History

This is an English translation of one of Korea’s most celebrated historical works, a pre-modern classic so well known to Koreans that it has inspired contemporary literature and television. Written in 1821 by Chong Yagyong (Tasan), Admonitions on Governing the People (Mongmin simsŏ) is a detailed manual for district magistrates on how to govern better. In encyclopedic fashion, Here Chong Yagyong addresses the administration, social and economic life, criminal justice, the military, and the Confucian ritual system. He provides examples of past corrupt officials and discusses topics of the day such as famine relief and social welfare. A general call for overhauling the Korean ruling system, the book also makes the radical proposition that the purpose of government is to serve the interests of the people. This translation opens a new window on early-nineteenth century Korea and makes available to a wide audience a work whose main concerns simultaneously transcend national and cultural boundaries.

This wide-ranging study of Japanese cultural expression reveals how a particular, often seemingly innocent aesthetic sensibility—present in novels, essays, popular songs, film, and political writings—helped create an “aesthetic of fascism” in the years leading up to World War II. Evoking beautiful moments of violence, both real and imagined, these works did not lead to fascism in any instrumental sense. Yet, the book suggests, they expressed and inspired spiritual longings quenchable only through acts in the real world. The book traces this lineage of aesthetic fascism from its beginnings in the 1920s through its flowering in the 1930s to its afterlife in postwar Japan.

In 1895 Japan acquired Taiwan as its first formal colony after a resounding victory in the Sino-Japanese war. For the next fifty years, Japanese rule devastated and transformed the entire socioeconomic and political fabric of Taiwanese society. This book examines the formation of Taiwanese political and cultural identities under the dominant Japanese colonial discourse of assimilation (dôka) and imperialization (kôminka) from the early 1920s to the end of the Japanese Empire in 1945. It analyzes the ways in which the Taiwanese struggled, negotiated, and collaborated with Japanese colonialism during the cultural practices of assimilation and imperialization. The book chronicles a historiography of colonial identity formations that delineates the shift from a collective and heterogeneous political horizon into a personal and inner struggle of “becoming Japanese.” Representing Japanese colonialism in Taiwan as a topography of multiple associations and identifications made possible through the triangulation of imperialist Japan, nationalist China, and colonial Taiwan, the author demonstrates the irreducible tension and contradiction inherent in the formations and transformations of colonial identities. Throughout the colonial period, Taiwanese elites imagined and constructed China as a discursive space where various forms of cultural identification and national affiliation were projected. Bridging history and literary studies, the book rethinks the history of Japanese rule in Taiwan by expanding its approach to colonial discourses.

This volume evaluates the dual roles of war and modernity in the transformation of twentieth-century Chinese identity. The chapters argue that war, no less than revolution, deserves attention as a major force in the making of twentieth-century Chinese history. Further, they show that modernity in material culture and changes in intellectual consciousness should serve as twin foci of a new wave of scholarly analysis. Examining in particular the rise of modern Chinese cities and the making of the Chinese nation-state, the chapters provide new ways of thinking about China's modern transformation up to the 1950s. Taken together, the chapters demonstrate that the combined effect of a modernizing state and an industrializing economy weakened the Chinese bourgeoisie and undercut the individual's quest for autonomy. Drawing upon new archival sources, these theoretically informed, thoroughly revisionist chapters focus on topics such as Western-inspired modernity, urban cosmopolitanism, consumer culture, gender relationships, interchanges between city and countryside, and the growing impact of the state on the lives of individuals. The volume makes an important contribution toward a postsocialist understanding of twentieth-century China.

In this study of the mapping and remapping of male-male sexuality over four centuries of Japanese history, the book explores the languages of medicine, law, and popular culture from the seventeenth century through the American Occupation. The book opens with fascinating speculations about how an Edo translator might grapple with a twentieth-century text on homosexuality, then turns to law, literature, newspaper articles, medical tracts, and other sources to discover Japanese attitudes toward sexuality over the centuries. During each of three major eras, it argues, one field dominated discourse on male-male sexual relations: popular culture in the Edo period (1600–1868), jurisprudence in the Meiji period (1868–1912), and medicine in the twentieth century.

