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Grace C. Huang reconsiders Chiang Kai-shek's leadership and legacy in an intriguing new portrait of this twentieth-century leader. Comparing his response to imperialism to those of Mao, Yuan Shikai, and Mahatma Gandhi, Huang widens the implications of her findings to explore alternatives to Western expressions of nationalism and modernity.
Once a powerful figure who reversed the disintegration of China and steered the country to Allied victory in World War II, Chiang Kai-shek fled into exile following his 1949 defeat in the Chinese civil war. As attention pivoted to Mao Zedong’s communist experiment, Chiang was relegated to the dustbin of history. In Chiang Kai-shek’s Politics of Shame, Grace C. Huang reconsiders Chiang’s leadership and legacy by drawing on an extraordinary and uncensored collection of his diaries, telegrams, and speeches stitched together by his secretaries. She paints a new, intriguing portrait of this twentieth-century leader who advanced a Confucian politics of shame to confront Japanese incursion into China and urge unity among his people. In also comparing Chiang’s response to imperialism to those of Mao, Yuan Shikai, and Mahatma Gandhi, Huang widens the implications of her findings to explore alternatives to Western expressions of nationalism and modernity and reveal how leaders of vulnerable states can use potent cultural tools to inspire their country and contribute to an enduring national identity.
China has become accessible to the west in the last twenty years in a way that was not possible in the previous thirty. The number of westerners travelling to China to study, for business or for tourism has increased dramatically and there has been a corresponding increase in interest in Chinese culture, society and economy and increasing coverage of contemporary China in the media. Our understanding of China’s history has also been evolving. The study of history in the People’s Republic of China during the Mao Zedong period was strictly regulated and primary sources were rarely available to westerners or even to most Chinese historians. Now that the Chinese archives are open to research...
Locked in a common fight against Imperial Japan, the United States and Nationalist China became allies, but significant fissures in their relationship soon developed. Neither ally would accommodate each other’s core interests in strategies necessary to win the war. This disconnect continued after Japan’s surrender, as the United States pressed Chinese Nationalists and Communists to join a coalition government that neither wanted. During the civil war, the United States supported the Nationalists, but never to the degree they thought mattered. After the Communist triumph, America served its national security and anti-Communism, by helping the Nationalists defend Taiwan, but hedged against assisting Chiang Kai-shek to reconquer the mainland. Twice in the 1950’s tensions in the Taiwan Strait nearly expanded into nuclear conflict.
Winner of the Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize “The Idealist is a powerful book, gorgeously written and consistently insightful. Samuel Zipp uses the 1942 world tour of Wendell Willkie to examine American attitudes toward internationalism, decolonization, and race in the febrile atmosphere of the world’s first truly global conflict.” —Andrew Preston, author of Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith A dramatic account of the plane journey undertaken by businessman-turned-maverick-internationalist Wendell Willkie to rally US allies to the war effort. Willkie’s tour of a planet shrunk by aviation and war inspired him to challenge Americans to fight a rising tide of nationalism at home. In A...
Those who seek change in civic life have much in common: they each bring valuable expertise to the table and need to strategize with others about what to do. That's why new collaborative relationships between diverse thinkers are essential. Yet they're difficult to form. Collaborate Now! presents a new argument about why that is, along with tools to foster them anew. As with any form of voluntary civic engagement, these relationships require time and motivation. Yet on top of that, collaborators often start off as strangers, and are uncertain about relationality: whether they'll relate to each other in ways that are meaningful and brimming with interaction. Using case studies, field experiments, interviews, and observational data, this book provides a rich understanding of the collaborative relationships needed to tackle civic challenges, how uncertainty about relationality can produce an unmet desire for them, and actionable tools to surface and meet this desire.
In China between Peace and War, Victor S. C. Cheng explores the gripping history of peace talks and international negotiations from 1945 to 1947 that helped determine the shape of the Chinese Civil War. The book focuses on the efforts of the two belligerent parties—the Chinese Nationalists, or Guomindang, and the Communists—to achieve an enduring peace. It presents previously unexplored major elements of the peace talks: ambiguous treaties, package deals and short-term solutions. It identifies the burning challenges that confronted attempts at peacemaking, including the two warring parties’ high-risk decision-making styles and the temptation to veto agreements and resume fighting. C...
Iconographies of Occupation is the first book to address how the “collaborationist” Reorganized National Government (RNG) in Japanese-occupied China sought to visualize its leader, Wang Jingwei (1883–1944); the Chinese people; and China itself. It explores the ways in which this administration sought to present itself to the people over which it ruled at different points between 1939, when the RNG was first being formulated, and August 1945, when it folded itself out of existence. What sorts of visual tropes were used in regime iconography and how were these used? What can the intertextual movement of visual tropes and motifs tell us about RNG artists and intellectuals and their unders...
Shonda Rhimes is one of the most powerful players in contemporary American network television. Adventures in Shondaland critically explores Shonda Rhimes's meteoric rise to stardom, her reign (or cultural appointment) as television's diversity queen, and Shondaland's almost-universally lauded melodramatic narratives.
Now fully revised and updated, The United States and China offers a comprehensive synthesis of US-Chinese relations from initial contact to the present. Balancing the modern (1784–1949) and contemporary (1949–present) periods, Dong Wang retraces centuries of interaction between two of the world’s great powers from the perspective of both sides. She examines state-to-state diplomacy, as well as economic, social, military, religious, and cultural interplay within varying national and international contexts. As China itself continues to grow in global importance, so too does the US-Chinese relationship, and this book provides an essential grounding for understanding its past, present, and possible futures.