'This book offers an exciting indigenous perspective on Chinese governance model and Professor Hongjun Zhao is to be applauded for his invaluable contribution!' - Tony Fang, Stockholm University, Sweden 'This book traces the root of China's past failure as well as its success since 1978 to the inertia of its government governance, which was in turn shaped by its environment, geography and natural endowment. The book makes an important contribution to the Neo-institutional school by introducing geographical factors to explain the puzzling stability of the traditional Chinese government governance and the new challenges this type of governance is facing in an increasing globalizing world.' - Guanzhong James wen, Trinity College, US 'Professor Zhao's book offers us a unique and valuable perspective on China's present and future from a historical perspective. The book also makes use of a large amount of valuable quantitative statistics on various aspects of Chinese history.' - Debin Ma, London School of Economics, UK This book takes a long-term perspective to examine the evolution of Chinese governance and its lasting impact on Chinese economic development. Through its broad exploration of the style, strength, and effectiveness of Chinese governance through the years, it touches on a universal relationship between economic development and governance and institutions, translating the experiences of one of the world?s oldest civilizations into widespread, current economic relevance. Hongjun Zhao first examines the formation of Chinese style governance, the core contents of this governance, and its vitality compared with other governance patterns in Chinese history. He also discusses the effectiveness of this governance pattern in supporting the economic development before the Song dynasty, the failure of this governance during the past 3-5 centuries and the governmental role in pushing development since 1978. Finally, he makes a prediction of the direction of Chinese governance patterns in over the next 20-30 years. Scholars and researchers interested in China's long term economic development will appreciate this comprehensive examination of the subject, as will high level undergraduate and graduate students interested in keeping pace with China?s rapid development.

Arabic Glitch explores an alternative origin story of twenty-first century technological innovation in digital politics-one centered on the Middle East and the 2011 Arab uprisings. Developed from an archive of social media data collected over the decades following the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, this book interrogates how the logic of programming technology influences and shapes social movements. Engaging revolutionary politics, Arab media, and digital practice in form, method, and content, Laila Shereen Sakr formulates a media theory that advances the concept of the glitch as a disruptive media affordance. She employs data analytics to analyze tweets, posts, and blogs to describe the political culture of social media, and performs the results under the guise of the Arabic-speaking cyborg VJ Um Amel. Playing with multiple voices that span across the virtual and the real, Sakr argues that there is no longer a divide between the virtual and embodied: both bodies and data are physically, socially, and energetically actual. Are we cyborgs or citizens-or both? This book teaches us how a region under transformation became a vanguard for new thinking about digital systems: the records they keep, the lives they impact, and how to create change from within.

The influence of the ulema, the official Sunni Muslim religious scholars of the Ottoman Empire, is commonly understood to have waned in the empire's last century. Drawing upon Ottoman state archives and the institutional archives of the ulema, this study challenges this narrative, showing that the ulema underwent a process of professionalisation as part of the wider Tanzimat reforms and thereby continued to play an important role in Ottoman society. First outlining transformations in the office of the Sheikh ul-islam, the leading Ottoman Sunni Muslim cleric, the book goes on to use the archives to present a detailed portrait of the lives of individual ulema, charting their education and professional and social lives. It also includes a glossary of Turkish-Arabic vocabulary for increased clarity. Contrary to beliefs about their decline, the book shows they played a central role in the empire's efforts to centralise the state by acting as intermediaries between the government and social groups, particularly on the empire's peripheries.

Horace 'Jim' Greasley was twenty years of age in the spring of 1939 when Adolf Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia and latterly Poland. There had been whispers and murmurs of discontent from certain quarters and the British government began to prepare for the inevitable war. After seven weeks training with the 2nd/5th Battalion Leicester, he found himself facing the might of the German army in a muddy field south of Cherbourg, in Northern France, with just thirty rounds of ammunition in his weapon pouch. Horace's war didn't last long. He was taken prisoner on 25th May 1940 and forced to endure a ten week march across France and Belgium en-route to Holland.

Horace survived...barely...food was scarce; he took nourishment from dandelion leaves, small insects and occasionally a secret food package from a sympathetic villager, and drank rain water from ditches. Many of his fellow comrades were not so fortunate. Falling by the side of the road through sheer exhaustion and malnourishment meant a bullet through the back of the head and the corpse left to rot. After a three day train journey without food and water, Horace found himself incarcerated in a prison camp in Poland. It was there he embarked on an incredible love affair with a German girl interpreting for his captors.

He experienced the sweet taste of freedom each time he escaped to see her, yet incredibly he made his way back into the camp each time, sometimes two, three times every week. Horace broke out of the camp then crept back in again under the cover of darkness after his natural urges were fulfilled. He brought food back to his fellow prisoners to supplement their meagre rations. He broke out of the camp over two hundred times and towards the end of the war even managed to bring radio parts back in. The BBC news would be delivered daily to over 3,000 prisoners. This is an incredible tale of one man's adversity and defiance of the German nation.

In Philosophical Enactment and Bodily Cultivation in Early Daoism, Thomas Michael illuminates the formative early history of the Daodejing and the social, political, religious, and philosophical trends that indelibly marked it. This book centers on the matrix of the Daodejing that harbors a penetrating phenomenology of the Dao together with a rigorous system of bodily cultivation. It traces the historical journey of the text from its earliest oral circulations to its later transcriptions seen in a growing collection of ancient Chinese excavated manuscripts. It examines the ways in which Huang-Lao thinkers from the Han Dynasty transformed the original phenomenology of the Daodejing into a metaphysics that reconfigured its original matrix, and it explores the success of the Wei-Jin Daoist Ge Hong in bringing the matrix back into its original alignment. This book is an important contribution to cross-cultural studies, bringing contemporary Chinese scholarship on Daoism into direct conversation with Western scholarship on Daoism. The book also concludes with a discussion of Martin Heidegger's recognition of the position and value of the Daodejing for the future of comparative philosophy.