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Grounded in comparative law research, this paper compares differences in the regulation of online child pornography in China and the United States. The United States began regulating child pornography through criminal law in the 1970s, gradually refining the laws to distinguish between child pornography and obscenity and prohibit the possession of child pornography and virtual child pornography. In contrast, China treats child pornography on an equal footing with adult pornography, but imposes more lenient penalties on disseminating child pornography, which has led to the proliferation of child pornography. By comparing the two countries' policies and laws on child pornography, this review makes four recommendations for other countries: (i) define child pornography in criminal law; (ii) distinguish between obscenity and child pornography; (iii) prohibit virtual child pornography on the internet; and (iv) increase criminal penalties for child pornography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biophysics has been either an independent discipline or an element of another discipline in the United States, but it has always been recognized as a stand-alone discipline in the People's Republic of China (PRC) since 1949. To inquire into this apparent divergence, this paper investigates the formational history of biophysics in China by examining the early institutional history of one of the best-known and prestigious science and technology universities in the PRC, the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). By showing how the university and its biophysics program co-evolved with national priorities from the school's founding in 1958 to the eve of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, the purpose of this paper is to assess the development of a scientific discipline in the context of national demands and institutional politics. Specific materials for analysis include the school's admission policies, curricula, students' dissertations, and research program. To further contextualize the institutional setting of Chinese biophysics, this paper begins with a general history of proto-biophysical institutions in China during the Nationalist-Communist transitional years. This paper could be of interest to historians wanting to know more about the origin of the biophysics profession in China, and in particular how research areas that constitute biophysics changed in tandem with socio-political contingencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores a parallel between the ‘yellow peril’ imagery of pollution and danger used to characterize China historically and that found in contemporary media accounts representing Chinese-made consumer goods in the USA. A survey of newspaper reporting on two key events involving Chinese imports (pet food and toys) reveals that in both eras, cases of ‘yellow peril’ involve narratives of domesticity threatened by potentially contaminating contact with an essentialized China. The paper demonstrates how the global movement of goods serves as a powerful bearer of racializing categories in the terrain of American consumerism and domesticity. Media narratives about consumer welfare and the threatened American consumer provide the moral anchor for a larger story about US national interest and ‘proper’ capitalism in the context of China's ‘rise’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The international relations (IR) discipline is known as an ‘American Social Science’ dominated by scholars and theories from the US core. This paper compares IR in two noncore settings, China and Europe. It shows that there is a growing institutional and intellectual integration into global Anglophone, mostly American, IR in both Europe and China. Both Chinese and European IR communities have established top Anglophone journals like theEuropean Journal of International Relationsand theChinese Journal of International Politicsto spearhead their integration into mainstream Anglophone IR and carve out a space for regional thinking. Yet, the analysis of their publication and citation patterns shows that IR outside the American core communicates through a hub-and-spokes system where there is always a connection to the American core but rarely very strong linkages to other peripheral regions. The two journals studied thus function as outlets for ‘local’ and American scholars, rely on ‘local’ and American sources, and there is very little integration and exchangebetweenChinese and European IR. Chinese and European IR would benefit from such a dialogue, especially regarding ‘schools’ of IR at the margins of an ‘American social science’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the past 30 years various accounts of Hmong history have emerged from Hmong and non-Hmong scholars working in the United States, other Diaspora countries and Asia. This short commentary paper examines and addresses some of the questions that have arisen from the many versions of Hmong history in China being circulated among the Hmong of the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The papers in this special issue are the products of a conference, 'History and China's Foreign Relations: The Achievements and Contradictions of American Scholarship, ' held at the University of Southern California in February 2008. All of us, professors, policy advisors and policy-makers, think it would be helpful if there was more informed discussion among the general public of the challenges of China's rise in the world and our responses to it, but we all acknowledge that the American public sphere is a big mess, fragmented by the apparent riches of the Internet, dumbed down to the vanishing point in the major media. Can we as scholars make some beginnings in drawing on China's long and complex history of relations with other peoples to find generalizations and patterns that help to illuminate the present for the policy elite and for the concerned public? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]