The name of Phan-Boi-Chau may not be readily recognized by many people outside Vietnam, but within his own country he is one of the most widely known and respected figures in recent history. Phan (1867-1940) was the most prominent leader of the Vietnamese independence movement during the first quarter of the twentieth century and a living link between the older generation who initiated the struggle against French rule in Vietnam and the younger generation who carried that struggle to its conclusion. In 1928, while under house arrest by the French authorities, Phan composed an account of his eventful life. His original text in literary Chinese has been used for this translation, which brings Phan's story into English for the first time. It is accompanied by an introduction and notes incorporating the most up-to-date information about Phan's life and setting his career in the panoramic context of modern Vietnamese history.
For many Westerners, the name Vietnam evokes images of a bloody televised American war that generated a firestorm of protest and brought conflict into their living rooms. In his sweeping account, Ben Kiernan broadens this vision by narrating the rich history of the peoples who have inhabited the land now known as Viet Nam over the past three thousand years. Despite the tragedies of the American-Vietnamese conflict, Viet Nam has always been much more than a war. Its long history had been characterized by the frequent rise and fall of different political formations, from ancient chiefdoms to imperial provinces, from independent kingdoms to divided regions, civil wars, French colonies, and modern republics. In addition to dramatic political transformations, the region has been shaped by its environment, changing climate, and the critical importance of water, with rivers, deltas, and a long coastline facilitating agricultural patterns, trade, and communications. Kiernan weaves together the many narrative strands of Viet Nam's multi-ethnic populations, including the Chams, Khmers, and Vietnamese, and its multi-religious heritage, from local spirit cults to Buddhism, Confucianism, and Catholicism. He emphasizes the peoples' interactions over the millennia with foreigners, particularly their neighbors in China and Southeast Asia, in engagements ranging from military conflict to linguistic and cultural influences. He sets the tumultuous modern period--marked by French and Japanese occupation, anticolonial nationalism, the American-Vietnamese war, and communist victory--against the continuities evident in the deeper history of the people's relationships with the lands where they have lived. In contemporary times, he explores this one-party state's transformation into a global trading nation, the country's tense diplomatic relationship with China and developing partnership with the United States in maintaining Southeast Asia's regional security, and its uncertain prospects for democracy. Written by a leading scholar of Southeast Asia, Viet Nam presents an authoritative history of an ancient land.
An Economist Best Book of the Year A Financial Times Best Book of the Year A major historian tells the dramatic and untold story of the shadowy networks of revolutionaries across Asia who laid the foundations in the early twentieth century for the end of European imperialism on their continent. This is the epic tale of how modern Asia emerged out of conflict between imperial powers and a global network of revolutionaries in the turbulent early decades of the twentieth century. In 1900, European empires had not yet reached their territorial zenith. But a new generation of Asian radicals had already planted the seeds of their destruction. They gained new energy and recruits after the First World War and especially the Bolshevik Revolution, which sparked utopian visions of a free and communist world order led by the peoples of Asia. Aided by the new technologies of cheap printing presses and international travel, they built clandestine webs of resistance from imperial capitals to the front lines of insurgency that stretched from Calcutta and Bombay to Batavia, Hanoi, and Shanghai. Tim Harper takes us into the heart of this shadowy world by following the interconnected lives of the most remarkable of these Marxists, anarchists, and nationalists, including the Bengali radical M. N. Roy, the iconic Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, and the enigmatic Indonesian communist Tan Malaka. He recreates the extraordinary milieu of stowaways, false identities, secret codes, cheap firearms, and conspiracies in which they worked. He shows how they fought with subterfuge, violence, and persuasion, all the while struggling to stay one step ahead of imperial authorities. Underground Asia shows for the first time how Asia’s national liberation movements crucially depended on global action. And it reveals how the consequences of the revolutionaries’ struggle, for better or worse, shape Asia’s destiny to this day. Previous praise for Tim Harper Praise for Forgotten Wars: “[A] compelling book.”—Philip Delves Broughton, Wall Street Journal “Lucid...majestic.”—Peter Preston, The Observer “Authoritative.”—Pankaj Mishra, New Yorker Praise for Forgotten Armies: “Panoramic... Vivid.”—Benjamin Schwarz, New York Times Book Review “A spectacular book.”—Martin Jacques, The Guardian
The Black Flags raided their way from southern China into northern Vietnam, competing during the second half of the nineteenth century against other armed migrants and uplands communities for the control of commerce, specifically opium, and natural resources, such as copper. At the edges of three empires (the Qing empire in China, the Vietnamese empire governed by the Nguyen dynasty, and, eventually, French Colonial Vietnam), the Black Flags and their rivals sustained networks of power and dominance through the framework of political regimes. This lively history demonstrates the plasticity of borderlines, the limits of imposed boundaries, and the flexible division between apolitical banditry and political rebellion in the borderlands of China and Vietnam. Imperial Bandits contributes to the ongoing reassessment of borderland areas as frontiers for state expansion, showing that, as a setting for many forms of human activity, borderlands continue to exist well after the establishment of formal boundaries.
