Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Inclusive Disruption serves as a primary guide to help readers understand what financial technology is and how it has evolved to change the future financial landscape. The central ideas of fintech are explained in details, with topics ranging from distributed innovation, inclusive blockchain to decentralised inclusive technologies.The book also gathers the views of key opinion leaders and cutting-edge practitioners who are at the forefront of fintech development. Therefore, it not only presents useful insights about financial technology but also represents an invaluable source of knowledge for readers who are interested in fintech.

How did the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution affect everyone's lives? Why did people re/negotiate their identities to adopt revolutionary roles and duties? How did people, who lived with different self-understandings and social relations, inevitably acquire and practice revolutionary identities, each in their own light?This book plunges into the contexts of these concerns to seek different relations that reveal the Revolution's different meanings. Furthermore, this book shows that scholars of the Cultural Revolution encountered emotional and intellectual challenges as they cared about the real people who owned an identity resource that could trigger an imagined thread of solidarity in their minds.The authors believe that the Revolution's magnitude and pervasive scope always resulted in individualized engagements that have significant and differing consequences for those struggling in their micro-context. It has impacted a future with unpredictable collective implications in terms of ethnicity, gender, memory, scholarship, or career. The Cultural Revolution is, therefore, an evolving relation beneath the rise of China that will neither fade away nor sanction integrative paths.

Why have the influences of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (roughly 1966-1976) in contemporary China been so pervasive, profound, and long-lasting? This book posits that the Revolution challenged everyone to decide how they can and should be themselves.Even scholars who study the Cultural Revolution from a presumably external vantage point must end up with an ideological position relative to whom they study. This amounts to a focused curiosity toward the Maoist agenda rivaling its alternatives. As a result, the political lives after the Cultural Revolution remain, ulteriorly and ironically, Maoist to a ubiquitous extent.How then can we cleanse, forget, neutralize, rediscover, contextualize, realign, revitalize, or renovate Maoism? The authors contend that all must appropriate ideologies for political and analytical purposes and adapt to how others use ideological discourses. This book then invites its readers to re-examine ideology contexts for people to appreciate how they acquire their roles and duties. Those more practiced can even reversely give new meanings to reform, nationalism, foreign policy, or scholarship by shifting between Atheism, Maoism, Confucianism, and Marxism, incurring alternative ideological lenses to de-/legitimize their subject matter.

Inclusive Disruption serves as a primary guide to help readers understand what financial technology is and how it has evolved to change the future financial landscape. The central ideas of fintech are explained in details, with topics ranging from distributed innovation, inclusive blockchain to decentralised inclusive technologies.The book also gathers the views of key opinion leaders and cutting-edge practitioners who are at the forefront of fintech development. Therefore, it not only presents useful insights about financial technology but also represents an invaluable source of knowledge for readers who are interested in fintech.

Representing Agency in Popular Culture: Children and Youth on Page, Screen and In-Between addresses the intersection of children's and youth's agency and popular culture. As scholars in childhood studies and beyond seek to expand understandings of agency, power, and voice in children's lives, this book places popular culture and representation as central to this endeavor. Core themes of family, gender, temporality, politics, education, technology, disability, conflict, identity, ethnicity, and friendship traverse across the chapters, framed through various film, television, literature, and virtual media sources. Here, childhood is considered far from homogeneous and the dominance of neoliberal models of agency is questioned by intersectional and intergenerational analyses. This book posits there is vast power in popular culture representations of children's agency, and interrogation of these themes through interdisciplinary lenses is vital to furthering knowledge and understanding about children's lives and within childhood studies.

Following China's accession to the WTO in 2001, reform of its science and technology system has deepened. This book provides an in-depth analysis of the high-tech sector, examining Chinese high-tech industry policy, the emergence of industrial clusters, the R&D activities of multinational corporations operating in China, and the prospect of commercialization of high-tech achievements. The authors argue that since commercialization has become the ultimate objective of innovation activity, the relationship between R&D facilities, the local economy and local enterprises has become closer, thereby boosting the technology innovation capability of the corporate sector. They go on to explore regions with the greatest scale and depth of high-tech industry development: Beijing, Shenzhen, Shanghai and Shaanxi; which now serve as models for other regions. The book concludes that although high-tech exports have become an important contributing factor to China's economic growth, the country still has no effective mechanism for high-risk investment, therefore Chinese high-tech enterprises still find it difficult to secure financing. This book will strongly appeal to those affiliated to multinational enterprises: managers, brokers, dealers and investors, as well as academics and researchers specialising in business economics and Asian studies.

