Intimate Encounters In China

This book was written so that I could share with my family, friends and those interested in China the stories and experiences of 10 years travelling and working in China and the impact it had on me. In the words of my friend and a colleague, Professor Wang, "From the book we can see how his life was in China: What he encountered, experienced, what he liked and disliked, what he expected and what was unexpected. His life in Tianjin made a big difference to him. To some degree I can confidently say his life in Tianjin and China changed him. He is now a different Doctor Ross Colquhoun from the time before he ever came to China." This book is divided into four parts. Each part reflects on aspects of my journeys throughout China and the intimate encounters I had with the people, society, culture and history. I say intimate, as I feel that the people of China opened their hearts to me and generously shared their knowledge, wisdom, aspirations and their lives. The 20 chapters cover many aspects of Chinese, life., including observations and insights into Chinese food, customs, philosophy, painting, poetry, music and much more.

No country feels China's rise more deeply than Japan. Through intricate case studies of visits by Japanese politicians to the Yasukuni Shrine, conflicts over the boundaries of economic zones in the East China Sea, concerns about food safety, and strategies of island defense, Sheila A. Smith explores the policy issues testing the Japanese government as it tries to navigate its relationship with an advancing China. Smith finds that Japan's interactions with China extend far beyond the negotiations between diplomats and include a broad array of social actors intent on influencing the Sino-Japanese relationship. Some of the tensions complicating Japan's encounters with China, such as those surrounding the Yasukuni Shrine or territorial disputes, have deep roots in the postwar era, and political advocates seeking a stronger Japanese state organize themselves around these causes. Other tensions manifest themselves during the institutional and regulatory reform of maritime boundary and food safety issues. Smith scrutinizes the role of the Japanese government in coping with contention as China's influence grows and Japanese citizens demand more protection. Underlying the government's efforts is Japan's insecurity about its own capacity for change and its waning status as the leading economy in Asia. For many, China's rise means Japan's decline, and Smith suggests how Japan can maintain its regional and global clout as confidence in its postwar diplomatic and security approach diminishes.

Anglo-Chinese Encounters Before the Opium War: A Tale of Two Empires Over Two Centuries studies the fascinating encounters between the two historic empires from Queen Elizabeth I’s first letter to the Ming Emperor Wanli in 1583, to Lord Palmerston’s letter to the Minister of China in 1840. Starting with Queen Elizabeth I’s letter to the Chinese Emperor and ending with the letter from Lord Palmerston to the Minister of China just before the Opium War, this book explores the long journey in between from cultural diplomacy to gunboat diplomacy. It interweaves the most known diplomatic efforts at the official level with the much unknown intellectual interactions at the people-to-people level, from missionaries to scholars, from merchants to travelers and from artists to scientists. This book adopts a novel "mirror" approach by pairing and comparing people, texts, commodities, artworks, architecture, ideologies, operating systems and world views of the two empires. Using letters, gifts and traded goods as fulcrums, and by adopting these unique lenses, it puts China into the world history narratives to contextualise Anglo-Chinese relations, thus providing a fresh analysis of the surviving evidence. Xin Liu casts a new light on understanding the Sino-centric and Anglo-centric world views in driving the complex relations between the two empires, and the reversals of power shifts that are still unfolding today. The book is not intended for specialists in history, but a general audience wishing to learn more about China’s historical engagement with the world.

A penetrating and sophisticated 2003 account of the relationship between China and imperial Britain.

The breathless pace of China’s economic reform has brought about deep ruptures in socioeconomic structures and people’s inner landscape. Faced with increasing market-driven competition and profound social changes, more and more middle-class urbanites are turning to Western-style psychological counseling to grapple with their mental distress. This book offers an in-depth ethnographic account of how an unfolding “inner revolution” is reconfiguring selfhood, psyche, family dynamics, sociality, and the mode of governing in post-socialist times. Li Zhang shows that anxiety—broadly construed in both medical and social terms—has become a powerful indicator for the general pulse of contemporary Chinese society. It is in this particular context that Zhang traces how a new psychotherapeutic culture takes root, thrives, and transforms itself across a wide range of personal, social, and political domains.

Reproduction of the original: Intimate China the Chinese as I Have Seen Them by Mrs. Archibald Little

Wang Gungwu's study of the relationship between China and imperial Britain examines the possibilities in, as well as the limits of, their encounters. It takes the story beyond the clichés of opium, fighting, and diplomacy to probe more intimate encounters. Students will benefit from Wang Gungwu's fluent erudition.