Westerners seem united in the belief that China has emerged as a major economic power and that this success will most likely continue indefinitely. But they are less certain about the future of China's political system. China's steps toward free market capitalism have led many outsiders to expect increased democratization and a more Western political system. The Chinese, however, have developed their own version of capitalism. Westerners view Chinese politics through the lens of their own ideologies, preventing them from understanding Chinese goals and policies.In Contemporary Chinese Political Thought: Debates and Perspectives, Fred Dallmayr and Zhao Tingyang bring together leading Chinese intellectuals to debate the main political ideas shaping the rapidly changing nation. Investigating such topics as the popular "China Model", the resurgence of Chinese Confucianism and its applications to the modern world, and liberal socialism, the contributors move beyond usual analytical frameworks toward what Dallmayr and Zhao call "a dismantling of ideological straitjackets." Comprising a broad range of opinions and perspectives, Contemporary Chinese Political Thought is the most up-to-date examination in English of modern Chinese political attitudes and discourse.Features contributions from Ji Wenshun, Zhou Lian, Zhao Tingyang, Zhang Feng, Liu Shuxian, Chen Ming, He Baogang, Ni Peimin, Ci Jiwei, Cui Zhiyuan, Frank Fang, Wang Shaoguang, and Cheng Guangyun.

Gaining an understanding of China's long and sometimes bloody history can help to shed light on China's ascent to global power. Many of China's imperial dynasties were established as the result of battle, from the chariot warfare of ancient times to the battles of the Guomindang (KMT) and Communist regimes of the twentieth century. China's ability to sustain complex warfare on a very large scale was not emulated in other parts of the world until the Industrial Age, despite the fact that the country is only now rising to economic dominance. In A Military History of China, Updated Edition, David A. Graff and Robin Higham bring together leading scholars to offer a basic introduction to the military history of China from the first millennium B.C.E. to the present. Focusing on recurring patterns of conflict rather than traditional campaign narratives, this volume reaches farther back into China's military history than similar studies. It also offers insightful comparisons between Chinese and Western approaches to war. This edition brings the volume up to date, including discussions of the Chinese military's latest developments and the country's most recent foreign conflicts.

Does it make sense to understand the prehistory, history and present-day patterns of life in Southeast Asia in terms of a distinction between two ways of life: "farming" and "foraging"? This is the central question addressed by the anthropologists and archaeologists contributing to this volume. Inherent within the question "Why Cultivate? " are people's relationships with the physical world: are they primarily to do with subsistence and economics or with social and/or cultural forces? The answers given by the contributors are complex. On a practical level they argue that there is a continuum rather than a sharp break between different levels of management of the environment, but rice-growing usually represents a profound break in people's relations to their cultural and symbolic landscapes. An associated point made by the archaeologists is that the "deep histories" of foraging-farming lifeways that are emerging in this region sit uncomfortably with the theory that foraging was replaced by farming in the mid Holocene as a result of a migration of Austronesian-speaking Neolithic farmers from southern China and Taiwan.

China's enormous size, vast population, abundant natural resources, robust economy, and modern military suggest that it will emerge as a great world power. Inside China's Grand Strategy: The Perspective from the People's Republic offers unique insights from a prominent Chinese scholar about the country's geopolitical ambitions and strategic thinking.Ye Zicheng, professor of political science in the School of International Studies at Peking University, examines China's interactions with current world powers as well as its policies toward neighboring countries. Despite claims that repressive domestic policies and an economic slowdown are evidence that the country's efforts toward modernization will fail, Ye points to China's inclusion in the G-20 as an indicator of success. Ye compares China's global ascension, particularly its emphasis on peace, to the historical experiences of rising European superpowers, providing an insider look at a country poised to become an increasingly prominent international power.

No, but we are different. Tonpa Sherab treated men and women in the same way, he passed on his teachings to both men and women and that is why we nuns are on equal footing with the monks, quite unlike the Buddhists.' The Bön religion is often seen as a part of the Tibetan Buddhism but its bond is actually far more complex and has its own origin in the history of Tibet. The role of women worshipping in Bön and Tibetan Buddhism, is quite different. And although there are studies on Buddhist nuns, there is hardly any research available on nuns in the Bön tradition. This pioneering study vividly portrays the nuns of the Redna Menling monastery in Dolanji (India), the headquarters of the Bön religion, in exile. It focuses on the developments of the Bön in exile, the specific context in which Bön nuns live and how the monastic tradition takes shape. It provides interesting insights into the monastic community in exile, the historic context of the Bön religion as well as the personal motives to become a nun.

