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In 1932, with the help of the League of Nations, the Chinese government sent an educational mission consisting of five scholars to Europe, in order to investigate education in different countries as reference points for ongoing Chinese educational reform. This article argues that educators in the mission used foreign examples to support their existing educational reform proposals, and that such a situation resulted from their understanding of the function of national education and China's practical situation. In doing so, the article adopts a transntional perspective and focuses on the discussions around national educational aims and general impressions of education in European countries, with a particular emphasis on two educators of the mission – Cheng Qibao and Yang Lian. To begin with, the article introduces the educational reform background of the mission – namely, what the Kuomintang (KMT) wanted national education to contribute. In the second part, the article discusses the understanding of the two educators regarding the social function of education, and reveals that, although they admired idealised internationalism, they considered that Chinese education should still prioritise a nationalist viewpoint. In the third part, the article analyses how the two educators constructed their impressions of education in those European countries, and used these impressions to remind readers about the Chinese situation. In the final part, the article discusses the proposals the two educators put forward and analyses the potential factors that prevented their proposals from having a concrete impact on Chinese educational reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the history of international mobility of students from China to other countries over the century and a half from 1870 to the present day. Different motivations, goals, courses, and knowledge are considered, together with how the purposes of individuals have matched national policy. Implications for the future development in a globalized context are briefly considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the impact of global conflict in multiethnic port cities using the case of Shanghai, China's imperial diasporas before and during World War I. It examines the social and political conditions of the city's foreign citizens. It also explores the widespread cosmopolitan attitude among the upper class, and the mixture of patriotism and cosmopolitanism in the city.

In response to foreign demands for concessions and territories, China’s last imperial court in the early twentieth century executed reforms to strengthen fiscal, personnel, military, and cultural control over its frontier regions. However, in so doing, it provoked an awakening of the national consciousness of the elites of non-Han ethnic minorities there. Much has changed over the past 100 years regarding the governance of China’s frontier territories of Inner Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang, with the diffusion of nationalist claims among increasing numbers of the ethnic minority populace, heightened focus of foreign actors on the humanitarian and rights situations of the ethnic minorities, and greatly extended reach and firmer grip of the central government. What remained unaltered is the “state integration” purpose of Chinese regimes, as manifested in the practices of “internal colonialism” or “ethnic assimilation,” which has led to grievances and resistance by China’s ethnic minorities against the Chinese state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

China's rise has been accompanied by a rise in nationalism. But what are the characteristics of this nationalism now being witnessed? Does it support China's constructive engagement with the international order, or does it seek to assert China's supremacy? These questions lie at the hub of a rapidly expanding secondary literature on the emergence of nationalism in China and its impact on China's foreign relations. What is, however, absent from the academic discourse is the voice of the Chinese people themselves. What are their perceptions of the nation-state, and how do these beliefs shape their views of China's relationship with East Asia? To address this gap, we conducted a series of large-scale surveys in Beijing between 2011 and 2013 on the twinned topics of domestic nationalism and international relations. Our findings, as reported below, represent an initial attempt to answer this final and, arguably, most critical set of questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Guangbao, published in Guangzhou between 1886 and 1891, was one of China's earliest native-owned newspapers, with a circulation three times larger than the Xunhuan Ribao. The newspaper, founded by Kuang Qizhao, provides important information on the ideas that were circulating at the time in Guangzhou, a place where a number of reformers were beginning to formulate their thoughts. The newspaper may have sown some of the seeds for the nationalism that would become a powerful force after the Sino-Japanese War. The Guangbao protested against the mistreatment of overseas Chinese and printed stories recommending