Borders of Chinese Civilization

Borders of Chinese Civilization PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
DIVD. R. Howland explores China & rsquo;s representations of Japan in the changing world of the late nineteenth century and, in so doing, examines the cultural and social borders between the two neighbors. Looking at Chinese accounts of Japan written during the 1870s and 1880s, he undertakes an unprecedented analysis of the main genres the Chinese used to portray Japan & mdash;the travel diary, poetry, and the geographical treatise. In his discussion of the practice of & ldquo;brushtalk, & rdquo; in which Chinese scholars communicated with the Japanese by exchanging ideographs, Howland further shows how the Chinese viewed the communication of their language and its dominant modes & mdash;history and poetry & mdash;as the textual and cultural basis of a shared civilization between the two societies. With Japan & rsquo;s decision in the 1870s to modernize and westernize, China & rsquo;s relationship with Japan underwent a crucial change & mdash;one that resulted in its decisive separation from Chinese civilization and, according to Howland, a destabilization of China & rsquo;s worldview. His examination of the ways in which Chinese perceptions of Japan altered in the 1880s reveals the crucial choice faced by the Chinese of whether to interact with Japan as & ldquo;kin, & rdquo; based on geographical proximity and the existence of common cultural threads, or as a & ldquo;barbarian, & rdquo; an alien force molded by European influence. By probing China & rsquo;s poetic and expository modes of portraying Japan, Borders of Chinese Civilization exposes the changing world of the nineteenth century and China & rsquo;s comprehension of it. This broadly appealing work will engage scholars in the fields of Asian studies, Chinese literature, history, and geography, as well as those interested in theoretical reflections on travel or modernism. /div

Borders of Chinese Civilization

Borders of Chinese Civilization PDF Author: Douglas Howland
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822382032
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
D. R. Howland explores China’s representations of Japan in the changing world of the late nineteenth century and, in so doing, examines the cultural and social borders between the two neighbors. Looking at Chinese accounts of Japan written during the 1870s and 1880s, he undertakes an unprecedented analysis of the main genres the Chinese used to portray Japan—the travel diary, poetry, and the geographical treatise. In his discussion of the practice of “brushtalk,” in which Chinese scholars communicated with the Japanese by exchanging ideographs, Howland further shows how the Chinese viewed the communication of their language and its dominant modes—history and poetry—as the textual and cultural basis of a shared civilization between the two societies. With Japan’s decision in the 1870s to modernize and westernize, China’s relationship with Japan underwent a crucial change—one that resulted in its decisive separation from Chinese civilization and, according to Howland, a destabilization of China’s worldview. His examination of the ways in which Chinese perceptions of Japan altered in the 1880s reveals the crucial choice faced by the Chinese of whether to interact with Japan as “kin,” based on geographical proximity and the existence of common cultural threads, or as a “barbarian,” an alien force molded by European influence. By probing China’s poetic and expository modes of portraying Japan, Borders of Chinese Civilization exposes the changing world of the nineteenth century and China’s comprehension of it. This broadly appealing work will engage scholars in the fields of Asian studies, Chinese literature, history, and geography, as well as those interested in theoretical reflections on travel or modernism.

The Way of the Barbarians

The Way of the Barbarians PDF Author: Shao-yun Yang
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295746017
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
Shao-yun Yang challenges assumptions that the cultural and socioeconomic watershed of the Tang-Song transition (800–1127 CE) was marked by a xenophobic or nationalist hardening of ethnocultural boundaries in response to growing foreign threats. In that period, reinterpretations of Chineseness and its supposed antithesis, “barbarism,” were not straightforward products of political change but had their own developmental logic based in two interrelated intellectual shifts among the literati elite: the emergence of Confucian ideological and intellectual orthodoxy and the rise of neo-Confucian (daoxue) philosophy. New discourses emphasized the fluidity of the Chinese-barbarian dichotomy, subverting the centrality of cultural or ritual practices to Chinese identity and redefining the essence of Chinese civilization and its purported superiority. The key issues at stake concerned the acceptability of intellectual pluralism in a Chinese society and the importance of Confucian moral values to the integrity and continuity of the Chinese state. Through close reading of the contexts and changing geopolitical realities in which new interpretations of identity emerged, this intellectual history engages with ongoing debates over relevance of the concepts of culture, nation, and ethnicity to premodern China.

Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity

Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity PDF Author: Nicola Di Cosmo
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108547001
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1284

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Book Description
Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity offers an integrated picture of Rome, China, Iran, and the Steppes during a formative period of world history. In the half millennium between 250 and 750 CE, settled empires underwent deep structural changes, while various nomadic peoples of the steppes (Huns, Avars, Turks, and others) experienced significant interactions and movements that changed their societies, cultures, and economies. This was a transformational era, a time when Roman, Persian, and Chinese monarchs were mutually aware of court practices, and when Christians and Buddhists criss-crossed the Eurasian lands together with merchants and armies. It was a time of greater circulation of ideas as well as material goods. This volume provides a conceptual frame for locating these developments in the same space and time. Without arguing for uniformity, it illuminates the interconnections and networks that tied countless local cultural expressions to far-reaching inter-regional ones.

History Without Borders

History Without Borders PDF Author: Geoffrey C. Gunn
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9888083341
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 446

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Book Description
Astride the historical maritime silk routes linking India to China, premodern East and Southeast Asia can be viewed as a global region in the making over a long period. Intense Asian commerce in spices, silks, and ceramics placed the region in the forefront of global economic history prior to the age of imperialism. Alongside the correlated silver trade among Japanese, Europeans, Muslims, and others, China's age-old tributary trade networks provided the essential stability and continuity enabling a brilliant age of commerce. Though national perspectives stubbornly dominate the writing of Asian history, even powerful state-centric narratives have to be re-examined with respect to shifting identities and contested boundaries. This book situates itself in a new genre of writing on borderland zones between nations, especially prior to the emergence of the modern nation-state. It highlights the role of civilization that developed along with global trade in rare and everyday Asian commodities, raising a range of questions regarding unequal development, intraregional knowledge advances, the origins of globalization, and the emergence of new Asian hybridities beyond and within the conventional boundaries of the nation-state. Chapters range over the intra-Asian trade in silver and ceramics, the Chinese junk trade, the rise of European trading companies as well as diasporic communities including the historic Japan-towns of Southeast Asia, and many types of technology exchanges. While some readers will be drawn to thematic elements, this book can be read as the narrative history of the making of a coherent East-Southeast Asian world long before the modem period.

Frontier Encounters

Frontier Encounters PDF Author: Franck Billé
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
ISBN: 1906924872
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
China and Russia are rising economic and political powers that share thousands of miles of border. Despite their proximity, their interactions with each other - and with their third neighbour Mongolia - are rarely discussed. Although the three countries share a boundary, their traditions, languages and worldviews are remarkably different. Frontier Encounters presents a wide range of views on how the borders between these unique countries are enacted, produced, and crossed. It sheds light on global uncertainties: China's search for energy resources and the employment of its huge population, Russia's fear of Chinese migration, and the precarious independence of Mongolia as its neighbours negotiate to extract its plentiful resources. Bringing together anthropologists, sociologists and economists, this timely collection of essays offers new perspectives on an area that is currently of enormous economic, strategic and geo-political relevance.

What Is China?

What Is China? PDF Author: Zhaoguang Ge
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674984986
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Ge Zhaoguang, an eminent historian of traditional China and a public intellectual, takes on fundamental questions that shape the domestic and international politics of the world’s most populous country and its second largest economy. What Is China? offers an insider’s account that addresses sensitive problems of Chinese identity and shows how modern scholarship about China—whether conducted in China, East Asia, or the West—has attempted to make sense of the country’s shifting territorial boundaries and its diversity of ethnic groups and cultures. Ge considers, for example, the ancient concept of tianxia, or All-Under-Heaven, which assigned supremacy to the imperial court and lesser status to officials, citizens, tributary states, and tribal peoples. Does China’s government still operate with a belief in divine rule of All-Under-Heaven, or has it taken a different view of other actors, inside and outside its current borders? Responding both to Western theories of the nation-state and to Chinese intellectuals eager to promote “national learning,” Ge offers an insightful and erudite account of how China sees its place in the world. As he wrestles with complex historical and cultural forces guiding the inner workings of an often misunderstood nation, Ge also teases out many nuances of China’s encounter with the contemporary world, using China’s past to explain aspects of its present and to provide insight into various paths the nation might follow as the twenty-first century unfolds.

