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The purpose of this book is to provide a systematic and policy-focused analysis of Korea's development performance from a historical perspective. The book begins with post-war reconstruction efforts and extends to recent developments in the Korean economy. Through a comprehensive analysis of Korea's development performance over the last six decades, the book examines in detail how development strategies and policies evolved over time, what were their consequences and underlying factors, and what lessons can be drawn from the Korean experience. A wide range of issues are discussed, including the role of government, capital accumulation, growth and structural change, industrial development and concentration, economic liberalization, human resource and technology development, social development and income distribution. The important features of the Korean development model are highlighted to draw lessons from the Korean experience.
"Urbanization was central to development in late imperial China. Yet its impact is heatedly debated, although scholars agree that it triggered neither Weberian urban autonomy nor Habermasian civil society. This book argues that this conceptual impasse derives from the fact that the seemingly continuous urban expansion was in fact punctuated by a wide variety of “dynastic urbanisms.” Historians should, the author contends, view urbanization not as an automatic by-product of commercial forces but as a process shaped by institutional frameworks and cultural trends in each dynasty. This characteristic is particularly evident in the Ming. As the empire grew increasingly urbanized, the gap bet...
"How have conceptions and practices of sovereignty shaped how Chineseness is imagined? This ethnography addresses this question through the example of Macau, a southern Chinese city that was a Portuguese colony from the 1550s until 1999. As the Portuguese administration prepared to transfer Macau to Chinese control, it mounted a campaign to convince the city’s residents, 95 percent of whom identified as Chinese, that they possessed a “unique cultural identity” that made them different from other Chinese, and that resulted from the existence of a Portuguese state on Chinese soil. This attempt sparked reflections on the meaning of Portuguese governance that challenged not only convention...
This study of Japan’s transformation by the economic crises of the 1930s focuses on efforts to overcome the effects of the Great Depression in rural areas, particularly the activities of local activists and policymakers in Tokyo. The reactions of inhabitants of rural areas to the depression shed new light on how average Japanese responded to the problems of modernization and how they re-created the countryside.
"This book addresses how gender became a defining category in the political and social modernization of Japan. During the early decades of the Meiji period (1868–1912), the Japanese encountered an idea with great currency in the West: that the social position of women reflected a country’s level of civilization. Although elites initiated dialogue out of concern for their country’s reputation internationally, the conversation soon moved to a new public sphere where individuals engaged in a wide-ranging debate about women’s roles and rights. By examining these debates throughout the 1870s and 1880s, Marnie S. Anderson argues that shifts in the gender system led to contradictory consequ...
"The year 1949 witnessed China divided into multiple political and cultural entities. How did this momentous shift affect Chinese literary topography? Modernity with a Cold War Face examines the competing, converging, and conflicting modes of envisioning a modern nation in mid-twentieth century Chinese literature. Bridging the 1949 divide in both literary historical periodization and political demarcation, Xiaojue Wang proposes a new framework to consider Chinese literature beyond national boundaries, as something arising out of the larger global geopolitical and cultural conflict of the Cold War. Examining a body of heretofore understudied literary and cultural production in mainland China,...
Prosperity signifies success in economic performance. Economic performance always takes place in a spatial context. And institutions matter in economic performance. These three interwoven themes underlie this inquiry into the regional economy of southern Fukien province during the Sung and Yuan dynasties, when the area was one of the most prosperous regions in China. Through a meticulous reading of the sources, the author seeks to understand the meaning of prosperity in the premodern Chinese context and argues that we have to understand economic performance as a process occurring in space and influenced by institutions, which affect economic actors particularly through the means of transaction costs.
"Kitasono Katue was a leading avant-garde literary figure, first in Japan and then throughout the world, from the 1920s to the 1970s. In his long career, Kitasono was instrumental in creating Japanese-language work influenced by futurism, dadaism, and surrealism before World War II and in contributing a Japanese voice to the international avant-garde movement after the war. This critical biography of Kitasono examines the life, poetry, and poetics of this controversial and flamboyant figure, including his wartime support of the Japanese state. Using Kitasono as a window on Japanese literature in the twentieth century, John Solt analyzes the relationship of Japanese writers to foreign literary movements and the influence of Japanese writers on world literature."
"In the formative years of the Japanese labor movement after World War II, the socialist unions affiliated with the General Council of Trade Unions (the labor federation known colloquially as Sohyo) formally endorsed the principles of women’s equality in the workforce and put in place measures to promote women’s active participation in union activities. However, union leaders did not embrace the legal framework for gender equality mandated by their American occupiers; rather, they pressured thousands of women labor activists to assume supportive roles that privileged a male-centered social agenda. By the late 1950s, even Japan’s radical socialist unions had reestablished the primacy of...
"We live in a world shaped by secularism—the separation of numinous power from political authority and religion from the political, social, and economic realms of public life. Not only has progress toward modernity often been equated with secularization, but when religion is admitted into modernity, it has been distinguished from superstition. That such ideas are continually contested does not undercut their extraordinary influence. These divisions underpin this investigation of the role of religion in the construction of modernity and political power during the Nanjing Decade (1927–1937) of Nationalist rule in China. This book explores the modern recategorization of religious practices ...