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"Over two thousand miles long, the boundary between Russia and China is the world's longest land border. Though sometimes considered a backwater, the border region was always of critical geopolitical importance and has a fascinating history. Not only did this border divide the two largest Eurasian empires, it was also the place where European and Asian civilizations met, where nomads and settled peoples mingled, where the imperial interests of Russia, China, and Japan clashed, and where both conflicts and gestures of friendship between the world's largest Communist regimes were staged. This book is a history of this border from the late nineteenth century until the fall of the Soviet Union. ...
For an open-access edition, visit the Yellow Perils page on Manifold. https://manifold.uhpress.hawaii.edu/projects/yellow-perils China’s meteoric rise and ever expanding economic and cultural footprint have been accompanied by widespread global disquiet. Whether admiring or alarmist, media discourse and representations of China often tap into the myths and prejudices that emerged through specific historical encounters. These deeply embedded anxieties have shown great resilience, as in recent media treatments of SARS and the H5N1 virus, which echoed past beliefs connecting China and disease. Popular perceptions of Asia, too, continue to be framed by entrenched racial stereotypes: its people...
The authors of this book focus on transcultural entanglements in Manchuria during the first half of the twentieth century. Manchuria, as Western historiography commonly designates the three northeastern provinces of China, was a politically, culturally and economically contested region. In the late nineteenth century, the region became the centre of competing Russian, Chinese and Japanese interests, thereby also attracting global attention. The coexistence of people with different nationalities, ethnicities and cultures in Manchuria was rarely if ever harmoniously balanced or static. On the contrary, interactions were both dynamic and complex. Semi-colonial experiences affected the people’s living conditions, status and power relations. The transcultural negotiations between all population groups across borders of all kinds are the subject of this book. The chapters of this volume shed light on various entangled histories in areas such as administration, the economy, ideas, ideologies, culture, media and daily life.
This volume examines relations between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and socialist Eastern European states during the Cold War. The chapters take previous findings on government policy and China’s role as a global player in the Cold War game as a starting point to locate the PRC in the socialist world and assess levels of interaction beyond diplomatic and governmental relations. By focusing on transfers and interconnections and the social dimension of governmental interactions, the primary goal of this book is to explore structures, institutions, and spaces of interaction between China and Eastern Europe and their potential autonomy from political conjunctures. The guiding questio...
The double-edged policy pursued by the Chinese government has created serious challenges for public health strategies implemented at national and local levels. As a result, the challenges created new research opportunities for Chinese and Western scholars, and this volume is a compilation of their work. The papers are organied within three main topics: health risks, health services, and health insurance for rural migrants in Chinese cities. The volume also includes two documentary contributions on migration regulations and civil society services for migrants suffering from occupational diseases and work-related injuries.
China and Russia are rising economic and political powers that share thousands of miles of border. Despite their proximity, their interactions with each other - and with their third neighbour Mongolia - are rarely discussed. Although the three countries share a boundary, their traditions, languages and worldviews are remarkably different. Frontier Encounters presents a wide range of views on how the borders between these unique countries are enacted, produced, and crossed. It sheds light on global uncertainties: China's search for energy resources and the employment of its huge population, Russia's fear of Chinese migration, and the precarious independence of Mongolia as its neighbours negotiate to extract its plentiful resources. Bringing together anthropologists, sociologists and economists, this timely collection of essays offers new perspectives on an area that is currently of enormous economic, strategic and geo-political relevance.
Mirrorlands is a journey through space and time to the meeting points of Russia and China, the world's largest and most populous countries. Charting an unconventional course southeast through Siberia, Inner Mongolia, the Russian Far East and Manchuria, anthropologist and linguist Ed Pulford sketches a rich series of encounters with people and places unknown not only to outsiders, but also to most residents of the capital cities where his journey begins and ends. What Russia and China have in common goes much deeper than their status as authoritarian post-socialist states or perceived menaces to Western hegemony. Their shared history can only fully be appreciated from an intimately local, bor...
In the 1970s industry in the West had reached its limits, precipitating a major discussion about how to solve the crisis. But what was going on in Eastern Europe parallel to this development? Were any similar trends being registered? The authors of this volume pursue the answers to these questions by studying the politics, economics, social and cultural movements of that time in the multiethnic countries of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. It becomes clear that these two countries were themselves in the midst of a latent crisis resulting from the global developments around them and from their own internal conflicts. The symptoms of this crisis were well known in expert circles, but not registered fully by either the political leaders or the citizens at large.
In the second half of the 19th century visions of an infrastructurally integrated imperial space captivated the minds of Russian administrators and businessmen. Infrastructural integration promised to unravel the economic and political potential of the Russian Empire but it also revealed its administrative weakness. The book explores the challenges the Tsarist administration faced in harmonizing the multitudinous regional economic regimes in its vast landed empire. It analyzes conflicting logics towards the imperial space and demonstrates how the modern project of an infrastructurally integrated space limited the leeway in resorting to imperial administrative practices and accelerated the "nationalization" of the Russian Empire's economic space.
In the early twentieth century, the first large batch of Chinese civil engineers had graduated from the USA, and together with their American senior colleagues returned to China. They were enthusiastic about reconstructing the young republic by building new railways, highways, and canals, but what the engineers experienced in China, including mismanaged railways, useless highways, and silted canals, did not always meet their expectations and ideals. In this book, Thorben Pelzer makes the stories of these Chinese and American engineers come to life through exploring previously unpublished letters, rare images, maps, and a rich biographical dataset. He argues that the experiences of these engineers include a myriad of contradictions, disillusionment, and discontent, keeping the engineering profession in a constant flux of searching for its meaning and its place in Republican China.