasehold’s political status vis-à-vis the metropole, the presence of the semipublic and enormously powerful South Manchuria Railway Company, and the region’s vulnerability to inter-imperial rivalries, intra-imperial competition, and Chinese nationalism throughout the first decades of the twentieth century combined to give rise to a distinctive type of settler politics. Settlers sought inclusion within a broad Japanese imperial sphere while successfully utilizing the continental space as a site for political and social innovation.In this study, Emer O’Dwyer traces the history of Japan’s prewar Manchurian empire over four decades, mapping how South Manchuria—and especially its principal city, Dairen—was naturalized as a Japanese space and revealing how this process ultimately contributed to the success of the Japanese army’s early 1930s takeover of Manchuria. Simultaneously, Significant Soil demonstrates the conditional nature of popular support for Kwantung Army state-building in Manchukuo, highlighting the settlers’ determination that the Kwantung Leasehold and Railway Zone remain separate from the project of total empire."
Download or read book When Empire Comes Home written by Lori Watt and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Following the end of World War II in Asia, the Allied powers repatriated over six million Japanese nationals from colonies and battlefields throughout Asia and deported more than a million colonial subjects from Japan to their countries of origin.Depicted at the time as a postwar measure related to the demobilization of defeated Japanese soldiers, this population transfer was a central element in the human dismantling of the Japanese empire that resonates with other post-colonial and post-imperial migrations in the twentieth century.Lori Watt analyzes how the human remnants of empire, those who were moved and those who were left behind, served as sites of negotiation in the process of the jettisoning of the colonial project and in the creation of new national identities in Japan. Through an exploration of the creation and uses of the figure of the repatriate, in political, social, and cultural realms, this study addresses the question of what happens when empire comes home."
Download or read book Empires on the Waterfront written by Catherine L. Phipps and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-05-11 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Empires on the Waterfront offers a new spatial framework for understanding Japan’s extended transition into the modern world of nation-states. This study examines a largely unacknowledged system of “special trading ports” that operated under full Japanese jurisdiction in the shadow of the better-known treaty ports. By allowing Japan to circumvent conditions imposed on treaty ports, the special trading ports were key to achieving autonomy and regional power.Catherine L. Phipps uses an overtly geographic approach to demonstrate that the establishment of Japan’s maritime networks depended on initiatives made and carried out on multiple geographical scales—global, national, and local. The story of the special trading ports unfolds in these three dimensions. Through an in-depth assessment of the port of Moji in northern Kyushu, Empires on the Waterfront recasts the rise of Japan’s own empire as a process deeply embedded in the complicated system of maritime relations in East Asia during the pivotal second half of the nineteenth century."
Download or read book Sovereignty at the Edge written by Cathryn H. Clayton and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "How have conceptions and practices of sovereignty shaped how Chineseness is imagined? This ethnography addresses this question through the example of Macau, a southern Chinese city that was a Portuguese colony from the 1550s until 1999. As the Portuguese administration prepared to transfer Macau to Chinese control, it mounted a campaign to convince the city’s residents, 95 percent of whom identified as Chinese, that they possessed a “unique cultural identity” that made them different from other Chinese, and that resulted from the existence of a Portuguese state on Chinese soil. This attempt sparked reflections on the meaning of Portuguese governance that challenged not only conventional definitions of sovereignty but also conventional notions of Chineseness as a subjectivity common to all Chinese people around the world. Various stories about sovereignty and Chineseness and their interrelationship were told in Macau in the 1990s. This book is about those stories and how they informed the lives of Macau residents in ways that allowed different relationships among sovereignty, subjectivity, and culture to become thinkable, while also providing a sense of why, at times, it may not be desirable to think them."
Download or read book The Tokyo War Crimes Trial written by Yuma Totani and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book assesses the historical significance of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE)—commonly called the Tokyo trial—established as the eastern counterpart of the Nuremberg trial in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Through extensive research in Japanese, American, Australian, and Indian archives, Yuma Totani taps into a large body of previously underexamined sources to explore some of the central misunderstandings and historiographical distortions that have persisted to the present day. Foregrounding these voluminous records, Totani disputes the notion that the trial was an exercise in “victors’ justice” in which the legal process was egregiously compromised for political and ideological reasons; rather, the author details the achievements of the Allied prosecution teams in documenting war crimes and establishing the responsibility of the accused parties to show how the IMTFE represented a sound application of the legal principles established at Nuremberg. This study deepens our knowledge of the historical intricacies surrounding the Tokyo trial and advances our understanding of the Japanese conduct of war and occupation during World War II, the range of postwar debates on war guilt, and the relevance of the IMTFE to the continuing development of international humanitarian law."
