Search results
The imperialist epoch was heralded in 1900, among other military campaigns, with an eight-nation imperialist invasion of China by Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States to put down the Boxer Rebellion. The importance of China for world development has long been recognised. For example
3835 Understanding Chinese:Layout 1 12/7/12 11:04 Page 5 1 Chinese politics The legacy of history What political scientists refer to as political culture – the deeply embedded distinctive patterns of political, economic and social behaviour that fundamentally shape politics – is best viewed as the accumulated legacies of a country’s history. History, however, is not destiny: while a country’s past shapes its politics it does not determine it. Change is ever present though the pace at which it occurs varies: sometimes glacial (with the political system
Spencer underwear, and taxi queues. Among the ‘bad’ legacies cited were a lingering ‘colonial us-and-them mentality’ in which a ‘remarkable lack of racial intermingling’ had taken place, British snobbery, and British pop culture, in which phenomena such as the Spice Girls and Loaded magazine had ‘managed to infiltrate and subvert 5,000 years of glorious Chinese culture’. 1 These lists are striking for
The US, the two Chinas and the 1960 Winter Olympics 185 10 ‘Chinese rings’: the United States, the two Chinas and the 1960 Squaw Valley Winter Olympics Rachel Vaughan It is only relatively recently that scholars have begun to recognise the centrality of sport to the public diplomacy and soft power strategies of governments within the international arena.1 To a degree, this was partly the reluctance of Western governments to acknowledge the role of sport within their diplomatic arsenal. In contrast, the West’s Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union, began to
The Chinese political system is the subject of much media and popular comment in part because China supports an economy with an apparently inexorable dynamic and impressive record of achievement. This book provides a comprehensive introduction to China's political system, outlining the major features of the Chinese model and highlighting its claims and challenges. It explores the central role of the Communist Party in the country's politics and the way in which the Party controls most elements of the political system. The collapse of the imperial system in 1911, the subsequent decades of turmoil and war and the coming to power of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1949 constitutes a truly revolutionary period in Chinese political history. The People's Republic of China (PRC) represents an unanticipated challenge to the logic of history. The key organising principle of the political system of the PRC is the leadership of the CCP. China remains a Leninist party-state. The book also examines the role of the National People's Representatives Congress (NPC) and then the State Council and the associated structures of central government departments. Greater democracy is facilitated, as are other reforms, by the recasting of China's foreign policy to encourage a calmer international environment. China's re-emergence as a major power is the single most important geo-political trend of the early twenty-first century.
Staging art and Chineseness is about the politics of borders ascribed to Chinese contemporary art and the identification of artists by locations and exhibitions. The paradoxical subject of Chineseness is central to this inquiry, which begins with the question, what does the term Chinese Art mean in the aftermath of the globalized shift in art? Through an exploration of embodied and performative representations (including eco-feminist performances) by artists from China and diasporic locations, the case studies in this book put to the test the very premise of the genealogical inscription for cultural objects attributed to the residency, homeland, or citizenship of the Chinese artist. Acknowledging the orientalist assumptions and appropriations that Chineseness also signifies, this study connects the artistic performance to the greater historical scope of ‘geographical consciousness’ envisioned by past and present global expositions. The emergence of China’s shiyan meishu experimental art movement in the 1980s–1990s has largely been the defining focus for ‘global art’ during the period when artfairs, biennials, and triennials also came into prominence as the new globalized art institution (exemplified by China’s first biennial in Guangzhou). The political aim is to recognize the multiple contradictions and repetitions of history engendered by art, nationalism, and capital in the legacy of Althusserian/Maoist interpellations – the reifications of global capitalist illusions in the twenty-first century are conveyed in this book by performative artistic expressions and the temporal space of the exposition.
The British community in China was rooted in the diverse cultures of imperial Britain. This book presents a study of Britain's presence in China both at its peak, and during its inter-war dissolution in the face of assertive Chinese nationalism and declining British diplomatic support. Using archival materials from China and records in Britain and the United States, the book presents a portrait of the traders, missionaries, businessmen, diplomats and settlers who constituted "Britain-in-China", challenging people's understanding of British imperialism there. Imperialism is no new subject for scholars of modern Chinese history. The largest settler communities were selfgoverning; even the smallest were still self-replicating. The book focuses on the structure and workings of this establishment in the decades before the Pacific War. The survey presented examines the processes by which Britain in China evolved, how it replicated itself and represented itself (and China). It looks at how it attempted to reform itself in the face of the militant state and mass nationalism it met in China in the mid-1920s and after. The survey also looks at the face of the efforts of the British state to regain control over it and to decolonise the British presence. All Britons in China possessed multiple identities: British, imperial and local. The book also analyzes the formation and maintenance of settler identities, and then investigates how the British state and its allies brought an end to the reign of freelance, settler imperialism on the China coast.
With the help of the Jesuits, the Qianlong emperor (often said to be Chinas Sun King in the long eighteenth century) built European palaces in the Garden of Perfect Brightness and commissioned a set of twenty images engraved on copper in Paris. The Second Anglo-Chinese Opium War in 1860 not only saw the destruction of the Garden, but also of the images, of which there are only a few left in the world. The John Rylands set contains a coloured image which raises even more questions about the construction of the palaces and the after-life of the images. How did it travel from Paris to Bejing, and from Belgium to the John Rylands Library? This article probes the fascinating history of this image. It highlights the importance of Europeans in the making of Chinese history and calls for studies of China in Europe.
Introduction China's soft-power influence in the Middle East is centuries old. Indeed, even by the ninth century trade was quite developed, with dhows travelling from across the Gulf to and from China. 1 China–Iran political contacts might date as far back as the pre-imperial Chinese era, and are evident in the blue glazing for Chinese pottery sourced from Iran. Contact extended into the first and the Han dynasty, the second imperial dynasty (206 BC to 220 AD), which
3 India and China: an uneasy relationship In recent years the world has grappled with the challenges posed by China’s rapid rise, and India is no exception. The peculiar nature of Sino-Indian ties has been underscored by a sudden downturn in bilateral relations. The relationship has become so ruptured that some Indian strategists were contemplating a “year of the Chinese attack on India,” suggesting that China would attack India by 2012 to divert attention from growing domestic troubles.1 The Indian media, rather than interrogating these claims, further