retaliation against Americans. It opposed Western imperialism, advocated a strong national defence, and even suggested annexing Korea. However, the newspaper was not xenophobic and tried to encourage good relations between Chinese and foreigners in China. Unlike future political newspapers, the Guangbao continued to support the existing political system—not because of fear or ignorance, but because of a sense that democracy may not have been appropriate for China at this time. Although Kuang was not a supporter of many Neo-Confucian traditions or beliefs, because he equated Confucian morality with Christian morality, and morality was needed to combat corruption, the Guangbao emphasized Confucian moral training.The newspaper also served as a platform to promote reform ideas. Kuang carefully picked ideas that he felt were appropriate for China, including: free universal and specialized education, women's rights, economic nationalism/industrialization/business, free trade, entrepreneurship through patent and copyright protection, support for the common people versus corrupt officials, and philanthropy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article re-examines the meanings of Chinese nationalism and its relationship to vibrant and recurring National Products movements in modern China through the case of the Shanghai Coca-Cola protest of 1947–1948. In a campaign to revitalize national industry, the Chinese business community of Shanghai targeted Coca-Cola as a foreign luxury, and asked the Nationalist government to prohibit the importation of raw materials for Coca-Cola. However, archival materials show that not only was the Coca-Cola bottler in Shanghai—Watson's Mineral Water Company—a Chinese company but they had made large contributions during previous National Products movements. Using imported raw materials was also a very common practice in the Chinese soft drinks industry in the first half of the twentieth century. By revealing inconsistencies between the Chinese business community's statement of protest and the actual character of Coca-Cola's Shanghai bottler, this article argues that in this case Chinese nationalism became a pretext and tool for business competition. This research suggests that Chinese nationalism as an analytical lens remains complicated and its role and meaning in history must not be over-generalized. Rather than the existence of a unified and singular nationalism, Chinese nationalisms have been socially constructed over time, with multiple faces, interpretations, and functions for different interest groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the One Belt One Road initiative (BRI) of China which aims to stimulate economic development as of January 2017. A background of BRI is provided which was established in 2013 that would create a network of infrastructure worldwide that are linked to China. Topics include the lack of understanding of BRI's strategic motivations, its implications for the Eurasian continent, and China's motivations and purposes for BRI. Also discussed are China's efforts to secure its continental backyard, the leadership of President Xi Jinping, and Chinese exceptionalism.

Why is the period from the Opium War through the Republican era in recent Chinese history treated by so many scholars of different stripes as a decline of China itself, rather than as a decline simply of the dynastic order? What is the nature of the Republican period? What role has the centralization and decentralization of power played through these years – and is it limited to the Republican period, or is it part of a much longer trend in Chinese history? Why have so many scholars fixated on the Opium War at the beginning of Chinese modernity? Mizoguchi asks these penetrating questions and makes telling comparisons with Japan over roughly the same period of time. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the multiple meanings of blood transfusion and banking in modern China through the history of the first Chinese blood bank, established by the Overseas Chinese in 1943 to solicit blood for the war effort. Through investigating the attitudes of Chinese soldiers and civilians toward the blood bank, this article argues for the multiplicity of motivations underpinning society's attitudes toward blood banking and donation. Cultural notions of blood were an important but not the sole factor in their consideration. Ideas of nationalism and altruism played a role too. What eventually turned out to be most effective for most donors was the promise of eggs and soy milk for blood. Its economic value in the context of wartime scarcity was enough for many to abandon opposition to blood banking. By drawing attention to socioeconomic concerns in biomedical practices, this article provides an alternative examination of blood banking in modern societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the context of literature on Chinese nationalism. It highlights the arguments between the identification of the English-language literature such as the foreign policy for Chinese nationalism and the threat of erroneous Chinese nationalism. It also stresses the political identity of the literature on Chinese nationalism.

