How did American schoolchildren, French philosophers, Russian Sinologists, Dutch merchants, and British lawyers imagine China and Chinese law? What happened when agents of presumably dominant Western empires had to endure the humiliations and anxieties of maintaining a profitable but precarious relationship with China? In Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes, Li Chen provides a richly textured analysis of these related issues and their intersection with law, culture, and politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Using a wide array of sources, Chen's study focuses on the power dynamics of Sino-Western relations during the formative century before the First Opium War (1839-1842). He highlights the centrality of law to modern imperial ideology and politics and brings new insight to the origins of comparative Chinese law in the West, the First Opium War, and foreign extraterritoriality in China. The shifting balance of economic and political power formed and transformed knowledge of China and Chinese law in different contact zones. Chen argues that recovering the variegated and contradictory roles of Chinese law in Western "modernization" helps provincialize the subsequent Euro-Americentric discourse of global modernity. Chen draws attention to important yet underanalyzed sites in which imperial sovereignty, national identity, cultural tradition, or international law and order were defined and restructured. His valuable case studies show how constructed differences between societies were hardened into cultural or racial boundaries and then politicized to rationalize international conflicts and hierarchy.
Foreword by Ezra F. Vogel, Director of the East Asia Research Center. Introduction. Includes sources, studies of modern Chinese literature, studies and translations of individual authors, and unidentified authors. Some titles shown in Chinese characters. Three appendices. Index.
This book consists five representative novels by Tao Shaohong. These novels, with local flavor of Changde, reflect the change of society and human nature in contemporary China. The author explores the people’s inner secrecy with a unique perspective. He has a sympathy for the people and understands their love and hatred. With a pen of artistic tension, he depicts meticulously and fully the people’s desire, struggle and redemption. The vivid and lively characters, attractive plots, concise and plain style of this novels are so unique and insightful to read.
Due to increasing potential in real-world applications such as visual communications, computer assisted biomedical imaging, and video surveillance, image and video interpretations have become an area of growing interest. Intelligent Image and Video Interpretation: Algorithms and Applications covers all aspects of image and video analysis from low-level early visions to high-level recognition. This publication highlights how these techniques have become applicable and will prove to be a valuable tool for researchers, professionals, and graduate students working or studying the fields of imaging and video processing.
Written by Li Ju-chen during the Qing dynasty Flowers in the Mirror is a classic novel of Chinese literature. It is full of fanciful tales. The term "Flowers in the Mirror" is an idiomatic phrase meaning "illusion." An example is a moon as seen upon a body of water which appears to be close and near, but it is a mere reflection. Empress Wu Tse-tien: The stories are set during the reign of Wu Tse-tien, female ruler. Wu was actually an Empress of China who ruled from 690 to 705. Her reign was a part of the short-lived Zhou dynasty, which interrupted the Tang dynasty. Some traditional historians portray Wu as a power hungry woman who cared little for those who she hurt nor what she did. A popular theory is that Wu killed her own child in order to become the empress. She was recognized, however, as both capable and attentive even by traditional historians who disliked her behavior. She had an ability to select capable people to serve as officials. She was admired for this trait throughout the Tang and subsequent dynasties. Wu was the only female emperor of China in more than four millennia. Fall from Grace: The story begins with a terrible blizzard. In show of hubris, Empress Wu issues a decree that all flowers must bloom. At the time, the fairy of a hundred flowers, ruler of all flowers in the celestial realm, goes on a personal visit to Maku, another fairy. In her absence, her subordinate fairies in response to the decree, take the initiative of blooming on their own. The Jade Emperor, the ruler of all the heavens, noting this subordination, punishes the fairy of a hundred flowers. He forces her to reincarnate in the human world. She reincarnates as the daughter of Tang Ao. Strange and Fantastic Lands: Previously, Tang Ao, an aspiring bureaucratic scholar, took the official scholars examination, and had passed the exam, gaining an exalted official title. However, because of his association with a failed coup against the Empress Wu, his title is revoked. Despairing and disillusioned with the scholarly bureaucracy, Tang boards a sailboat, and with his brother-in-law, Merchant Lin, and a hired sailor "Old Tou." The three travelers sail on the open sea and visit various fantastic and strange countries. They also encounter a variety of bizarre characters: First is the country of "the gentlemen." Merchants there try to sell their best quality goods at the cheapest price while customers haggle and to pay more for merchandise. In the country of "the Giants," virtuous people have rainbows under their feet. Wicked people have dark clouds under their feet. The government officials of this country cover their feet with multicolored robes cover so no one can tell if they have rainbows or clouds under their feet. In the "two faced kingdom," people have two faces; one in the front and one in the back. The faces in front are smiling, and the faces in the back are ugly. The people of this kingdom are deceptive. Another country has only people who always lie, and never tell the truth. There are many other such strange countries. The first half of the book describes the adventures of Tang Ao and his companions as they travel overseas by boat.
