The Chinese Writing System in Asia: An Interdisciplinary Perspective integrates a diverse range of disciplinary approaches in examining how the Chinese script represents and actively shapes personal and social identities in and beyond Asia. It is an ideal read for students and scholars interested in a broad and culturally rich introduction to research on the Chinese writing system. It can also serve as the main text of an undergraduate course on the subject. Key features of this volume include: Insights from studies of the Chinese writing system in linguistics, script reform and technology, gender, identity, literature, and the visual arts; Examples embedded in inquiries of the cultural history and contemporary society of Asia; Rigorous yet accessible discussions of complex concepts and phenomena that assume no prior knowledge of Asian languages or linguistics; Supplementary multimedia materials and resources, including instructional support, available online.

The Paradox in Partnership: The Role of Conflict in Partnership Building elucidates on alliances that are - on one hand, designed to promote collaboration between individuals, groups and organizations - but on the other hand, the processes of their formation and maintenance entail continuous engagement with competitive orientation, power struggles and conflict. Theoretical frameworks with praxis are integrated as reflected in a variety of organizational, community and national contexts. In the theoretical domain, it expands knowledge on partnerships in general and their paradoxical nature in p.

"Why did the Vietnamese accept certain Chinese institutions and yet explicitly reject others? How did Vietnamese cultural borrowings from China alter the dynamics of traditional relations between Vietnam, Siam, Laos, and Cambodia? How did Vietnam’s smaller Southeast Asian environment modify and distort classical East Asian institutions? Woodside has answered these questions in this well-received political and cultural study. This first real comparison of the civil governments of two traditional East Asian societies on an institution-by-institution basis is now reissued with a new preface."

After the Fall of South Vietnam, both the southerners and northerners differentiate between helpers and deceivers: Americans arrived in South Vietnam to help as they had done in Japan and West Germany after WWII; the great majority of Vietnamese people appreciate 58,276 US soldiers who sacrificed their lives and other Americans who contributed valuable helps in the years from 1954–1975. Contrarily, the communists from the North, with deceitful slogans like "Let us fight Americans to rescue our country" and "Nothing is precious than freedom" and so on are deceivers. Additionally, the Vietnamese felt miserable in the stringent dictatorship of the communists, so millions of them risked their lives to escape; at least 300,000 died on the East Sea or in the forests. - - - - The Vietnamese refugees (escapees, former officials and officers from prisons or labor camps of the communists) appreciate all countries that welcome and help them and their families rebuild their lives; they have better lives now. The USA is the land of opportunities, so many of them have overcome difficulties and procured successes in different fields, especially in educated and business careers.

This book contains inspiring stories of how World Bank Group projects have affected and transformed lives across East Asia and Pacific. You will see pictures and hear the voices of our partners in development: a mother cradling her little boy who is alive because of a new health facility in Cambodia; a school principal in Beijing who talks with passion about how her school is part of the solar energy wave; a cocoa farmer in Papua New Guinea who happily works with youth to help them build a sustainable crop and a sustainable future; a village chief in Lao PDR who lovingly holds his grandson and talks about the better life he now knows the boy can have; a student in Vietnam whose life changed when she received a scholarship. They are testimony to the power of seemingly small things that gave them an opportunity to build a better life for themselves, their families, their communities. East Asia and Pacific has experienced remarkable growth and prosperity, with extreme poverty falling faster than in any other region. However, over 340 million people across the region still live on just $2 a day. This book conveys stories demonstrating how these people are changing that statistic.

In this ambitious and path-breaking book, Shawn McHale challenges long held views that define modern Vietnamese history in terms of anticolonial nationalism and revolution. McHale argues instead for a historiography that does not overstress either the role of politics in general or Communism in particular. Using a wide range of sources from Vietnam, France, and the United States, many of them previously unexploited, he shows how the use of printed matter soared between 1920 and 1945 and in the process transformed Vietnamese public life and shaped the modern Vietnamese consciousness. Print and Power begins with an overview of Vietnam's lively public spheres, bringing debates from Europe and the rest of Asia to Vietnamese studies with nuance and sophistication. It examines the impact of the French colonial state on Vietnamese society as well as Vietnamese and East Asian understandings of public discourse and public space. Popular taste, rather than revolutionary or national ideology, determined to a large extent what was published, with limited intervention by the French authorities. A vibrant but hierarchical public realm of debate existed in Vietnam under authoritarian colonial rule. The work goes on to contest the impact of Confucianism on premodern and modern Vietnam and, based on materials never before used, provides a radically new perspective on the rise of Vietnamese communism from 1929 to 1945. Novel interpretations of the Nghe Tinh soviets (1930-1931), the first major communist uprising in Vietnam, and Vietnamese communist successes in World War II built an audience for their views and made an extremely alien ideology comprehensible to growing numbers of Vietnamese. In what is by far the most thorough examination in English of modern Vietnamese Buddhism and its transformations, McHale argues that, contrary to received wisdom, Buddhism was not in decline during the 1920-1945 period; in fact, more Buddhist texts were produced in Vietnam at that time than at any other in its history. This finding suggests that the heritage of the Vietnamese past played a crucial role in the late colonial period. Print and Power makes a significant contribution to Vietnamese and Asian studies and will be of compelling interest to those in the fields of comparative religion and European colonialism.

This book is a much-needed scholarly intervention and postcolonial corrective that examines why and when and how misunderstandings of Chinese writing came about and showcases the long history of Chinese theories of language. 'Ideography' as such assumes extra-linguistic, trans-historical, universal 'ideas' which are an outgrowth of Platonism and thus unique to European history. Classical Chinese discourse assumes that language (and writing) is an arbitrary artifact invented by sages for specific reasons at specific times in history. Language by this definition is an ever-changing technology amenable to historical manipulation; language is not the House of Being, but rather a historically embedded social construct that encodes quotidian human intentions and nothing more. These are incommensurate epistemes, each with its own cultural milieu and historical context. By comparing these two traditions, this study historicizes and decolonializes popular notions about Chinese characters, exposing the Eurocentrism inherent in all theories of ideography. Ideography and Chinese Language Theory will be of significant interest to historians, sinologists, theorists, and scholars in other branches of the humanities.