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The Tian An Men Square massacre of 4 June 1989 was the violent repression carried out by the armed forces carrying out the order of the oppressive central government to which students and workers demanded the assertion of civil rights. Although the ’89 episode, due to its highly symbolic value, is remembered as the massacre of China, the population took to Tian An Men Square many times during the short century, exhausted by internal civil wars, massive losses during the world wars and rampant corruption in government circles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the areas that the advent of the Internet has changed most profoundly is the relationship that human beings have with their past. Sources that would once have been barely accessible after a difficult and taxing search are now available to one and all, and can be compared to more traditional texts. The article sets out to show how knowledge of Mao's China and the Cultural Revolution in particular will benefit significantly from the immense pool of recordings and video clips available on the Internet. With the resources afforded by the Web, a brand–new way of linking up words and images, text and visual sources, has become possible, providing the study of history and memory with unexplored tracts of promising terrain. But the importance of this emerging material is not just to do with historical knowledge and methodology. Its main contribution is political: the persecutors and the victims of those years have spoken out, they have deposited their memories online, exercising a faculty that the Cultural Revolution and post–Maoist political institutions had denied them for decades. Through the bottom–up perspective that the Internet provides, the historical protagonists have been able to bear witness in potential perpetuity without needing the researcher's mediation. By speaking directly to the public, the witnesses cease to be merely pieces of the past. They are not just victims or perpetrators who condemn past deeds, but, as the actors who made and endured history, they can turn themselves from passive historical figures into active political agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, water resources scarcity has become a severe issue that interferes with economic, social, and ecological development. As the most significant use of water resources in agriculture, irrigation plays a crucial role in ensuring agricultural production when rainfall is insufficient to maintain the growth of crops. In this paper, estimation of water resources in irrigation practices was carried out in Baoding since the area suffers from water scarcity, and the situation there is worsening, especially after the founding of Xiongan New District. This study aimed to evaluate the supply and demand balance of irrigation at the municipal and county levels through the climate information and crop pattern summarization in Baoding. Data provided by Agricultural Machinery Bureau was integrated with CLIMWAT 2.0 to compute crop water requirements, irrigation requirements, and irrigation schemes in CROPWAT 8.0. Results show that an estimated sum of 1881.3 mm annual crop water requirements comprising the vast majority of crops in agricultural production led to 1493.5 million m3 irrigation requirements, creating an irrigation deficit of 119.2 million m3. The greater cutdown on annual water supply compared to the irrigation requirements led to a consecutive exacerbation of annual irrigation deficits. Suggestions, including physical and political measures, were provided to improve the current situation in Baoding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

General George Catlett Marshall, a soldier and diplomat, went down in history as the US secretary of state and the author of the famous Marshall Plan. In the years 1945-1947, he conducted a mediation mission in China which ended in a total fiasco. It is usually indicated that the reason for such a catastrophic conclusion was the inability to reach a compromise on the part of the Nationalist and Communist parties. The article points out that the actual goal of the Marshall Mission was to avoid America's political and military entanglement in China. The Truman administration's attention was focused on Europe. Real support for the KMT - which might have changed the outcome of the civil war - was not considered at all. The purpose of Marshall Mission was to provide an excuse to withdraw. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Valuing water is difficult and contentious owing to water's physical, political, and economic characteristics. Combining household-level and county-level data at the county level could clarify the responsibilities of both the government and users. In the Thousand Island Lake Water Distribution Project (TILWDP), the upstream ecosystem services provider, Chunan County, is assumed to sustain a tremendous opportunity cost due to the extremely strict environmental protection requirements of the project. To estimate the opportunity cost of supplying fresh water that meets the standards of the National Primary Drinking Water Regulations, a synthetic control model is introduced, and county-level macroeconomic data are used. A funding gap was estimated in the current government-financed situation. Meanwhile, willingness to pay is calculated based on household-level data collected in the downstream area. The estimate indicates that the combination of ecological compensation payments from governments and downstream stakeholders' willingness to pay for water services could completely cover the upstream service provider's opportunity cost. Specifically, the related central and downstream governments would need to take on approximately 1/3 of the total cost, while the users from the downstream area would take on the rest. The proposed policies include adopting government–user joint-financing payment for ecosystem services (PES) schemes for regional ecological and environmental cooperation in China, implementing diversified payment vehicles, launching additional environmental education projects, etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is