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"Negotiating China's Destiny" explains how China developed from a
country that hardly mattered internationally into the important
world power it is today. Before World War II, China had suffered
through five wars with European powers as well as American imperial
policies resulting in economic, military and political domination.
This shifted dramatically during WWII, when alliances needed to be
realigned, resulting in the evolution of China's relationships with
the USSR, the U.S., Britain, France, India, and Japan. Based on key
historical archives, memoirs, and periodicals from across East Asia
and the West, this book explains how China was able to become one
of the Allies with a seat on the Security Council, thus changing
the course of its future.
Breaking with U.S.-centered analyses which stressed the
incompetence of Chinese Nationalist diplomacy, "Negotiating China's
Destiny" makes the first sustained use of the diaries of Chiang
Kai-shek (which have only become available in the last few years)
and who is revealed as instrumental in asserting China's claims at
this pivotal point. "Negotiating China's Destiny" demonstrates that
China's concerns were far broader than previously acknowledged and
that despite the country's military weakness, it pursued its policy
of enhancing its international stature, recovering control over
borderlands it had lost to European imperialism in the nineteenth
and early twentieth century, and becoming recognized as an
important allied power with determination and success.
The current waves of migration sweeping the Chinese world may seem
like new phenomena, the outcome of modernization and
industrialization. However, this concise and readable book
convincingly shows that contemporary movements are just the most
recent stage in a long history of migration, both within China and
beyond its borders. Distinguished historian Diana Lary traces the
continuous expansion and contraction of the Chinese state over more
than four millennia. Periods of expansion, which involved huge
movements of people, have been interspersed with periods of
inward-turning stasis. Following a chronological framework, the
author discusses the migrations themselves and the recurrent themes
within them. We see migration as a broad spectrum of movement, from
short-term and short-range to permanent and long-range, and as a
powerful vehicle for the transfer of commodities, culture,
religion, and political influence. The Confucian tradition treated
migration as undesirable. It praised the delights of staying at
home: A thousand days at home are good, half a day away is hard.
Lary argues that, despite this view, migration has been a key
element in the evolution of Chinese society, one that the state
disparages and encourages at the same time. Her book will be
compelling for all readers who want to understand the context for
the present internal and international migrations that have changed
the face of China itself and its international relations.
In response to the leaders of China and Japan attacking each other
for the way they deal with history, scholars from Japan, China, and
the West held a conference in 2002, under the auspices of the
Harvard Asia Center, to examine the Japanese invasion and
occupation of China. The essays collected in this timely volume are
the product of these scholars7; research on this historical
problem. Delving deeply into the nature of the occupation, the
authors examine local variations in the role of the Japanese in
local politics, economics, and society, in such diverse localities
as Manchuria, Mongolia, Shanghai, Jiangxi, and Yunnan, where the
wartime experience has been little studied.
Contributors include: Timothy Brook, John Dower, Kubo Toru, Chang
Jui-te, Shao Minghuang, Tsukase Susumu, Xie Xueshi, Lu Minghui,
Odoric Y. K. Wou, Ju Zhifen, Zhuang Jianping, Wei Hongyun, Frederic
Wakeman, Jr., and Peter Merker.
If the past hundred years will be remembered as a century of war,
Asia is surely central to that story. Tracing the course of
conflicts throughout the region, this groundbreaking volume is the
first to explore systematically the nexus of war and state
terrorism. Challenging states' definitions of terrorism, which
routinely exclude their own behavior, the book focuses especially
on the nature of Japanese and American wars and crimes of war. The
authors also assess significant acts of terror instigated by other
Asian nations including China, Cambodia, and Indonesia. Offering a
rare comparative perspective, the authors consider how state terror
leads to massive civilian casualties, crimes of war, and crimes
against humanity. In counterbalance, they discuss anti-war and
anti-nuclear movements and international efforts to protect human
rights, and the interwoven issues of responsibility, impunity, and
memory. Interdisciplinary and deeply informed by global
perspectives, this volume will resonate with readers searching for
a deeper understanding of an epoch that has been dominated by war
and terror.
Over the past century and a half, China has experienced foreign
invasion, warfare, political turmoil, and revolution, along with
massive economic and technological change. Through all this change,
there is one stable element: grandmothers, as child carers,
household managers, religious devotees, transmitters of culture,
and, above all, sources of love, warmth, and affection. In this
interdisciplinary and longitudinal study, China's Grandmothers
sheds light on the status and lives of grandmothers in China over
the years from the late Qing Dynasty to the twenty-first century.
Combining a wide range of historical and biographical materials,
Diana Lary explores the changes and continuities in the lives of
grandmothers through revolution, wars, and radical upheaval to the
present phase of economic growth. Informed by her own experience as
a grandchild and grandmother, Lary offers a fresh and compelling
way of looking at gender, family, and ageing in modern Chinese
society.