This study explores the complex position of the Catholic Church in modern Vietnamese history. It demonstrates how French colonial rule in Indochina allowed for the transformation of Catholic missions in Vietnam into broad and powerful economic and institutional structures in which race defined both ecclesiastical, cultural prestige and control of resources and institutional authority. This, along with colonial rule itself, created a culture of religious life in which relationships between Vietnamese Catholics and European missionaries were less equal and more fractious than ever before. The colonial era, however, also brought unprecedented ties between Vietnam and the transnational institutions and culture of global Catholicism, as Vatican reforms to create an independent national church helped Vietnamese Catholics to reimagine and redefine their relationships to both missionary Catholicism and to colonial rule itself. Much like the myriad revolutionary ideologies and struggles in the name of the Vietnamese nation, this revolution in Vietnamese Catholic life was ultimately ambiguous, even contradictory: it established the foundations for an independent national church, but it also polarized the place of the new church in postcolonial Vietnamese politics and society, and it produced deep divisions between Vietnamese Catholics themselves.

Three American missiles hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and what Americans view as an appalling and tragic mistake, many Chinese see as a “barbaric” and intentional “criminal act,” the latest in a long series of Western aggressions against China. This book explores the roles of perception and sentiment in the growth of popular nationalism in China. At a time when the direction of China's foreign and domestic policies have profound ramifications worldwide, the author offers an in-depth look at the nature of China's new nationalism, particularly as it involves Sino-American and Sino-Japanese relations: two bilateral relations that carry extraordinary implications for peace and stability in the twenty-first century. This new nationalism is traced through recent Chinese books and magazines, movies, television shows, posters, and cartoons. Anti-Western sentiment, once created and encouraged by China's ruling PRC, has been taken up independently by a new generation of Chinese. Deeply rooted in narratives about past “humiliations” at the hands of the West and impassioned notions of Chinese identity, popular nationalism is now undermining the Communist Party's monopoly on political discourse, threatening the regime's stability. The book analyzes the impact that popular nationalism will have on twenty-first century China and the world.

This book examines the devastating impact of Japan's invasion and occupation of the lower Yangzi on China's emerging modern-business community. Arguing that the war gravely weakened Chinese capitalists, the author demonstrates that in occupied areas the activities of businessmen were closer to collaboration than to heroic resistance. He shows how the war left an important imprint on the structure and culture of Chinese business enterprise by encouraging those traits that had allowed it to survive in uncertain and dangerous times. Although historical memory emphasizes the entrepreneurs who followed the Nationalist armies to the interior, most Chinese businessmen remained in the lower Yangzi area. If they wished to retain any ownership of their enterprises, they were forced to collaborate with the Japanese and the Wang Jingwei regime in Nanjing. Characteristics of business in the decades prior to the war, including a preference for family firms and reluctance to become public corporations, distrust of government, opaqueness of business practices, and reliance on personal connections (guanxi) were critical to the survival of enterprises during the war and were reinforced by the war experience. Through consideration of the broader implications of the many responses to this complex era, the book contributes to larger discussions of the dynamics of World War II and of Chinese business culture.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, China's sovereignty was fragile at best. In the face of international pressure and domestic upheaval, young urban radicals—desperate for reforms that would save their nation—clamored for change, championing Western-inspired family reform and promoting free marriage choice and economic and emotional independence. But what came to be known as the New Culture Movement had the unwitting effect of fostering totalitarianism. This book examines how the link between family order and national salvation affected state building and explores its lasting consequences. The author argues that the replacement of the authoritarian, patriarchal, extended family structure with an egalitarian, conjugal family was a way for the nation to preserve crucial elements of its traditional culture. Her research shows that in the end, family reform paved the way for the Chinese Communist Party to establish a deeply intrusive state which undermined the legitimacy of individual rights.

In exploring the career of Seki Hajime (1873–1935), who served as mayor of Japan's second-largest city, Osaka, this book traces the roots of social progressivism in prewar Japan. Seki, trained as a political economist in the late 1890s, when Japan was focused single-mindedly on “increasing industrial production,” distinguished himself early on as a people-centered, rather than state-centered, national economist. After three years of advanced study in Europe at the turn of the century, during which he engaged with Marxism and later steeped himself in the exciting new field of social economics, Seki was transformed into a progressive. The social reformism of Seki and others had its roots in a transnational fellowship of progressives who shared the belief that civilized nations should be able to forge a middle path between capitalism and socialism. This book permits us not only to weave social progressivism into the modern Japanese historical narrative, but also to reconceive it as a truly transnational movement whose impact was felt across the Pacific as well as the Atlantic.