Download or read book Critical Aesthetics written by James Dorsey and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This study revolves around the career of Kobayashi Hideo (1902–1983), one of the seminal figures in the history of modern Japanese literary criticism, whose interpretive vision was forged amidst the cultural and ideological crises that dominated intellectual discourse between the 1920s and the 1940s. Kobayashi sought in criticism a vehicle through which to rhetorically restore to the artistic work an aura of concreteness that precluded interpretation and instead inspired awe, to somehow recover a literary experience unmediated by intellectual machinations. In adhering firmly to this worldview for the duration of World War II, Kobayashi came to assume a complex stance toward the wartime regime. Although his interweaving of aesthetics and ideology exhibited elements of both resistance and complicity, his critical ethos served ultimately to undergird his wartime fascist stance by encouraging acquiescence to authority, championing patriotism, and calling for more vigorous thought control. Treating Kobayashi’s influential works and the historical context in which they are rooted, James Dorsey traces the emergence of a modern critical consciousness in conversation with such concerns as the nature of materiality in capitalist culture, the relationship of narrative to subjectivity, and the nostalgia for beauty in a time of war."
Download or read book Two Timing Modernity written by Keith J. Vincent and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-05-11 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Until the late nineteenth century, Japan could boast of an elaborate cultural tradition surrounding the love and desire that men felt for other men. By the first years of the twentieth century, however, as heterosexuality became associated with an enlightened modernity, love between men was increasingly branded as “feudal” or immature. The resulting rupture in what has been called the “male homosocial continuum” constitutes one of the most significant markers of Japan’s entrance into modernity. And yet, just as early Japanese modernity often seemed haunted by remnants of the premodern past, the nation’s newly heteronormative culture was unable and perhaps unwilling to expunge completely the recent memory of a male homosocial past now read as perverse. Two-Timing Modernity integrates queer, feminist, and narratological approaches to show how key works by Japanese male authors—Mori Ōgai, Natsume Sōseki, Hamao Shirō, and Mishima Yukio—encompassed both a straight future and a queer past by employing new narrative techniques to stage tensions between two forms of temporality: the forward-looking time of modernization and normative development, and the “perverse” time of nostalgia, recursion, and repetition."
Download or read book Global Hong Kong written by Cindy Wong and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Global Hong Kong locates Hong Kong in the contemporary globalizing world. Hong Kong, as the authors argue, is an archetypal place, sitting at the intersection of East and West. It is also a major center for global capital flows and world trade. Moreover, in recent years, the island's global cultural power has become increasingly evident, as Hong Kong popular culture has spread to the West via a booming film industry. While looking at issues of postcoloniality, transnationalism and economic globalization, Wong and McDonogh focus on the new cultures and social formations of contemporary Hong Kong, as well as the transformation of the physical city itself. They also trace the new interconnections - economic, demographic, social and cultural - between Hong Kong and other parts of the worldthat have benn fostered by globalization. Books in this series look at how nations and regions across the world are navigating the tumultuous currents of globalization. Concise, descriptive, interdisciplinary, and theoretically informed, they serve as ideal introductions to the peoples and places of our increasingly globalized world.
Download or read book Remembering Restoration Losers written by Michael Wert and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-05-11 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book is about the “losers” of the Meiji Restoration and the supporters who promoted their legacy. Although the violence of the Meiji Restoration is typically downplayed, the trauma was real, and those who felt marginalized from the mainstream throughout modern Japan looked to these losers as models of action. Using a wide range of sources, from essays by former Tokugawa supporters like Fukuzawa Yukichi to postwar film and “lost decade” manga, Michael Wert traces the shifting portrayals of Restoration losers. By highlighting the overlooked sites of memory such as legends about buried gold, the awarding of posthumous court rank, or fighting over a disembodied head, Wert illustrates how the process of commemoration and rehabilitation allows individuals a voice in the formation of national history. He argues that the commingling of local memory activists with nationally known politicians, academics, writers, and treasure hunters formed interconnecting memory landscapes that promoted local figures as potential heroes in modern Japan."
Download or read book Buddhism Unitarianism and the Meiji Competition for Universality written by Michel Mohr and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-05-11 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In the late 1800s, as Japanese leaders mulled over the usefulness of religion in modernizing their country, they chose to invite Unitarian missionaries to Japan. This book spotlights one facet of debates sparked by the subsequent encounter between Unitarianism and Buddhism—an intersection that has been largely neglected in the scholarly literature. Focusing on the cascade of events triggered by the missionary presence of the American Unitarian Association on Japanese soil between 1887 and 1922, Michel Mohr’s study sheds new light on this formative time in Japanese religious and intellectual history. Drawing on the wealth of information contained in correspondence sent and received by Unitarian missionaries in Japan, as well as periodicals, archival materials, and Japanese sources, Mohr shows how this missionary presence elicited unprecedented debates on “universality” and how the ambiguous idea of “universal truth” was utilized by missionaries to promote their own cultural and ethnocentric agendas. At the turn of the twentieth century this notion was appropriated and reformulated by Japanese intellectuals and religious leaders, often to suit new political and nationalistic ambitions."