The Chinese peoples experience of war during the Second World War,
as it is known in the West, was one of suffering and stoicism in
the face of dreadful conditions. China s War of Resistance began in
1937 with the Japanese invasion and ended in 1945 after eight long
years. Diana Lary, one of the foremost historians of the period,
tells the tragic history of China s war and its consequences from
the perspective of those who went through it. Using archival
evidence only recently made available, interviews with survivors,
and extracts from literature, she creates a vivid and highly
disturbing picture of the havoc created by the war, the destruction
of towns and villages, the displacement of peoples, and the
accompanying economic and social disintegration. Her focus is on
families torn apart, men, women, and children left homeless and
struck down by disease and famine. It is also a story of courage
and survival. By 1945, the fabric of China s society had been
utterly transformed, and entirely new social categories had
emerged. As the author suggests in a new interpretation of modern
Chinese history, far from stemming the spread of communism from the
USSR, which was the Japanese pretext for invasion, the horrors of
the war, and the damage it created, nurtured the Chinese Communist
Party and helped it to win power in 1949.
Between the 1890s and the Second World War, twenty-five million
people traveled from the densely populated North China provinces of
Shandong and Hebei to seek employment in the growing economy of
China's three northeastern provinces, the area known as Manchuria.
This was the greatest population movement in modern Chinese history
and ranks among the largest migrations in the world. Swallows and
Settlers is the first comprehensive study of that migration.
Drawing methods from their respective fields of economics and
history, the coauthors focus on both the broad quantitative
outlines of the movement and on the decisions and experiences of
individual migrants and their families. In readable narrative
prose, the book lays out the historical relationship between North
China and the Northeast (Manchuria) and concludes with an
examination of ongoing population movement between these regions
since the founding of the People's Republic in 1949.
Over the past century and a half, China has experienced foreign
invasion, warfare, political turmoil, and revolution, along with
massive economic and technological change. Through all this change,
there is one stable element: grandmothers, as child carers,
household managers, religious devotees, transmitters of culture,
and, above all, sources of love, warmth, and affection. In this
interdisciplinary and longitudinal study, China's Grandmothers
sheds light on the status and lives of grandmothers in China over
the years from the late Qing Dynasty to the twenty-first century.
Combining a wide range of historical and biographical materials,
Diana Lary explores the changes and continuities in the lives of
grandmothers through revolution, wars, and radical upheaval to the
present phase of economic growth. Informed by her own experience as
a grandchild and grandmother, Lary offers a fresh and compelling
way of looking at gender, family, and ageing in modern Chinese
society.
China's Civil War is the first book of its kind to offer a social
history in English of the Civil War in 1945-9 that brought the
Chinese Communist Party to power. Integrating history and memory,
it surveys a period of intense upheaval and chaos to show how the
Communist Party and its armies succeeded in overthrowing the
Nationalist government to bring political and social revolution to
China. Drawing from a collection of biographies, memoirs,
illustrations and oral histories, Diana Lary gives a voice to those
who experienced the war first-hand, exemplifying the direct effects
of warfare - the separations and divisions, the exiles and losses,
and the social upheaval that resulted from the conflict. Lary
explores the long-term impact on Chinese societies on the Mainland,
Taiwan and Hong Kong, which have all diverged far from pre-war
Chinese society.
The current waves of migration sweeping the Chinese world may seem
like new phenomena, the outcome of modernization and
industrialization. However, this concise and readable book
convincingly shows that contemporary movements are just the most
recent stage in a long history of migration, both within China and
beyond its borders. Distinguished historian Diana Lary traces the
continuous expansion and contraction of the Chinese state over more
than four millennia. Periods of expansion, which involved huge
movements of people, have been interspersed with periods of
inward-turning stasis. Following a chronological framework, the
author discusses the migrations themselves and the recurrent themes
within them. We see migration as a broad spectrum of movement, from
short-term and short-range to permanent and long-range, and as a
powerful vehicle for the transfer of commodities, culture,
religion, and political influence. The Confucian tradition treated
migration as undesirable. It praised the delights of staying at
home: A thousand days at home are good, half a day away is hard.
Lary argues that, despite this view, migration has been a key
element in the evolution of Chinese society, one that the state
disparages and encourages at the same time. Her book will be
compelling for all readers who want to understand the context for
the present internal and international migrations that have changed
the face of China itself and its international relations.
