The events of December, 1937 in Nanjing are long-standing causes of contention rooted in political differences of opinion between China and Japan. The Chinese view is unified, expressed in the "300,000 victims" engraved on the memorial walls in Nanjing, which bluntly refers to the Chinese opinion and entity of the "Great Massacre School." Views in Japan range from complete denial to agreement with the Chinese. The Japanese government's position of denial fuels the diplomatic clash. The Politics of Nanjing takes a centrist position in order to reconstruct historiographically the days leading up to and following the Japanese invasion of the capital and the political aftermath in China-Japan relations.

The essays that make up this volume offer the reader a full introduction to, and analysis of, the politics of the People's Republic of China from 1949 to the mid 1990s

First emerging at the beginning of the twentieth century, architectural reconstruction has increasingly become an instrument to visually revive a long bygone past. This book deals with the phenomenon of meticulous reconstruction in architecture. It argues that the politics of reconstruction go far beyond aesthetic considerations. Taking architecture as a major source of history and regional identity, the impact of large-scale reconstruction is deeply intertwined with political and social factors. Furthermore, memories and associations correlated with lost buildings of a bygone era are heavily influenced by their re-appearance, something which often contradicts historical events. Reconstruction has become an established way of building and dealing with the past, yet so far, there is no comprehensive scientific study on it. By bringing together eight case studies from Eastern Europe, France, Spain, China, Japan, Israel and Brazil, it provides valuable insights into this topic. The chapters analyse the political background of the reconstructions and identify the protagonists. In doing so, this volume adds to our understanding of the impact of reconstruction to memory and oblivion, as well as the critical power of reconstruction regarding contemporary architecture and urbanism.

This book posits that when foreign actors face high opportunity costs of intervention in a weak state, their behavior may foster state sovereignty. This occurs as foreign actors work with local groups to avoid their worst fear, domination of the polity by rivals. Drawing from primary and secondary sources, Ja Ian Chong examines this argument by considering China, Indonesia, and Thailand between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. The book augments existing perspectives on nationalism, sovereignty, and state formation by introducing insights from research on foreign intervention and local collaboration.

"We live in a world shaped by secularism—the separation of numinous power from political authority and religion from the political, social, and economic realms of public life. Not only has progress toward modernity often been equated with secularization, but when religion is admitted into modernity, it has been distinguished from superstition. That such ideas are continually contested does not undercut their extraordinary influence. These divisions underpin this investigation of the role of religion in the construction of modernity and political power during the Nanjing Decade (1927–1937) of Nationalist rule in China. This book explores the modern recategorization of religious practices and people and examines how state power affected the religious lives and physical order of local communities. It also looks at how politicians conceived of their own ritual role in an era when authority was meant to derive from popular sovereignty. The claims of secular nationalism and mobilizational politics prompted the Nationalists to conceive of the world of religious association as a dangerous realm of “superstition” that would destroy the nation. This is the first “superstitious regime” of the book’s title. It also convinced them that national feeling and faith in the party-state would replace those ties—the second “superstitious regime.”"

The organization 'Genocide Watch' estimates that 100 million civilians around the globe have lost their lives as a result of genocide in only the past sixty years. Over the same period, the visual arts in the form of documentary footage has aided international efforts to document genocide and prosecute those responsible, but this book argues that fictional representation occupies an equally important and problematic place in the process of shaping minds on the subject. Edited by two of the leading experts in the field, The History of Genocide in Cinema analyzes fictional and semi-fictional portrayals of genocide, focusing on, amongst others, the repression of indigenous populations in Australia, the genocide of Native Americans in the 19th century, the Herero genocide, Armenia, the Holodomor (Stalin's policy of starvation in Ukraine), the Nazi Holocaust, Nanking and Darfur. Comprehensive and unique in its focus on fiction films, as opposed to documentaries, The History of Genocide in Cinema is an essential resource for students and researchers in the fields of cultural history, holocaust studies and the history of film.

"A glossary of political terms of the People's Republic of China is a collection of 560 important and frequently-used Chinese political terms and phrases that appeared between 1949 and 1990. Each entry begins with an explanation of the term and its origin, a description of how and under what circumstances the term was used, and a discussion of the changes of meaning over the years, as well as the political and social significance of the words."--Jacket.

Serving as a touchstone for a much-needed research program on social scales, this volume challenges disciplinary boundaries and brings into focus a paradoxical state of affairs in contemporary thought: the domain of local-global interactions has not yet been identified as an object of analysis in its own right, despite engaging a large, multi-disciplinary research community with strong potential for cross-fertilization. Bringing together internationally renowned as well as emerging scholars, this book presents concrete case studies framed by theoretical concern with the issue of scale. It demonstrates that a diverse array of theoretical, methodological and empirical perspectives can productively converge on a common set of problems related to social, temporal and spatial scales and contemporary globalization. Local Politics, Global Impacts will stimulate empirical and theoretical research that focuses on understanding how political concepts, practices, and instruments translate across scales, and contribute to the emergence of a self-aware community of scholars and practitioners focusing explicitly on modelling the dynamics of local-regional-global interactions.

Among China’s restive religious and social groups, Protestants have arguably created the most sustained structural challenges to the Chinese Communist Party’s ordering of society. By drawing on grassroots fieldwork conducted across the country, this book therefore charts the ambition of the government to restrain Protestant population growth and direct it towards regime purposes. In particular, interviews with key church leaders who founded illegal Protestant congregations with hundreds of participants, reveal how officials and illegal congregational leaders have developed ties of trust and information that have permitted church growth, even as they preserve a public image of Party domination. Thus, by tracing the rise of large, illegal Protestant congregations apart from Party-state structures, this book highlights the importance of the public behaviour of religious actors and regime officials in understanding the dynamics of negotiation, domination, and resistance in 21st century China. Ultimately, The Politics of Protestant Churches and the Party-State in China paradoxically demonstrates that societal actors can alter the boundaries set by the Chinese Communist Party and the ways in which the Party is both more adaptive and resilient in its relations with society than first imagined. Offering the first book-length analysis of how ambitious Protestants have founded large, unregistered churches despite regime pressure, this book will be useful for students and scholars of Chinese Politics, Chinese Religion and Sociology.

Under the rule of the descendants of Chinggis Khan (1167-1227), China saw the development of a new culture in which medical practice came to be considered a highly respected occupation for elite men. During this period, further major steps were also taken towards the codification of medical knowledge and promotion of physicians’ social status. This book traces the history of the politics, institutions, and culture of medicine of China under Mongol rule, through the eyes of a successful South Chinese official Yuan Jue (1266-1327). As the first comprehensive monograph on history of medicine in China under the Mongols, it argues that this period was a separate moment in Chinese history, when a configuration of power different from that of previous and succeeding periods created its own medical culture. The Politics of Chinese Medicine under Mongol Rule emphasizes the impact of the political and institutional changes caused by the Mongols and their collaborators on the social and cultural history of medicine, which culminated in the medical theory of Zhu Zhenheng (1282–1358), still influential in East Asian medicine. Using a variety of Chinese-language sources including gazetteers, legal texts, biographies, poems, and medical texts, it analyses the roles of the Mongols and West and Central Asians as cultural brokers and also as unifiers of China. Further, it views North and South Chinese elites as agents of historical change rather than as victims of Mongol oppression. Underlining the complexity of the history of China under the Mongols and the significance of time and geography for the study of this history, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Chinese medical history, Chinese social and cultural history, and medieval global history.