This book is about the political economy of China’s industrial reform and the rise of a group of Chinese big businesses under the Communist Party and the central state’s control. It examines the origins, evolution and institutional configuration of this centralized system in governing the ‘commanding heights’ of the Chinese industrial economy. Shaped by persistent industrial policies to develop China’s ‘national champions’ enterprises, the core parts of China’s central industrial ministries and mono-bank system have been transformed into a ‘national team’ of giant modern business firms in industries such as oil, power generation, telecommunications, aerospace, aviation, nuclear, shipbuilding, mining, construction, automobile and banking. Through an adaptive process of learning, experimentation and restructuring, the bedrock of the authority relations and control mechanisms among the Party, government bureaucracy and firms has been consolidated rather than dismantled in the system’s transformation. This alternative view of China’s industrial reform presents a direct challenge to the neo-liberal transition model of China’s institutional development and the mainstream Western conceptions of Chinese big business.
Han Dynasty (206 BC–AD 220) stone carved tombs were constructed from carved stone slabs or a combination of moulded bricks and carved stones, and were distributed in Central and Eastern China. In this book, the origins, meanings and influences of these tombs are presented as a part of the history of interactions between different parts of Eurasia.
This dissertation is an attempt to define a Chinese "modernism," exemplified by the narrative practices of four major writers in Taiwan today, from the perspective of comparative literature and recent development of literary theory. I propose that modernity of Taiwanese fiction is not so much a result of Western influences as an evolution of Chinese narrative tradition itself. To argue my point I delineate a poetics of Chinese narrative, from which I devise a method of reading and a criterion of evaluation for contemporary Taiwanese fiction in defining its achievement and historical significance. This study of Taiwanese fiction also aims at providing a better understanding of fundamental aesthetic assumptions of Western "modernism" in the context of its own literary tradition. Chapter One, "Introduction," investigates the theoretical foundation and its line of development in Western and Chinese poetics respectively. It first examines the Platonic view of mimesis and Aristotelian aesthetic view of fictionality and their influence on the critical tradition, the continuity of the ancient battle between philosophy and poetry as seen in the structuralist and deconstructionist theories, then the relationship between subjective fictionality and ironic objectivity in Chinese poetics, the continuity of the dilemma in the Chinese novelists in their dual allegiance to the ideal and the real. A final section gives a critical overview of the literary scene in Taiwan. The following four chapters provide examples of the internal tension between fictionality and ironic awareness in the Taiwanese modernist texts. I suggest that instead of stretching the metaphorical potential of fiction to a highly intellectualized abstraction or playing down the interpretive claims of fiction by dramatizing its vulnerability like their Western counterpart, the Taiwanese modernists create their texts on the borderline between the high and the low. Self-assertive as well as self-denying, each of them confronts his own intellectual vision with paradox and ambivalence. In Ch'en Ying-chen, this is expressed as a battle between a lyrical vision of ideological values and an instinctive self-clowning, in Ch'i-teng Sheng, as a form of competition between pattern and contingency, in Wang Chen-ho, as a celebration and abuse of the fictionality of fiction, and in Wang Wen-hsing, an intense self-parody. I conclude that the sensitivity to the irrational and contradiction, inherent with a resistance to didacticism, constitutes the best part of the Chinese humanistic tradition, which is continuously enriched with new dimensions by the contemporary Taiwanese writers.
Daughter of Good Fortune tells the story of Chen Huiqin and her family through the tumultuous 20th century in China. She witnessed the Japanese occupation during World War II, the Communist Revolution in 1949 and its ensuing Land Reform, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the Reform Era. Chen was born into a subsistence farming family, became a factory worker, and lived through her village’s relocation to make way for economic development. Her family’s story of urbanization is representative of hundreds of millions of rural Chinese.
This IBM® Redbooks® publication highlights IBM Technical Computing as a flexible infrastructure for clients looking to reduce capital and operational expenditures, optimize energy usage, or re-use the infrastructure. This book strengthens IBM SmartCloud® solutions, in particular IBM Technical Computing clouds, with a well-defined and documented deployment model within an IBM System x® or an IBM Flex SystemTM. This provides clients with a cost-effective, highly scalable, robust solution with a planned foundation for scaling, capacity, resilience, optimization, automation, and monitoring. This book is targeted toward technical professionals (consultants, technical support staff, IT Architects, and IT Specialists) responsible for providing cloud-computing solutions and support.
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