In this book, Phan Le-Ha identifies and discusses four growing self-sustained/sustaining fundamental phenomena in transnational education (TNE), namely (1) the planned, evolving and transformative mediocrity behind the endorsement of English-medium education legitimized by the interactive Asia-the West relationship; (2) the strategic employment of the terms ‘Asia/Asian’ and ‘West/Western’ by all stakeholders in their perceptions and construction of choice, quality, rigour, reliability and attractiveness of programs, courses, and locations; (3) the adjusted desire for an imagined (and often misinformed) ‘West’ among various stakeholders of transnational education; and (4) the assigned and self-realized ownership of English by otherwise normally on-the-margin groups of speakers. A focus on how these phenomena impact questions of identity and desire in TNE is a running theme. The above phenomena are discussed against the backdrop of ‘the rise of Asia’ sentiment and how this sentiment has played out in interactions and relationships between ‘the West’ and ‘Asia’ and among Asian institutions and various entities. Phan Le-Ha’s examination of the identified phenomena in TNE has been informed by her multi-layered engagement with the dialectic of the Asia-the West relationship, her critical take on certain pro-Asia and decolonisation scholarship, and her interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approach to theorise the field and the specific topic under scrutiny. Phan Le-Ha shows that the current Asia chooses (not necessarily by force but largely by will and often with an informed and well-articulated agency) to go with the idea of the West and often desires an affiliation with the West either directly or indirectly, something that is getting more intense in the context of globalization, regionalization, and commercialization of education. The rise of Asia has made the idea of the West even more looked-for in Asia. TNE in Asia, in many ways, is the transforming and dynamic transit point, a layover that facilitates entry into a wanted destination – the West and/or the idea of the West. The West and Asia need one another more than ever in the context of the internationalization and commercialization of higher education. What’s more, the West and Asia have hardly ever been mutually exclusive but have rather been in an eventful love-and-obsession relationship with each other. This is the very dialectic proposition that Phan Le Ha takes throughout this book while paying specific attention to transnational higher education in the greater Asian region including the Middle East, following her several research projects conducted in the region since 2005 to date. Transnational Education Crossing 'the West' and 'Asia' explores: • English, Internationalisation of Higher Education, and Identity: Increasing Academic Monolingualism and English-only Package • Transnational Education and Dream Realization: From the Philippines to Vietnam, From Afghanistan to Dubai, From Everywhere in Asia to Thailand • Desiring International /Transnational Education: Theorisation of Key Concepts and Next Steps from Here The book will be of interest to researchers in the field of transnational education, Asia education and education policy.
The adventures of a seductive immortal in Nero’s Rome from a Bram Stoker Award winner: “Nobody does historical vampire fiction better” (Laurell K. Hamilton). Since 1978, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro has produced about two dozen novels and numerous short stories detailing the life of a character first introduced to the reading world as Le Comte de Saint‐Germain. We first meet him in Paris during the reign of Louis XV when he is, apparently, a wealthy, worldly, charismatic aristocrat, envied and desired by many but fully known to none. In fact, he is a vampire, born in the Carpathian Mountains in 2119 BCE, turned in his late thirties in 2080 BCE, and destined to roam the world forever, watching and participating in history and, through the author, giving us an amazing perspective on the time tapestry of human civilization. In Blood Games, beginning during the reign of Nero, Saint‐Germain finds his way through the political turmoil of the time and becomes the lover of the incomparable Atta Olivia Clemens.
