East-Asian Marxisms and Their Trajectories
East-Asian Marxisms and Their Trajectories

Author: Joyce Liu

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-02-03

Total Pages: 445

ISBN-13: 1317418573

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In this volume, leading scholars from around the world suggest that radical ideologies have shaped complex historical processes in East Asia by examining how intellectuals and activists interpreted, rethought and criticized Marxism in East Asia. The contributors to this volume ask how we can use Marxism to understand East Asia in a global capitalist world, and where the problems that Marxism highlighted, including imperialism, domination and inequality, are increasingly prevalent. The volume draws on various disciplines to reinterpret Marx, and shed light on the complex dynamics of global capitalism in various historical/national contexts. The distinguished contributors illuminate, rethink and make accessible highly complex Marxist concepts, such as the question of class contradiction, the temporalities of capitalism, real and formal subsumption, relative surplus value and the commodity form, the question of class and the proletariat. At a time when people around the world are struggling to cope with the crises of global capitalism, this volume on regional responses to capitalism is especially welcome. It will be of interest to students and scholars of East Asian studies, social and political theory, sociology and globalization studies.

Chinese Visions of World Order
Chinese Visions of World Order

Author: Ban Wang

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2017-10-19

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0822372444

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The Confucian doctrine of tianxia (all under heaven) outlines a unitary worldview that cherishes global justice and transcends social, geographic, and political divides. For contemporary scholars, it has held myriad meanings, from the articulation of a cultural imaginary and political strategy to a moralistic commitment and a cosmological vision. The contributors to Chinese Visions of World Order examine the evolution of tianxia's meaning and practice in the Han dynasty and its mutations in modern times. They attend to its varied interpretations, its relation to realpolitik, and its revival in twenty-first-century China. They also investigate tianxia's birth in antiquity and its role in empire building, invoke its cultural universalism as a new global imagination for the contemporary world, analyze its resonance and affinity with cosmopolitanism in East-West cultural relations, discover its persistence in China's socialist internationalism and third world agenda, and critique its deployment as an official state ideology. In so doing, they demonstrate how China draws on its past to further its own alternative vision of the current international system. Contributors. Daniel A. Bell, Chishen Chang, Kuan-Hsing Chen, Prasenjit Duara, Hsieh Mei-yu, Haiyan Lee, Mark Edward Lewis, Lin Chun, Viren Murthy, Lisa Rofel, Ban Wang, Wang Hui, Yiqun Zhou

Pan-Asianism and the Legacy of the Chinese Revolution
Pan-Asianism and the Legacy of the Chinese Revolution

Author: Viren Murthy

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2023-10-25

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0226827992

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An intellectual history of pan-Asianist discourse in the twentieth century. Recent proposals to revive the ancient Silk Road for the contemporary era and ongoing Western interest in China’s growth and development have led to increased attention to the concept of pan-Asianism. Most of that discussion, however, lacks any historical grounding in the thought of influential twentieth-century pan-Asianists. In this book, Viren Murthy offers an intellectual history of the writings of theorists, intellectuals, and activists—spanning leftist, conservative, and right-wing thinkers—who proposed new ways of thinking about Asia in their own historical and political contexts. Tracing pan-Asianist discourse across the twentieth century, Murthy reveals a stronger tradition of resistance and alternative visions than the contemporary discourse on pan-Asianism would suggest. At the heart of pan-Asianist thinking, Murthy shows, were the notions of a unity of Asian nations, of weak nations becoming powerful, and of the Third World confronting the “advanced world” on equal terms—an idea that grew to include non-Asian countries into the global community of Asian nations. But pan-Asianists also had larger aims, imagining a future beyond both imperialism and capitalism. The fact that the resurgence of pan-Asianist discourse has emerged alongside the dominance of capitalism, Murthy argues, signals a profound misunderstanding of its roots, history, and potential.

China's May Fourth Movement
China's May Fourth Movement

Author: Sabaree Mitra

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-02-28

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1000829839

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This book looks at China’s May Fourth Movement and how it has been contextualised in modern Chinese history. Tracing the roots of the movement and of modern Chinese literary and intellectual traditions, the book analyses how the movement transformed ideas, culture, and social practices in the country. The volume presents a critical in-depth study of the May Fourth Movement from interdisciplinary perspectives. With essays written by scholars and experts from India, China, and the West, it discusses concepts and themes such as nationalism; the citizen and revolutionary morality in the late Qing dynasty as well as Lu Xun’s struggle with the aporetic temporalities of capitalist modernity; the May Fourth spirit and the Communist Party of China; the birth of the ‘New Woman’; and the literature, cinema, and art produced during the movement. It also examines how the waves created by the movement in Chinese culture and society continue to influence and shape events and thoughts in contemporary times. This book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of Chinese Studies, Chinese history, Asian Studies, Asian history, political history, and cultural history.

Logistical Asia
Logistical Asia

Author: Brett Neilson

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-05-01

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 9811083339

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This book explores how the management science of logistics changes working lives and contributes to the making of world regions. With a focus on the port of Kolkata and changing patterns of Asian regionalism, the volume examines how logistics entwine with political power, historical forces, labour movements, and new technologies. The contributors ask how logistical practices reconfigure both Asia’s relation to the world and its internal logic of transport and communication. Building on critical perspectives that understand logistics as a political technology for producing and organizing space and power, Logistical Asia tracks how digital technologies and material infrastructure combine to remake urban and regional territories and produce new forms of governance and subjectivity.