Taiwan's economic development experience represents a unique case study especially in the wake of the Asian financial crisis. Taiwan has performed outstandingly in terms of macroeconomic and industrial development, particularly during recent democratic and social change. This book aims to provide a broad picture of these institutional reforms and policy evolutions. The expert contributors detail and examine the interactive relationship between Taiwan's economic liberalization, political democratization and social pluralization. Taking 1980 as a watershed, the book highlights the impact these economic and cultural changes have exerted on SMEs, foreign trade and investment, technological progress, industrial development and policy, and the reform of financial and fiscal systems. They investigate the contentious issue of whether political democratization is beneficial for economic development and go on to discuss the creation of an efficient Taiwanese economy and the resolution of conflicts created by social pluralization. The book analyses the comparative advantage of Taiwan over comparable countries, paying particular attention to the Asian financial crisis. The authors offer a fresh approach by observing Taiwanese development post 1980 and integrating economic, political and social analysis. As such, development economists and scholars of Asian economics will find this unique book both useful and enlightening.

The concept of the 'desire for technology' originates with Jean Baudrillard, the French postmodernist and high-tech social thinker. Desire for Technology delves into this concept, seeking to understand the relationship between technology and human desire in science fiction and beyond. Academic disciplines have increasingly sought to bridge the gap between human beings and technology. Baudrillard points to three orders of simulacra to rethink the objectivity of science and history, taking simulacra from the Renaissance, through the industrial revolution, to the postmodern era, corresponding to counterfeit, production, and simulation. This title proposes three stages in the procession of science fiction. Fantasy literature belongs to the beginning, science fiction to the developing, and technological theory to the culminating stage: the expansion of science fiction. A Promethean rebellion against God's will announces the death of Nature, disclosing potential technological disasters, and stimulating the building of a human-centred technological utopia.

This book situates Taiwan's indigenous knowledge in comparative contexts across other indigenous knowledge formations. The content is divided into four distinct but interrelated sections to highlight the importance and diversity of indigenous knowledge in Taiwan and beyond. It begins with an exploration of the recent development and construction of an indigenous knowledge and educational system in Taiwan, as well as issues concerning research ethics and indigenous knowledge. This is followed by a section that illustrates diverse forms of indigenous knowledge, and in turn, a theoretical dialogue between indigenous studies and settler colonial studies. Lastly, the Paiwan indigenous author Dadelavan Ibau's trans-indigenous journey to Tibet rounds out the coverage. This book is useful to readers in indigenous, settler colonial, and decolonial studies around the world, not just because it offers substantive content on indigenous knowledge in Taiwan, but also because it offers conceptual tools for studying indigenous knowledge from comparative and relational perspectives. It also greatly benefits anyone interested in Taiwan studies, offering an ethical approach to indigeneity in a classic settler colony.

Cosmo is a young boy whose life has been changed forever, after falling out of the tree he loved to climb. Now, Cosmo is disabled and uses a wheelchair. Now, Cosmo wants to have a conversation with the tree. In this outstanding debut collection for children, Stephen Lightbown draws on his own personal experiences as a wheelchair user, while creating a unique and utterly engaging character in Cosmo. Written in Cosmo’s voice and peppered with contributions from the boy’s family, these poems take the reader on a journey of challenges, questions, hurts, explorations and triumphs. Cosmo is endlessly open and curious, and his observations and reflections are at once perceptive, raw, hilarious, confronting and enchanting. How can Cosmo come to terms with, and adapt to, this seismic change in his life? Is his life as he knew it gone? Could there be new possibilities ahead, and also new abilities that Cosmo doesn't yet know he possesses? And will the tree ever reply to his number one question: why?

This book investigates the global hub airport as an exemplar of cosmopolitan culture and space. A machine made for movement, itself perched at the crossroads of the world's incessant mobility, the airport is both a symbol of and stage for the ways in which we construct and inhabit the world today. Taking an ethnographically-inflected approach, this study brings together knowledge of the moving body from dance and performance and the study of systems of mobility within cultural and mobilities studies, in order to call attention to the kinaesthetic experience of global space. What is the choreography of the global airport? How does it perform on us. How do we perform within it? Extending thinking about contemporary cosmopolitanism and cultural identity, and the performativity of places and identities, this book is essential reading for those interested in cultural debates around globalisation, the innovative application of performance theory towards everyday experience, and interdisciplinary methodologies.

The year is 1616. William Shakespeare has just died and the world of the London theatres is mourning his loss. 1616 also saw the death of the famous Chinese playwright Tang Xianzu. Four hundred years on and Shakespeare is now an important meeting place for Anglo-Chinese cultural dialogue in the field of drama studies. In June 2014 (the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth), SOAS, The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and the National Chung Cheng University of Taiwan gathered 20 scholars together to reflect on the theatrical practice of four hundred years ago and to ask: what does such an exploration mean culturally for us today? This ground-breaking study offers fresh insights into the respective theatrical worlds of Shakespeare and Tang Xianzu and asks how the brave new theatres of 1616 may have a vital role to play in the intercultural dialogue of our own time.