This Open Access book provides a critical reflection into how indigenous cultures are attempting to adapt to climate change. Through detailed first-hand accounts, the book describes the unique challenges facing indigenous peoples in the context of climate change adaptation, governance, communication strategies, and institutional pressures. The book shows how current climate change terminologies and communication strategies often perpetuate the marginalisation of indigenous peoples and suggests that new approaches that prioritise Indigenous voices, agency and survival are required. The book first introduces readers to Indigenous peoples and their struggles related to climate change, describing the impacts of climate change on their everyday lives and the adaptation strategies currently undertaken to address them. These strategies are then detailed through case studies which focus on how Indigenous knowledge and practices have been used to respond to and cope with climate change in a variety of environments, including urban settings. The book discusses specific governance challenges facing Indigenous peoples, and presents new methods for engagement that will bridge existing communication gaps to ensure Indigenous peoples are central to the implementation of climate change adaptation measures. This book is intended for an audience of Indigenous peoples, adaptation practitioners, academics, students, policy makers and government workers.
Guanxi, a system of Chinese business relationships, is often described, but is rarely fully understood. Though it seems intangible, there is no doubt that it has contributed significantly to the success of Chinese entrepreneurs and the places where they work. Translated loosely as ‘personal ties’, this simple explanation belies a complex and nuanced system. Guanxi has often been criticised as nepotism - unfair, inefficient, even corrupt, and generally detrimental to business and economic growth... but if it is that bad, how does it survive? This insightful book unravels the origins of Guanxi and provides a much-needed explanation of the phenomena. It investigates: why it was initiated and developed what function it serves how it is maintained why it is such a dominant phenomenon in Chinese business life Combining economics, law and culture, this clear and concise book looks to the future of Guanxi based on its history. Drawing on cultural, organizational and economic studies, it takes a multi-disciplinary approach, integrating these various topics into a coherent explanation of Guanxi ensuring that this illuminating book will be equally useful to students of Asian business as to practitioners working within this market.
First published in 1979. Sociology flourished in China during the 1930s and 1940s but with the establishment of the People's Republic of China, controversies arose over the place of sociology in the process of socialist construction. Siu-lun Wong analyses the reasons for this change in the fortune of sociological studies in China and examines it in relation to the country's contemporary political system.
The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art has been the most important mathematical source in China for the past 2000 years, comparable in significance to Euclid's Elements in the West. The Nine Chapters quickly acquired a distinguished reputation, and was the standard mathematics textbook in China and the surrounding regions until Western science was introduced in about 1600. This volume contains the first complete English translation of the Nine Chapters, together with the illuminating commentary of Liu Hui written in the 3rd century AD and other early century commentaries and further insights provided by the translators. The Nine Chapters contains 246 problems and their solutions, which fall into nine categories that are firmly based on practical needs. There are methods for solving problems in areas such as land measurement, construction, agriculture, commerce, and taxation, while the Chinese commentators provide the algorithms needed to solve the problems, and explanations of how the algorithms work. The translators' commentary provides clear and accessible background material for the Western reader, explanations of technicalities, and notes on the treatment of similar or identical mathematical problems in other countries. This first, full-English translation gives us an idea of the distinctive style and important contributions that have been made by traditional Chinese mathematics.
Half a million Hong Kong residents fled their homeland during the thirteen years before Hong Kong's reversion to China in 1997. Nearly half of those returned within the next several years. Filled with detailed, first-hand stories of nine Hong Kong families over nearly two decades, Hong Kong Movers and Stayers is a multifaceted yet intimate look at the forces behind Hong Kong families' successful, and failed, efforts at migration and settlement. Defining migration as a process, not a single act of leaving, Hong Kong Movers and Stayers provides an antidote to ethnocentric and simplistic theories by uncovering migration stories as they relate to social structures and social capital. The authors meld survey analysis, personal biography, and sociology and compare multiple families in order to give voice to the interplay of gender, age, and diverse family roles as motivating factors in migration.
Pain is the most common symptom when sickness occurs. The treatment of any illness is directed towards both the cure of underlying pathology and the decrease of suffering. Every health care provider should be familiar with pain medicine. In the last decade, an overwhelming amount has been added to our knowledge of pain and its management. By contrast with the textbooks on this complex subject, A Guide to Pain Medicine is intended to be a convenient practical reference. It provides up-to-date information on specific topics of frequent relevance to the work of the general practitioner. The book is designed for clear presentation of the pertinent facts and recent advances on pain medicine. As such, it also serves as a primer for more comprehensive study. The reader is encouraged to bring the book to the clinic and ward for reading and reference. In this way a firm foundation for pain medicine could be acquired.
In the past century, tens of millions of women and girls have disappeared in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. There are many reasons: the women variously were sold as "foreign spouses"; imprisoned for their political beliefs; taken to night clubs or massage parlors to work as "escorts"; provided as "comfort women" to soldiers; or murdered by female corpse dealers and sold as "ghost brides" to families looking to give their deceased sons wives in the afterlife. The youngest girls fell victim to infanticide, the tragic result of a "one child" law in a male-dominated society. As a result of the gender imbalance these disappearances created, countless young males now suffer from the "marriage squeeze," remaining single without families of their own. This sociological study explores the institutional factors, develops a typology for these populations, and lays a foundation for the examination of lost populations in the future.
This well-documented study discusses the social and economic changes in Shandong province before the influence of the West was felt at the end of the nineteenth century. The authors show that by the sixteenth century, commercial and handicraft towns linked to national and local markets had already begun to emerge. Urban growth was made possible by increased agricultural production, which in turn stimulated specialization and increased commercialization in the agricultural sector. Another important change in rural society at this time was the emergence of a new stratum of wealthy landlords who managed their estates with wage labor. Case studies of managerial landlords, who form the main focus of this study, are included as well as generalizations drawn from questionnaire materials. Luo Lun and Jing Su wrote this book while they were young researchers at Shandong University in the late 1950s, using data they had gathered in the culturally relaxed period of the Hundred Flowers. In his introduction, Endymion Wilkinson analyzes the authors’ thesis and concludes that their Leninist model is inapplicable to premodern Chinese history. The value of this study lies not so much in its conclusion that even without the impact of Western imperialism China would of itself have developed a capitalist society, but rather in the wealth of data the authors present, in this first in-depth study of a relatively advanced region in north China.
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