Why has China's foreign policy become more assertive since 2009, and what is driving Beijing's foreign policy orientations? Given the significance of China's rise over the past few decades, it is surprising that this question has not been subjected to systematic analysis as well as general investigation within scholarly research. This article serves to examine the sources of China's assertiveness using a system-level, unit-level and individual-level analysis. This article first looks at system-level explanations such as state power, external threats and national interests, and then considers unit-level factors including bureaucratic competition, struggles of the elite and the surge of nationalism. However, both system-level and unit-level explanations alone fail to account for China's more assertive foreign policy. This suggests that individual factors play a major role in explaining the country's more assertive external behaviour. This is especially the case when the perceptions of the political elite are deeply embedded in the state leader's preferences. This finding can enhance our understanding of why traditional explanations, that do not incorporate the role of the state leader, may fail to predict Chinese foreign policy behaviour. To understand better the implications of China's rise, therefore, we must take into account the role of the state leadership and its impact on China's growing influence in international politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Before the establishment of the Cenozoic Research Laboratory (Xinshengdai yanjiushi) in 1929, paleoanthropological research in China was mainly in the hands of foreigners, individual explorers as well as organized teams. This paper describes the development of paleoanthropology in China in the 1920s and 1930s and its transformation from the international phase to an indigenized one. It focuses on the international elite scientist network in metropolitan Beijing whose activities and discoveries led to such transformation. The bond between members of the network was built on shared scientific devotion, joint field experience, and social activities. However, such scientific internationalism was not immune from imperialistic and nationalistic interests and competition as most members of the network also belonged to institutions of the dominant hegemonic powers, such as the French Paleontological Mission and the American Museum of Natural History, operating by the logic of international system of imperialism. While these foreign institutions enjoyed relatively unrestricted access to the Chinese frontier and Mongolia in the early 20th century to discover and collect for the establishment of what they saw as universal scientific knowledge, in the late 1920s rising Chinese and Mongolian nationalisms began to interpret these activities as violations to their national sovereignty. The idea of establishing a “Chinese” institute to carry out paleoanthropological research in China took shape in such milieu. This paper highlights the entanglement between scientific internationalism, imperialism, nationalism in China in the early 20th century and the complicated process of knowledge formation at various national and personal levels. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article explores the history of cultural heritage and historical preservation in Russia and China. The author compares policies on the preservation and destruction of churches under communism and postcommunism. Emphasis is given to topics such as protection under state ownership of churches in the Soviet Union, the relationship between modern Chinese nationalism and temples, and religious life in communist China.

This article will explore the evolution of China's border policy through the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing on newly available archival sources and recent secondary literature, it will argue that during the early Cold War, the PRC leadership lacked a clear sense of the concept of national sovereignty, and often attempted to use territorial negotiations with China's neighbours to bargain for broader foreign policy objectives. The article will also examine the historical and political assumptions underlying Mao Zedong's approach to border questions, suggesting that Mao combined longstanding imperial assumptions about universal emperorship with the modern, Marxist idea of a world revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the politics of China in the early twentieth century when there was enough threat from foreign powers in the of imperialism with the Chinese intellectuals opting for interaction of cultures with theories of nationalism, Marxism, and cosmopolitanism.

This paper starts from the assumption that geostrategic and security interests alone are not sufficient to explain China’s foreign policy choices. It argues that ideas about what China’s role as an actor in the increasingly globalised international system should be, and about world order in general, have a deep influence on China’s foreign policy decision-making process. Taking the North Korean issue as a case study, the paper postulates that China is currently engaged in a search for a ‘new’ identity as a global player. China’s actor identity is composed of various partly contradictory role conceptions. National roles derived from China’s internal system structures and its historical past lead to continuity in foreign policy, while the ‘new’ roles resultant from China’s rise to global power require an adaptation of its foreign policy principles. In the