The Specter of Materialism
The Specter of Materialism

Author: Petrus Liu

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2022-12-09

Total Pages: 129

ISBN-13: 1478024054

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In recent years, queer theory appears to have made a materialist turn away from questions of representation and performativity to those of dispossession, precarity, and the differential distribution of life chances. Despite this shift, queer theory finds itself constantly reabsorbed into the liberal project of diversity management. This theoretical and political weakness, Petrus Liu argues, stems from an incomplete understanding of capitalism’s contemporary transformations, of which China has been at the center. In The Specter of Materialism Liu challenges key premises of classic queer theory and Marxism, turning to an analysis of the Beijing Consensus—global capitalism’s latest mutation—to develop a new theory of the political economy of sexuality. Liu explores how relations of gender and sexuality get reconfigured to meet the needs of capital in new regimes of accumulation and dispossession, demonstrating that evolving US-Asian economic relations shape the emergence of new queer identities and academic theories. In so doing, he offers a new history of collective struggles that provides a transnational framework for understanding the nexus between queerness and material life.

Tianxia in Comparative Perspectives
Tianxia in Comparative Perspectives

Author: Roger T. Ames

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2023-10-31

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 0824896025

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Tianxia—conventionally translated as “all-under-Heaven”—in everyday Chinese parlance simply means “the world.” But tianxia is also a geopolitical term found in canonical writings that has a deeper historical and philosophical significance. Although there are many understandings of tianxia in this literature, interpretations within the Chinese process cosmology generally begin with an ecological understanding of intra-national relations that acknowledge the mutuality and interdependence of all economic and political activity. This volume contextualizes the tianxia vision of geopolitical order within a variety of strategies drawn from a broad spectrum of cultures and peoples: Buddhist, Islamic, Indian, African, Confucian, European. The conversation among the contributors is guided by several central questions: Is tianxia the only model of cosmopolitanism? Are there ideas and ideals comparable to tianxia that exist in other cultures? What alternative perspectives of global justice have inspired Western, Indian, Islamic, Buddhist, and African cultural traditions? The fundamental premise here is that in order for a planetary tianxia system to be relevant and significant for the present time and for our vision of the future, it must acknowledge the plurality of moral ideals defining the world’s cultures while at the same time seek practical ways to formulate a minimalist morality that can provide the solidarity needed to bring the world’s people together.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative
China’s Belt and Road Initiative

Author: Alfred Gerstl

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-11-29

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 1000260577

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This edited volume presents a trans-disciplinary and multifaceted assessment of the strategic and economic impacts of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) on three regions, namely Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and Central Eastern Europe. The contributions to this book demonstrate the requirement of a more realistic view concerning the anticipated economic benefits of the New Silk Road. The contributors critique the strategic effects of China’s opaque long-term grand strategy on the regional and global political order. Specific countries that are covered are Finland, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Poland, and Thailand. Additionally, case studies from South Asia and Africa, notably India and Ethiopia, enable insightful comparisons. Encouraging readers to critically challenge mainstream interpretations of the aims and impacts of the BRI, this book should interest academics and students from various disciplines including Political Science, International Relations, Political Geography, Sociology, Economics, International Development, and Chinese Studies.

Tenkō: Cultures of Political Conversion in Transwar Japan
Tenkō: Cultures of Political Conversion in Transwar Japan

Author: Irena Hayter

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-06-17

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 1000397300

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This book approaches the concept of tenkō (political conversion) as a response to the global crisis of interwar modernity, as opposed to a distinctly Japanese experience in postwar debates. Tenkō connotes the expressions of ideological conversion performed by members of the Japanese Communist Party, starting in 1933, whereby they renounced Marxism and expressed support for Japan’s imperial expansion on the continent. Although tenkō has a significant presence in Japan’s postwar intellectual and literary histories, this contributed volume is one of the first in Englishm language scholarship to approach the phenomenon. International perspectives from both established and early career scholars show tenkō as inseparable from the global politics of empire, deeply marked by an age of mechanical reproduction, mediatization and the manipulation of language. Chapters draw on a wide range of interdisciplinary methodologies, from political theory and intellectual history to literary studies. In this way, tenkō is explored through new conceptual and analytical frameworks, including questions of gender and the role of affect in politics, implications that render the phenomenon distinctly relevant to the contemporary moment. Tenkō: Cultures of Political Conversion in Transwar Japan will prove a valuable resource to students and scholars of Japanese and East Asian history, literature and politics.

The Future of China's Past
The Future of China's Past

Author: Albert Welter

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2023-01-01

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1438491689

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The Future of China's Past examines how China's traditional culture is being reinvented and manipulated for political purposes. Like no time before in its recent history, and certainly at no time in the history of the People's Republic, China is being shaped in terms of its past, but which past—Confucianism, Legalism, Daoism, Buddhism—or combination of pasts is being held up as the model? Given its growing economic, political, and cultural significance, it is incumbent upon us to take China's rise seriously, yet perspectives involving modern and contemporary geopolitical and intrastate dynamics are insufficient, on their own, for understanding China's rise, and the same holds true for economic analyses, however pertinent. Instead, this book looks at current engagements with models of China's past, introducing the four traditional lenses of Chinese thought and reflecting on their potential relevance for China's—and the world's—future.