The British Museum's collection of South Indian paintings consists of around 1000 items ranging from the 17th to the 20th century and representing a wide variety of themes and techniques. Only a very few examples from this major collection have been published before. In this book the collection will be catalogued in full, and 250 of the most important items will be reproduced in colour. The paintings will be described and listed according to the their topics (Hindu mythology; castes, trades and occupations; natural history drawings; painted narratives; India observed) and according to the medium on which they were executed (paper, cloth, leather, mica). Each section will begin with a brief introduction outlining the essential stylistic and iconographic features. Among this material are a number of highly interesting albums such as a set of 91 paintings depicting Hindu mythology, dating from the early decades of the 19th century. More unusual items are the long painted scrolls from Andhra illustrating local mythological narratives, the painted cloths from Tamil Nadu depicting the Ramayana epic, and paintings on paper used by the storytellers of northern Karnataka.

Xiaobing Li's comprehensive examination of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) offers new insights into the military's central place in modern Chinese society. A History of the Modern Chinese Army goes beyond the usual Western assessments of the Chinese military 'threat' and also expands on the politically constricted scholarship of native Chinese military historians. Li offers a sweeping yet thorough study of modern Chinese armed forces in the context of the nation's cultural traditions, its Communist revolution, and recent technological innovations that have radically transformed all aspects of Chinese society. Grounding the text in both newly released archival documents and the personal testimonies of over two hundred PLA soldiers, Li adopts military modernization as his central theme. A History of the Modern Chinese Army links the modernization of the military to China's rapid growth as a major industrial producer and its growing power in the international economy. Openness to political reforms is necessary, he argues, to ensure China's continued progress toward building one of the world's most advanced professional military forces. Li's analysis thus sheds new light on China's achievement and maintenance of its current status as a rising global power.

This volume documents almost a decade of groundbreaking investigations within the Annapurna highlands of Nepal, including survey recording of fort and settlement sites. From the outset, the project's focus was the extraordinary ruins of Kohla Sombre – Kohla, The Three Villages – the ancestral settlement of the Tami-mai (Gurung) community, who hosted and instigated the fieldwork programme. Ultimately, only a single season's excavation was conducted before the project was cut short by the political insurgency within the country. It concluded with holding a great shaman's meeting in Pokhara in 2002, at which their historical oral texts were presented. Narrating the long migration of the Tamu-mai into the region and down from a distant north, this volume includes the full translation of one of these oral epics, the Lemako Roh Pye. The project represents a unique collaboration between archaeologists, anthropologists and a shaman. Including interviews with upland inhabitants, the volume encompasses the diverse voices of both its immediate participants and the local community. Fulsome in its presentation of the archaeological data and rich in ethnographic source-material, not only is this book crucial for Himalayan culture studies generally, but also relevant for anyone concerned with the construction and context of the past in the present, and the active forging of ethno-historical identities.

This is the final volume in the series. The volume summarises and synthesises the material from this remarkable site, and considers its place in the wider context of Southeast Asian prehistory.

This book focuses on the money of Eastern Central Asia to c. AD 800, a period of over 900 years, across a vast geographical area with a very diverse population of different cultures and traditions. The only relevant historical accounts are those found in the Chinese dynastic histories, yet these contain few references to money in Eastern Central Asia. This study therefore depends almost entirely on the archaeological evidence for money found at sites in the region, in the form of coins and contemporary documentary evidence. The book is arranged in four parts. The first part presents the background to the study, the second the numismatic evidence, the third gives the evidence for money in the contemporary documents excavated at sites in Eastern Central Asia, and the concluding part brings together the data from the numismatic and documentary evidence to create a new framework for money in early Eastern Central Asia.