case of its relationship with North Korea, China’s foreign policy is oscillating between the two roles of ‘socialist power’ – as thus comrade-in-arms with its socialist neighbour – and ‘responsible great power’, which leads to it being expected to comply with international norms, and thus to condemn North Korea’s nuclear provocations and related actions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article seeks to spark a conversation about shifting conceptualizations of disaster under modernizing states. It employs case studies of two major disasters, the North China Famine of 1876–79 and the Yellow River flood of 1938–47, to map changes and continuities in Chinese responses to disaster. State approaches to the late-Qing famine both drew on a millennium of Chinese thinking about disaster causation and anticipated new issues that would become increasingly important in twentieth-century China. The catastrophic Yellow River flood occurred when China's Nationalist government deliberately breached a major dike in a desperate attempt to “use water instead of soldiers” to slow the brutal Japanese invasion. The Nationalist state's technologization of disaster, its rejection of cosmological interpretations of calamity, and its depiction of flood victims as heroes sacrificing for the nation mark departures from late-imperial responses to disaster, but foreshadow features of the devastating Mao-era Great Leap Famine of 1958–62. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The expeditions of foreign explorers and archaeologists along China's borderlands during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have long been a lightning rod for debates over cultural sovereignty, imperialism, and nationalism. This study attempts to move beyond such cultural and moral glosses by placing the expeditions of Aurel Stein and Sven Hedin to the northwestern province of Xinjiang back into the domestic geopolitical context of the Nanjing Decade (1927–37). Newly available archival material demonstrates how the discourse of cultural sovereignty, far from sabotaging such expeditions, instead became the handmaiden of domestic geopolitical competitors who attempted to turn Stein and Hedin into exploitable resources for their own agendas. The logistical pragmatism revealed in these sources relegates principled nationalist intellectuals and their imperialist targets to the background, and shows how a new approach to a familiar topic can help paint a fuller portrait of some of the most contested episodes of transnational cultural interactions throughout Eurasia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study explores how the government of mainland China values Chinese nationalism as a component of its historical memory and traces its relationship with music education from the twentieth century to the global age within broader social contexts. In a rapidly commercializing and modernizing China, nationalism remains the main driving force shaping Chinese music education, while historical nationalism and familial relationship have been reinforced by the current regime's educational socialization. Love for country and family and an emphasis on nationalism and Confucianism are the pragmatic tools employed by Chinese authorities to maintain their primacy in and power over education, particularly song teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Mantetsu Employees' Association, founded in 1926 by a group of elite university-educated employees of the South Manchuria Railway Company, was an organization of unprecedented scope and vision which provided for the development of a limited form of self-government by the Japanese in the Kwantung Leasehold and Rail Zone during Japan's occupation of northeast China. Its founding principles resembled the ideological tenets of the metropole's movement of Taishō Democracy which had since the post-Russo-Japanese War energized supporters of widened popular access to the job of national governance. This paper traces how the Mantetsu Employees' Association reflected the political zeitgeist of post World War I metropolitan society whilst simultaneously developing in response to heightened Chinese nationalism in the northeast throughout the 1920s. It shows how the Association encompassed a wide range of employee ambitions—from increased involvement in imperial decision-making to labour advocacy on behalf of the Company's lowest-ranking Japanese workers to a critique of colonial policy as dictated by Tokyo's political parties. The paper introduces key Association players and their ideas as a means of questioning the nature of democracy in an imperial setting. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the last three decades, a considerable body of English-language academic work has shed much light on Japan's empire-building project in Greater China during the first half of the twentieth century. At the same time, Japanese-language studies of the country's pre-war financial history have also grown in leaps and bounds. Yet, to date, neither body of literature seems to have fully examined what might appear to the naked eye as one of the critical pre-war junctures, where Japanese financial history converged on imperial policy and Chinese nationalist responses thereto.1 This paper will therefore aim to fill part of the gap by examining how the Yokohama Specie Bank, arguably the backbone of Japanese finance in China Proper, was affected by Chinese anti-foreign boycotts throughout the pre-war era (1842–1937). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

