You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The production of food crops helps us meet the basic need of human nutrition. The world's population now exceeds 7 billion people and continues to grow. Alongside this growth, the human demand for food also increases rapidly. Crop production is becoming increasingly intensive and large-scale and, as a result, simplified landscape-systems form. Crop production in simplified agricultural landscapes often face or suffer from various threats, such as pest damage (caused by diseases, insect pests, weeds and rodents) or a shortage of pollinators. These pests can cause serious damage to seeds, germination, growth, breeding and maturity during crop production and food storage, however, effective pes...
This volume explores the role played by monastic discipline in the emergence and evolution of modern Chinese Buddhism. A central feature of the Buddhist tradition, monastic discipline has received growing attention in the contemporary Buddhist world, but little from scholars. Adopting a diachronic perspective and a multidisciplinary approach, contributions by leading scholars investigate relevant Vinaya-related practices in twentieth and twenty-first centuries China and Taiwan, including issues of monastic identity and authenticity, updated ordination procedures, recent variations of Mahāyāna precepts and rules, and original perspectives on body movement and related sport activities. The restoration and renewal of Vinaya practices and standards within Chinese Buddhist practices shed new light on the response of Buddhist leaders and communities to the challenges of modernity. Contributors are: Ester Bianchi, Raoul Birnbaum, Daniela Campo, Tzu-Lung Chiu, Ann Heirman, Zhe Ji, Yu-chen Li, Pei-ying Lin, and Jiang Wu.
A portrait of daily life in tenth-century China during the turbulent period of transition following the disintegration of the Tang dynasty, using the anecdotal memoirs of the scholar Wang Renyu and providing extensive translations of these hitherto unreconstructed texts.
Tea growing was a prosperous industry in Sichuan when Wang Anshi's New Policies created a Tea Market Agency to buy up Sichuanese tea and trade it to Tibetan tribesmaen for cavalry horses. At first the highly autonomous agency not only acquired the needed horses but made a profit. After the Junchen conquest of Noth China, however, market realities changed and the combined Tea and Horse Agency's once successful policies ruined tea farmers, failed to meet quotas for horses, and ran a deficit. Paul J. Smith details the workings of Sichuan tea farming and the tea trade, examines the geopolitical factors that forced the Song to buy horses, and graphically describes the difficulties of driving them...
Between the early 1950s and the accelerated demolition and construction of Beijing's “old city” in preparation for the 2008 Olympics, the residents of Dashalar—one of the capital city's poorest neighborhoods and only a stone's throw from Tian’anmen Square—lived in dilapidated conditions without sanitation. Few had stable employment. Today, most of Dashalar's original inhabitants have been relocated, displaced by gentrification. In Beijing from Below Harriet Evans captures the last gasps of subaltern life in Dashalar. Drawing on oral histories that reveal memories and experiences of several neighborhood families, she reflects on the relationships between individual, family, neighbor...
I originally wanted to get along with you as an ordinary person, but you kept making things difficult for me. I'm a billionaire. I don't care how much money I spend. I can't afford to spend all of it. I never make friends to see if they have money. Do you think I'm just an unskilled rich second-generation? Hehe... I'll show you how big a dream is and how big a stage is.
Between Fall 2002 and Spring 2003, most of the national leadership of China's party, state and military will be replaced by a new generation of officials. The accession to power of this "Fourth Generation" leadership will have profound implications. This is an introduction to the new leaders.