Diana Lary, one of the foremost historians of the period, tells the
tragic history of China's War of Resistance and its consequences
from the perspective of those who went through it. Using archival
evidence only recently made available, interviews with survivors,
and extracts from literature, she creates a vivid and highly
disturbing picture of the havoc created by the war, the destruction
of towns and villages, the displacement of peoples, and the
accompanying economic and social disintegration. As the author
suggests in this 2010 interpretation of modern Chinese history, far
from stemming the spread of communism from the USSR, which was the
Japanese pretext for invasion, the horrors of the war, and the
damage it created, nurtured the Chinese Communist Party and helped
it to win power in 1949.
A study of the tensions between region and nation in Republican
China. Diana Lary gives a detailed examination of Kwangsi province
in south-west China, the home base of a major warlord clique that
was important both for its interesting internal politics and for
its national influence in the late 1920s and the 1930s. She
reconstructs with imagination and thoroughness the intricate
political and military history of the nation, but without losing
sight of the overall regional character of the Kwangsi government
and its policies. She shows how the regional leaders responded to
central breakdown, what sense they had of the nation even in its
weakened condition. China is usually studied as a monolithic
entity; Diana Lary demonstrates that such a simple view must fail,
that China also consists of a large number of distinct regions with
special patterns of relationship to the centre.
Twenty-first century China is emerging from decades of war and
revolution into a new era. Yet the past still haunts the present.
The ideals of the Chinese Republic, which was founded almost a
century ago after 2000 years of imperial rule, still resonate as
modern China edges towards openness and democracy. Diana Lary
traces the history of the Republic from its beginnings in 1912,
through the Nanjing decade, the warlord era, and the civil war with
the Peoples' Liberation Army which ended in defeat in 1949.
Thereafter, in an unusual excursion from traditional histories of
the period, she considers how the Republic survived on in Taiwan,
comparing its ongoing prosperity with the economic and social
decline of the Communist mainland in the Mao years. This
introductory textbook for students and general readers is enhanced
with biographies of key protagonists, Chinese proverbs, love
stories, poetry and a feast of illustrations.
Twenty-first century China is emerging from decades of war and
revolution into a new era. Yet the past still haunts the present.
The ideals of the Chinese Republic, which was founded almost a
century ago after 2000 years of imperial rule, still resonate as
modern China edges towards openness and democracy. Diana Lary
traces the history of the Republic from its beginnings in 1912,
through the Nanjing decade, the warlord era, and the civil war with
the Peoples' Liberation Army which ended in defeat in 1949.
Thereafter, in an unusual excursion from traditional histories of
the period, she considers how the Republic survived on in Taiwan,
comparing its ongoing prosperity with the economic and social
decline of the Communist mainland in the Mao years. This
introductory textbook for students and general readers is enhanced
with biographies of key protagonists, Chinese proverbs, love
stories, poetry and a feast of illustrations.
China's Civil War is the first book of its kind to offer a social
history in English of the Civil War in 1945-9 that brought the
Chinese Communist Party to power. Integrating history and memory,
it surveys a period of intense upheaval and chaos to show how the
Communist Party and its armies succeeded in overthrowing the
Nationalist government to bring political and social revolution to
China. Drawing from a collection of biographies, memoirs,
illustrations and oral histories, Diana Lary gives a voice to those
who experienced the war first-hand, exemplifying the direct effects
of warfare - the separations and divisions, the exiles and losses,
and the social upheaval that resulted from the conflict. Lary
explores the long-term impact on Chinese societies on the Mainland,
Taiwan and Hong Kong, which have all diverged far from pre-war
Chinese society.
Throughout its modern history, China has suffered from
immensedestruction and loss of life from warfare. During its worst
periodof warfare, the eight years of the Anti-Japanese War
(1937-45),millions of civilians lost their lives. For China, the
story of modernwar-related death and suffering has remained hidden.
Hundreds ofmassacres are still unrecognized by the outside world
and even by Chinaitself. The focus of this original hisotry is on
the social andpsychological, not the economic, costs of war on the
country.
Armies are made up of a small number of officers and a large number
of ordinary soldiers, recruited from the working class or
peasantry. When the military dominates a society, as it did in
Warlord China, it is these ordinary soldiers who become the direct
agents of oppression and terror. Asking who these men were, and why
they turned on their own society, this book looks at the origins,
training and behaviour of the soldiers of Warlord China. It thus
provides a case study of the misery inflicted by military regimes
on civilian societies. Military control in China was long drawn
out, and fragmented. The Warlord period, in the first years of
Republican China, has been designated as the darkest of Modern
Chinese history. The soldiers who served in the warlord armies were
considered to be the lowest of the low, and have not for that
reason been a subject for study, but their impact on their society
was enormous. Their parallels in other, contemporary societies are
equally influential. Diana Lary's book includes in translation
documents of the period to illuminate the human side of her theme.
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