The Tyranny of History

The Tyranny of History PDF Author: William John Francis Jenner
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
The author examines China's political, economic and social structures which have resulted in a culture that has stifled creative thinking - He argues that China has been both held together and held back by its extreme deference to history - Boxer movement - Cultural Revolution - Great Leap Forward.

Borders of Chinese Civilization

Borders of Chinese Civilization PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description
DIVD. R. Howland explores China & rsquo;s representations of Japan in the changing world of the late nineteenth century and, in so doing, examines the cultural and social borders between the two neighbors. Looking at Chinese accounts of Japan written during the 1870s and 1880s, he undertakes an unprecedented analysis of the main genres the Chinese used to portray Japan & mdash;the travel diary, poetry, and the geographical treatise. In his discussion of the practice of & ldquo;brushtalk, & rdquo; in which Chinese scholars communicated with the Japanese by exchanging ideographs, Howland further shows how the Chinese viewed the communication of their language and its dominant modes & mdash;history and poetry & mdash;as the textual and cultural basis of a shared civilization between the two societies. With Japan & rsquo;s decision in the 1870s to modernize and westernize, China & rsquo;s relationship with Japan underwent a crucial change & mdash;one that resulted in its decisive separation from Chinese civilization and, according to Howland, a destabilization of China & rsquo;s worldview. His examination of the ways in which Chinese perceptions of Japan altered in the 1880s reveals the crucial choice faced by the Chinese of whether to interact with Japan as & ldquo;kin, & rdquo; based on geographical proximity and the existence of common cultural threads, or as a & ldquo;barbarian, & rdquo; an alien force molded by European influence. By probing China & rsquo;s poetic and expository modes of portraying Japan, Borders of Chinese Civilization exposes the changing world of the nineteenth century and China & rsquo;s comprehension of it. This broadly appealing work will engage scholars in the fields of Asian studies, Chinese literature, history, and geography, as well as those interested in theoretical reflections on travel or modernism. /div

Re-understanding Japan

Re-understanding Japan PDF Author: Lu Yan
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824827304
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
To many Chinese, the rise and expansion of Japanese power during the years between the two Sino-Japanese wars (1895–1945) presented a paradox: With its successful modernization, Japan became a model to be emulated; yet as the country’s imperial ambitions on the continent grew, it posed an ever-increasing threat. Drawing on an extraordinary array of source materials, Lu Yan shows that this attraction to and apprehension of Japan prompted the Chinese to engage in a variety of long-term relationships with the Japanese. Re-understanding Japan examines transnational and transcultural interactions between China and Japan during those five dramatic and tragic decades at the intimate level of personal lives and behavior. At the center of Lu’s inquiry are four diverse yet significant case studies: military strategist Jiang Baili, literary critic and essayist Zhou Zuoren, Guomindang leader Dai Jitao, and romantic poet turned Communist Guo Moruo. In their public and private lives, these influential Chinese formed lasting ties with Japan and the Japanese. While their writings reached the Chinese public through the print mass media and served to enhance popular understanding of Japan and its culture, their activities in political, cultural, and diplomatic affairs paralleledsignificant turns in Sino-Japanese relations. Based on archival documents, personal memoirs, correspondence, interviews, and contemporary literary works, Re-understanding Japan delineates diverse approaches in Chinese efforts to engage Japan in China’s modern reforms.

States, Nations and Borders

States, Nations and Borders PDF Author: Allen Buchanan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521525756
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
This volume examines comparatively the views and principles of seven prominent ethical traditions on one of the most pressing issues of modern politics - the making and unmaking of state and national boundaries. The traditions represented are Judaism, Christianity, Islam, natural law, Confucianism, liberalism and international law. Each contributor, an expert within one of these traditions, shows how that tradition can handle the five dominant methods of altering state and national boundaries: conquest, settlement, purchase, inheritance and secession. Written by a distinguished group of international specialists this volume is unique in providing both in-depth normative and comparative perspectives on a troubling question that will offer readers real insight into inter-tradition conflict. Those readers will range from upper-level undergraduates to scholars in such fields as philosophy, political science, international relations and comparative religion.