On a September day in 1863, Abdul Hamid entered the Central Asian city of Yarkand. Disguised as a merchant, Hamid was actually an employee of the Survey of India, carrying concealed instruments to enable him to map the geography of the area. Hamid did not live to provide a first-hand count of his travels. Nevertheless, he was the advance guard of an elite group of Indian trans-Himalayan explorers -- recruited, trained, and directed by the officers of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India -- who were to traverse much of Tibet and Central Asia during the next thirty years.Derek Waller presents the history of these explorers, who came to be called "native explorers" or "pundits" in the public documents of the Survey of India. In the closed files of the government of British India, however, they were given their true designation as spies. As they moved northward within the Indian subcontinent, the British demanded precise frontiers and sought orderly political and economic relationships with their neighbors. They were also becoming increasingly aware of and concerned with their ignorance of the geographical, political, and military complexion of the territories beyond the mountain frontiers of the Indian empire. This was particularly true of Tibet.Though use of pundits was phased out in the 1890s in favor of purely British expeditions, they gathered an immense amount of information on the topography of the region, the customs of its inhabitants, and the nature of its government and military resources. They were able to travel to places where virtually no European count venture, and did so under conditions of extreme deprivation and great danger. They are responsible for documenting an area of over one million square miles, most of it completely unknown territory to the West. Now, thanks to Waller's efforts, their contributions to history will no longer remain forgotten.

The Korean War in World History features the accomplishments of noted scholars over the last decade and lays the groundwork for the next generation of scholarship. These essays present the latest thinking on the Korean War, focusing on the relationship of one country to the war. William Stueck's introduction and conclusion link each essay to the rich historiography of the event and suggest the war's place within the history of the twentieth century. The Korean War had two very different faces. On one level the conflict was local, growing out of the internal conditions of Korea and fought almost entirely within the confines of a small Asian country located far from Europe. The fighting pitted Korean against Korean in a struggle to determine the balance of political power within the country. Yet the war had a huge impact on the international politics of the Cold War. Combat threatened to extend well beyond the peninsula, potentially igniting another global conflagration and leaving in its wake a much escalated arms race between the Western and Eastern blocs. The dynamics of that division remain today, threatening international peace and security in the twenty-first century. Contributors: Lloyd Gardner, Chen Jian, Allan R. Millett, Michael Schaller, and Kathryn Weathersby

This volume contains twenty-one fully illustrated papers by contributors to an international colloquium held in June 2001, jointly organised by the Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art and the British Museum. It constitutes full publication of an iconic early major masterwork of Chinese figure painting which has been in the British Museum since 1903 but is rarely on display for conservation reasons. The illustrations make use of new high-quality digital photography of every aspect of the world-famous scroll.

When North Korean forces invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950, Otto Apel was a surgical resident living in Cleveland, Ohio, with his wife and three young children. A year later he was chief surgeon of the 8076th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital constantly near the front lines in Korea. Immediately upon arriving in camp, Apel performed 80 hours of surgery. His feet swelled so badly that he had to cut his boots off, and he saw more surgical cases in those three and a half days than he would have in a year back in Cleveland. There were also the lighter moments. When a Korean came to stay at the 8076th, word of her beauty spread so rapidly that they needed MPs just to direct traffic. Apel also recalls a North Korean aviator, nicknamed "Bedcheck Charlie," who would drop a phony grenade from an open-cockpit biplane, a story later filmed for the television series. He also tells of the day the tent surrounding the women's shower was "accidentally" blown off by a passing helicopter. In addition to his own story, Apel details the operating conditions, workload, and patient care at the MASH units while revealing the remarkable advances made in emergency medical care. MASH units were the first hospitals designed for operations close to the front lines, and from this particularly difficult vantage, their medical staffs were responsible for innovations in the use of antibiotics and blood plasma and in arterial repair. On film and television, MASH doctors and nurses have been portrayed as irreverent and having little patience with standard military procedures. In this powerful memoir, Apel reveals just how realistic these portrayals were.

After the 1870s there was an explosion in print production via non-woodblock media in Japan. This study examines this development looking at a group of etchings issued from the 1830s to the 1880s that are now in the British Museum, the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow, the Scottish National Library, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.

The prehistoric site of Khok Phanom Di in central Thailand, occupied c.2000-1500 BC, was particularly rich in material culture. This volume focuses on the non-ceramic objects, all of which are discussed, catalogued and illustrated. The finds include objects made from bone, antler and turtle shell, worked stone, burnishing stones, shell, ivory and bone ornaments, shell knives and other shell items.