dedicated to the analysis of The Bull’s Hour (Chas byka) by Ivan Efremov, a final novel in a series of his science fiction works about a remote communist future of the Earth. In the description of the terrestrial astronauts’ mission to a planet named Tormans, utopia and dystopia merge: the utopian communist society of the Earth is contrasted with a sinister dystopian reality of Tormans, where terror, violence, and repressions flourish and where the totalitarian mechanism of the State rejects any idea of human life valour. The description of Tormans recalls explicitly the realia of the 20th century, with particular references not only to the USA, China and the Nazi Germany, but – and, maybe, mostly – to the Soviet Union. The Bull’s Hour therefore can be read as a literary act of resistance against the regime and an expression of a hope for possible changes of the Soviet system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates the evolution of the narrative elaborated by the Chinese Communist Party during Jiang Zemin's Presidency. It aims at highlighting, through an analysis of the official speeches pronounced by the Chinese political leadership, mainly by Jiang Zemin, how China's posture evolved in international relations from the late eighties to the late nineties. Hence, the narrative also plays a crucial role for setting the foreign policy agenda of a country. Furthermore, such article considers how alterations in national collective memory, which occurred in the narrative elaborated by the Chinese government during the nineties, can be interpreted as compatible with its leaders' expectations about the role of China in international affairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article investigates the new developments and challenges of social sciences and humanities in the era of globalization and underlines the importance of social sciences' intersection with interdisciplinary and transregional collaborative researches of Area studies stressing particular attention on the new developments of Social sciences in some developing and emerging countries such as nowadays China, which plays an important role in the contemporary geopolitical world orders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to analyse the evolution of Sino-Italian relations from the foundation of the PRC to the end of the Cold War, with a special focus on the construction of the official relationship from 1970 to 1992. The article has been divided into three parts: a critical reflection on the historical context that set the ground for the evolution of Sino-Italian relations between the 1950s and the 1970s; an assessment of the historical impact of normalisation; and a reconstruction of the main dynamics in bilateral relations between 1970 and 1992. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the relationship between Chinese officials and Western European industrialists, revealing that in the second half of the 1950s, there already was a specific Western European interest in China's market potential, and that this was met with favour on the Chinese side. In order to become a strong and independent country, the People's Republic of China was especially interested in evaluating a wide range of offers in the chemical and energy sectors. By looking at the early achievements of the Italian company, National Hydrocarbon Holding (Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi, ENI), this article will show how its offer in terms of technology and engineering met with the favour of the Chinese at the beginning of the 1960s. This was just when the local petroleum industry was moving towards self-reliance, which China ultimately achieved, albeit for a short time. Sources show that, despite economic and political constraints, PRC decision-makers were perfectly aware of prices and commercial strategies, as well as of the state-of-the-art technology of the time. Furthermore, China's commercial cooperation with Western European companies in the 1950s–1960s meant that early on Chinese leaders had an opportunity to evaluate market alternatives to their tightly constraining alliance with the Socialist bloc. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

After 1955 the People's Republic of China looked to Western Europe to develop new economic and cultural relations, and to project its new image as an independent Socialist state. In this new context, between 1955 and 1957 several Italian delegations visited China to explore the possibility of cooperation between China and Italy in the field of literature and art. This article investigates the most important of these delegations, led by the jurist, Piero Calamandrei, in 1955, and some subsequent initiatives, such as the exhibition of Italian artists held in Beijing in 1956. Drawing mainly from Italian published and private sources, the article explores how Socialist China's revolutionary cultural identity was understood and received in Italy in this period. It does so with special reference to the impact of Soviet cultural influence on China, and the prospect of Sino-Italian cooperation in the field of arts and literature as a way to bridge the East–West political and ideological divide. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article applies a political sociology approach to the study of Chinese foreign policy. It uses the neo-weberian dichotomy of weak states-strong states to explain the features of the making of foreign policy. In particular, the article analyzes how the configuration in contemporary China of state-society relations - the domestic structure - affects Beijing's responses to international events. After a brief sketch, in the first section, of the analytical framework, the second section outlines the main characteristics of state-society relations in China, and the third section discusses the impact of domestic structure on Chinese foreign economic policy and security policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses various aspects of Mao Zedong's perception of the United States. Mao's feelings for the United States during his youth; US imperialism as the main threat; Factors affecting Mao's attitudes toward the US.