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Books > History > Asian / Middle Eastern history
'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.
By the end of the American war in Vietnam, the coastal province of
Phu Yen was one of the least-secure provinces in the Republic of
Vietnam. It was also a prominent target of the American strategy of
pacification - an effort, purportedly separate and distinct from
conventional warfare, to win the 'hearts and minds' of the
Vietnamese. In Robert J. Thompson III's analysis, the consistent,
and consistently unsuccessful, struggle to place Phu Yen under
Saigon's banner makes the province particularly fertile ground for
studying how the Americans advanced pacification and why this
effort ultimately failed. In March 1970, a disastrous military
engagement began in Phu Yen, revealing the enemy's continued
presence after more than three years of pacification. Clear, Hold,
and Destroy provides a fresh perspective on the war across multiple
levels, from those making and implementing policy to those affected
by it. Most pointedly, Thompson contends that pacification, far
from existing apart from conventional warfare, actually depended on
conventional military forces for its application. His study reaches
back into Phu Yen's storied history with pacification before and
during the French colonial period, then focuses on the province
from the onset of the American War in 1965 to its conclusion in
1975. A sharply focused, fine-grained analysis of one critical
province during the Vietnam War, Thompson's work demonstrates how
pacification is better understood as the foundation of U.S.
fighting in Vietnam.
In January 1969, one of the most promising young lieutenant colonels the U.S. Army had ever seen touched down in Vietnam for his second tour of duty, which would turn out to be his most daring and legendary. David H. Hackworth had just completed the writing of a tactical handbook for the Pentagon, and now he had been ordered to put his counterguerilla-fighting theories into action. He was given the morale-drained 4/39th -- a battalion of poorly led draftees suffering the Army's highest casualty rate and considered its worst fighting battalion. Hackworth's hard-nosed, inventive and inspired leadership quickly turned the 4/39th into Vietnam's valiant and ferocious Hardcore Recondos. Drawing on interviews with soldiers from the Hardcore Battalion conducted over the past decade by his partner and coauthor, Eilhys England, Hackworth takes readers along on their sniper missions, ambush actions, helicopter strikes and inside the quagmire of command politics. With Steel My Soldiers' Hearts, Hackworth places the brotherhood of the 4/39th into the pantheon of our nation's most heroic warriors.
An intimate portrait of the postwar lives of Korean children and
women Korean children and women are the forgotten population of a
forgotten war. Yet during and after the Korean War, they were
central to the projection of US military, cultural, and political
dominance. Framed by War examines how the Korean orphan, GI baby,
adoptee, birth mother, prostitute, and bride emerged at the heart
of empire. Strained embodiments of war, they brought Americans into
Korea and Koreans into America in ways that defined, and at times
defied, US empire in the Pacific. What unfolded in Korea set the
stage for US postwar power in the second half of the twentieth
century and into the twenty-first. American destruction and
humanitarianism, violence and care played out upon the bodies of
Korean children and women. Framed by War traces the arc of intimate
relations that served as these foundations. To suture a fragmented
past, Susie Woo looks to US and South Korean government documents
and military correspondence; US aid organization records; Korean
orphanage registers; US and South Korean newspapers and magazines;
and photographs, interviews, films, and performances. Integrating
history with visual and cultural analysis, Woo chronicles how
Americans went from knowing very little about Koreans to making
them family, and how Korean children and women who did not choose
war found ways to navigate its aftermath in South Korea, the United
States, and spaces in between.
The primary objective of this book is to unearth the Mosul
Incident, place it in a historical narrative and introduce it to
the literature. Despite creating a historical turning point, the
incident has not attracted the necessary attention in neither the
Ottoman nor Iraqi historiography until now. By interpreting the
preferences, policies and practices associated with this particular
incident, the book is engaged to analyze the Post-Constitutional
power shifts, perceptions of collective violence and the origins of
Arab-Kurdish Dispute. The banishment and murder of Sheikh Said
Barzanji who was the family head of Sadaat al-Barzanjiyya as the
most influential religious organization of region, created a
critical threshold in the history of Mosul. As the urban shootout
on January 5 turned into a provincial bloodshed, Kurdish Sayyids,
tribes and religious orders consolidated and revolted against the
Ottoman authorities. Governors who were polarized as Anti Sâdât
and Pro Sâdât allegedly misconducted their offices and misguided
the authorities of law enforcement and judiciary. By overcoming the
historical rupture between Ottoman Mosul and Modern Iraq, the book
introduces an analytical framework to associate the origins of
collective violence and ethnic fragmentation experienced in
today’s Iraq with the past.
Economic and political relations with Iran were a primary concern
for the German Democratic Republic leadership and dominated the
GDR's press. This is the first book to analyse the representation
of Iran in the media, from the GDR's formation in 1949 until 1989,
the last complete year before its demise. Covering key events, such
as the overthrow of the Mossadegh government in 1953, the White
Revolution, the Islamic Revolution of 1979, and the Iran-Iraq war,
the author reveals that only in periods where the two countries
enjoyed less amicable or poor relations, was the press free to
critically report events in Iran and openly support the cause of
the country's communist party, the Tudeh. The book explores the use
of the press as a tool for ideological education and propaganda. It
also examines how the state's official Marxist-Leninist ideology,
the GDR's international competition with West Germany, and cultural
prejudices and stereotypes impacted reporting so powerfully.
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.
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.
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