By tracing the origin and evolution of Chinese nationalism, this paper finds that the dialectical relationship between the Chinese "self and the foreign "other" has provided the cultural-institutional context for the construction of its national identity. The positional change of the Chinese actor in the self-other interaction--resulting from the institutional shift from the tianxia order to the Westphalian system--and the consequent national humiliation have been embedded in the Chinese collective memory and given rise to the consensual norms ingrained in the national identity. Viewed through the lens of political sociology and identity politics, China's tenacious struggle for national rejuvenation can be construed as a social practice guided by these memory-encoded social norms. Due to the protracted and ambivalent nature of the state's purposive action in attaining great-power status on the international stage, the confidence of the resurgent state is compromised by an acute sense of frustration. This identity predicament has engendered a peculiar Chinese state emotion, which has profoundly influenced the in-group members' evaluation and perception of out-group entities and their behavior in the antagonistic intergroup relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nationalist struggle to bring about the end of colonial rule in India, and the Republican and communist struggles to arrest and reverse the humiliation and the “carve-up” of China by foreign powers, were both closely allied to the struggle to become modern. Indeed, the two goals were usually seen to be so closely related as to be indistinguishable: a people had to start becoming modern if they were ever to be free of foreign domination, and they had to gain sovereignty and state power in order to undertake the laborious but necessary task of building a strong, prosperous, and modern nation. Thus in India, as in China, political movements from the latter nineteenth century sought to found a sovereign nation free from domination by a Western power or powers, and also sought to make this putative nation and its people “modern,” both as a necessary means towards the nationalist end and as an end in itself. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article carries a two-fold argument. First, Beijing's economic sanctions against Vietnam during the period 1975–1978 were mainly motivated by its desire to punish Vietnam for an anti-China policy that smacked of ingratitude for the latter's past assistance, fuelled further by Hanoi's closer relations with Moscow. They were also designed to extract Hanoi's accommodation of China's demand for territorial boundary concessions and to halt the persecution of ethnic Chinese residents in Vietnam. Second, the resultant meltdown of Sino-Vietnamese relations, as well as the making of the Soviet-Vietnamese alliance between 1975 and 1978, was gradual and contentious rather than swift and decisive as most existing studies contend. Hanoi's reluctance to forge a formal military alliance with the faraway Soviet Union against China was largely driven by the importance of China's remaining aid and economic potential to Vietnam's post-war economic reconstruction and the uncertainty of the Soviet commitment to aid Vietnam. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Shanghai’s peculiar status between 1842 and 1943, its sovereignty degraded in key ways, meant that it gave sanctuary to, and spawned, a wide range of nationalist activity and counteractivity. This essay examines five different layers of activity that the city hosted, and spawned, and explores how they interacted, and touches also on their legacies. It outlines the three key factors that gave shape to the city and to its overt and covert political communities: space, law, and time (or the calendar). The essay explores the interplay of the physical and administrative realms that cut across the city, the restrictions they imposed, and the opportunities they opened up, and shows vividly how nationalism and the urban intersected in this site of multinational imperial power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the emerging discourse of child-citizen-workers in wartime China and demonstrates how this concept of children's citizenship was put into practice in work training programs within wartime children's homes. This article argues that the idea of child-citizen-workers grew from three pre-war antecedents that converged and were greatly accelerated by Chinas war with Japan: the new idea of an autonomous sphere of childhood articulated during the early Republican period; a progressive education movement to introduce labor training and experiential learning as essential elements of modern education; and Nationalist state-building and activist efforts at family reform, which viewed traditional parents with distrust and increasingly intervened in family life. The second half of the article focuses particularly on orphans, who were considered potentially unstable social elements due to their position outside the control of families, and whose lack of parental protection made them available for appropriation. This article demonstrates that the war opened up a space in which Guomindang state-builders, working with educators and childcare workers, attempted to restructure orphans lives within wartime child welfare institutions to realize a vision for Chinas future: the ideal of child-citizen-workers habituated toward sacrifice for the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the Women's Advisory Council of the New Life Movement