This collection elucidates the complexity of living politics in the 21st century, considering how self-help groups draw on shared regional traditions, and how they adapt their actions to the diverse formal political environments in which they operate. It considers the nexus between ideas and action in a world where the conventional 'right-left' divide has a decreasing hold on the political imagination. Examining grassroots self-help actions as responses to everyday life problems, it argues that whilst action may be initiated by encounters with ideas that come into the community from outside, often the flow of cause and effect works in the opposite direction. Focusing on countries both politically dynamic and with long-standing historical and cultural connections - China (including Inner Mongolia), Japan, Taiwan and Korea - this book fills a significant gap in the literature on social movements, demonstrating that survival itself is a political act.

This collection elucidates the complexity of living politics in the 21st century, considering how self-help groups draw on shared regional traditions, and how they adapt their actions to the diverse formal political environments in which they operate. It considers the nexus between ideas and action in a world where the conventional 'right-left' divide has a decreasing hold on the political imagination. Examining grassroots self-help actions as responses to everyday life problems, it argues that whilst action may be initiated by encounters with ideas that come into the community from outside, often the flow of cause and effect works in the opposite direction. Focusing on countries both politically dynamic and with long-standing historical and cultural connections - China (including Inner Mongolia), Japan, Taiwan and Korea - this book fills a significant gap in the literature on social movements, demonstrating that survival itself is a political act.

News under Fire: China's Propaganda against Japan in the English-Language Press, 1928-1941 is the first comprehensive study of China's efforts to establish an effective international propaganda system during the Sino-Japanese crisis. It explores how the weak Nationalist government managed to use its limited resources to compete with Japan in the international press. By retrieving the long-neglected history of English-language papers published in the treaty ports, Shuge Wei reveals a multilayered and often chaotic English-language media environment in China and demonstrates its vital importance in defending China's sovereignty. Chinese bilingual elites played an important role in linking the party-led propaganda system with the treaty-port press. Yet the development of propaganda institutions did not foster the realization of individual ideals. As the Sino-Japanese crisis deepened, the war machine absorbed treaty-port journalists into the militarized propaganda system and dashed their hopes of maintaining a liberal information order.