to show how educated women developed their own concepts of wartime responsibilities as they conducted resistance and social construction programmes. It particularly examines their work with rural women and efforts to improve education, production, life habits and national consciousness. In transferring their vision of China's development to uneducated compatriots in the interior, the Council cadres attempted to bolster their social authority and prove their leadership abilities. Their work explicates another dimension of the lasting consequences to wartime relief provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Cultural Palace of Nationalities, one of the Ten Monumental Buildings built in 1959 in Beijing to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), is considered a ‘political building’ in that it brings together ethnicity, architecture, art, technology and, most importantly, representations of the Party-state’s policy on the unity of the many different nationalities in China. A careful examination of the history of the Palace’s construction and its exhibits reveals two unsettling problems: the Chinese Communist Party’s manipulation of official images of national minorities, along with the Party’s difficulties in dealing with ethnic nationalism, regional separatism and local identity in the first decade of the PRC. These same thorny issues continue to cause the current government a major headache. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Chinese writings on international relations increasingly invoke history. In the past Chinese and foreigners alike have seen China's foreign policies through the lens of history, but recent Chinese stress on the 'harmonious world' resulting from Confucianism has shifted the discussion. It serves as a guide to resurgent claims for leadership, a source of legitimation for why China deserves leadership, and a warning of how its leadership may be abused to the detriment of countries agreeing to regionalism or multilateralism. Claims to superiority raise tensions in Japan, South Korea, and elsewhere where hopes had existed for a shared view of history. They arouse controversy among advocates of socialist ideology who fear that Confucianism will eclipse communism. The increasingly hereditary elite of Party leaders continues to bridge the gap between these two types of memory, but they face an ideological challenge at home and a credibility challenge abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2003, the dispute over the history of the ancient kingdom of Koguryŏ (37 bce, trad.-668 ce), located in Manchuria and northern Korea, has been one of the hottest issues between China and Korea. The debate seems to have fueled a new nationalistic or Sinocentric historiography of the ancient Chinese northeast. A ninth century BCE poem called “Hanyi” in the Classic of Poetry [Shijing] has been the cause of a far older history dispute. Whereas Chinese scholars have generally understood Han as a Zhou feudal state ruled by a Ji-surnamed scion of the Zhou Dynasty (1045–256 bce), most Korean scholars have linked the polity with Old Chosŏn (n.d.-108 bce), the earliest known state in Korean history. However, by comparing the “Hanyi” with several bronze inscriptions with similar contents, this study seeks to re-read the “Hanyi” from a perspective that transcends the dichotomy of Chinese history versus Korean history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The land-locked north China province of Shanxi, identified in 1870 by the geologist Baron Richthofen as ‘one of the most remarkable coal and iron regions in the world’, was the site of a provincially‑defined national movement far removed from the better‑studied treaty ports and their articulate and prolific nationalists. This late-Qing provincialism may be read as a mediating symbol of an emerging national consciousness.Social tensions were exacerbated by external challenges brought by foreign agents, and their Chinese collaborators, of cultural and economic imperialism. Opposition to missionaries and Chinese Christians had begun as early as the 1860s. In 1898 the British Pekin Syndicate and its extra-provincial Chinese associates, with the backing of the central government, secured rights to Shanxi's rich coal and iron resources. These rights were ceded back ten years later after a successful ‘rights-recovery’ movement that possesses similarities to (but also significant differences from) the well-studied oppositional movements in Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Hunan, and Shandong in the period 1905–1911. The duration of Shanxi's struggle, along with its extra-bureaucratic elite activism, popular mobilization, and cooperation with Beijing, makes its rights-recovery movement distinctive. The rhetoric and practices of the movement, which began before the Boxer Uprising of 1900 and reflects the rhetorical influence of these earlier protests, contributed to a strong regional solidarity that was backed by central state authority. There were various patterns of protest, one indigenous and provincial, one extra-provincial and nationalist, that interacted in the period 1902–1908. Provincial activists, including merchants, peasants, students, degree-holders, and officials, insisted that Shanxi's coal was for the use of the community, the province, and the nation on terms established by and for the people of Shanxi. In their victory, localism, provincialism, and the national project, had come together. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article looks at the strategic manipulation of national Red Cross Societies as markers of sovereignty during a period of heightened world nationalism in the early twentieth century. Using Chinese archival materials, it examines how in 1916, on China's much contested Shandong Peninsula, a Japanese delegation set up a Japanese Red Cross chapter and hospital in the Chinese port city of Longkou, in flagrant disregard of widely recognized principles of sovereignty and international law. Occurring just as the larger 'Shandong Question' was roiling the international legal community, this incident shows how the local practice of international legal statutes diverged from a more publicized, transnational discussion of those same principles. The article explores this disjuncture, and considers one instance of what I term the differentiated practice of international law: the early twentiethcentury Japanese 'double policy' - 'one policy for the East and another for the West.' Revealing much about the use of humanitarian activity and the laws of war to further national agendas, the Longkou Incident was later used by the Chinese Red Cross Society as precedent for checking further incursions into China's sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Sino-Japanese relations are quite stable presently, it was as recent as 2004–2005 that the two nations slid into the worst bilateral quagmire in decades. When in 2007 Japan was China’s third largest trading partner and China surpassed the US to become Japan’s largest trading partner, what is eating these two otherwise very pragmatic traders? History, nationalism and face, enabled by recent changes in the strategic environment, are the factors that have been most salient in bringing about the plunge in Sino-Japanese relations in 2004–05 and though Sino-Japanese relations have been much better since, these factors hang like a storm front over Sino-Japanese relations today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interpretations of history have been a source of tension in East Asia but usually involve Japan and the Second World War. Yet, in the past ten years, another controversy has been brewing over history, this time between South Korea and China over claims to 'ownership' of an ancient kingdom. This article is a case study that examines how states utilize reinterpretations of history for current and future strategic goals. The result has been a dispute that has resembled a security dilemma where China's initial actions, deemed to be largely defensive by Beijing, were perceived in Seoul as offensive, provoking a counter-response that has in turn, alarmed China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article chronicles the evolution of ethnic politics in the Yanbian region, focusing on the Chinese Korean communist leader Chu Tǒk-hae during the Chinese civil war and the early Korean War. Chu's advocacy of Chinese nationality for ethnic Koreans is juxtaposed with his cooperation with North Korea, conflict over North Korean refugees, and examinations of the Yanbian region's role between the People's Republic of China and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. The ''Resist America and Aid Korea'' movement provides the most dramatic example of how Chu and ethnic Koreans in Yanbian expressed a uniquely tinged Chinese nationalism while continuing to lend support to North Korea. The article thereby aims to contribute to the regional history of Northeast Asia, add texture to debates on Chinese and Korean nationalism in that region, and reveal new aspects of Chinese Korean agency in the earliest years of Chinese Communist Party control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In China, the Miao ethnic group has been known for its long and tragic history. This image, however, was formed only during the modern era. Using a historiographical approach, this paper reviews and analyzes the process through which the Chinese Miao emerged as a modern ethnic group. Specifically, it focuses on the transition from "Miao" as a blanket term for non-Han ethnic groups in southern China during the pre-modern period to "Miaozu" as a modern ethnic group, originally constructed in the context of the emergence of Chinese nationalism at the beginning of the 20th century in the context of the domineering "Other" of Han culture and eventuating in the official recognition of fifty-six "minority nationalities" (shaoshu minzu) in the 1950s. Based on this study, this paper then goes on to a theoretical discussion on the question of alterity in the formation of ethnic groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines politics and government in China, focusing on the ability of its Communist government to maintain power when so many others did not in the late 1980s and 1990s. The political situation and economic and social conditions at the time of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests are compared to those in 2009, and found to be almost precisely reversed in many aspects, such as the role of young adults, who were the protesters of 1989 and in 2009 are predominately supporters of the government. The government's policies of economic liberalization are held to be primarily responsible for its success in holding power. Economic development has created a strong sense of national pride, nationalism with which the government has strongly identified itself. It is noted that political protest in the 21st century takes place largely in rural areas, and the protesters are generally appealing for intervention by the central government against local government.

This article examines the representation of Chinese identity in museums in the People's Republic of China, comparing this briefly with the portrayal of local and national identities in Hong Kong and Taiwan. In particular, the article looks at the implications for museums of the shift in emphasis within state ideology from socialism to patriotism - a shift that has been particularly marked since the early 1990s. Museums in contemporary China are officially designated as 'bases for patriotic education', but the content of the 'patriotism' that they are meant to promote remains in many respects vague or problematic. One of the key tensions here is that between a deep-rooted assumption of equivalence between 'Chinese' and 'Han' culture and history, and the multicultural reality of the contemporary People's Republic - including as it does a range of non-Han groups such as Tibetans, Uighurs and Mongols. The progressive abandonment of socialism has in some ways exposed these contradictions more starkly in recent years. Meanwhile, the homogenous and totalising official vision of Chinese identity in general, and Han identity in particular, is contested either at the popular or the official level (or both) in the largely Han communities of Hong Kong and Taiwan. In a rapidly commercialising and modernising China, the promotion of a state-centred patriotism has become a key instrument for the regime in its efforts to preserve its legitimacy, and museums represent a key element in this strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Facing the trend and pressure of globalisation, the history curricula of Hong Kong and Shanghai have been undergoing reforms in order to better equip the youth for coping with rapid contextual changes. At the same time, there have been attempts to reposition nationalism in the changing contexts. This paper aims to compare and contrast how the forces of nationalism and globalisation affect, and are re-presented in, the contents of the junior secondary history curricula of the two cities, with a view to exploring the convergent and divergent trends of development in the two systems (capitalist and socialist) within one country. It is expected that the findings will shed light on the continuities and changes in the junior secondary history curricula of the two cities, and explore possible alternatives for the improvement of history education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following Prasenjit Duara's strategy for "de-constructing China." this article traces the development of several competing narratives of national unity and origin during the formative Republican era ( 1911-49) of Chinese history. Faced with the difficult task of incorporating the heterogeneous peoples of the Qing empire into the new Chinese nation-state, Han Chinese intellectuals looked backward into their own history for scientific pr(x)f of this unitary national imaginary. The article focuses on the tension between, on the one hand, a racial formulation that placed the source of Chinese trinity in the "common origin" (tongyuan) of its people and, on the other hand, a more subjective formulation that located this unity in the gradual, evolutionary "melding" (ronghe) of several distinct cultures and races into a new national consciousness. In the process, it highlights the role played by social scientific discourses--as institutionalized in the disciplines of history, archaeology, and ethnology--in the construction of national identity in twentieth-century China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses both Manchu and Han sources to interrogate the relationship between Qing and China. After toppling the Ming reign, the Qing rulers identified their state with China as their eighteenth-century campaigns in Inner Asia redefined what China was. By the early twentieth century, educational institutions had Facilitated the Manchu efforts to gain the hearts and minds of the Han intellectual elite, who embraced the idea that China was a multiethnic state. Although Manchu rule ended in 191 I, the Chinese people never returned to the position that "China" was the property of the Han people: China's modem identity would be that of a unified multiethnic state. In other words, the Qing legacies to modem China include not just the country's vast territory but also a new concept of China that laid the solid foundation for the rise of its national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article retraces the history of the Sino-Indian frontier dispute, still a hotly debated issue in today's international arena, from a fresh perspective. Drawing on both English primary sources and, in particular, the previously unexplored Chinese archival materials of the Nationalist era, this research reconstructs the previously ignored historical terrain of the Northeast Frontier Agency, from the time of the Simla talks until the late 1940s, at the moment when the present-day Indian and Chinese regimes were about to emerge.

The Chinese practice of Marxist historical writing represents a dynamic interaction between nationalism and transnationalism. On the one hand, Chinese Marxists were attracted to the Soviet experience in applying Marxism to historical study, especially during the 1950s and the early 1960s, for the latter provided a seemingly much needed theoretical guidance. On the other hand, they attempted to circumscribe the Soviet influence in order to strike a balance between history and theory, the foreign and the indigenous, and the national and the transnational. In so doing, they turned their practice of Marxism into an interpretive, hermeneutic process, in which the temporal distance between the Marxist text and China's historical experience became recognized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]