Pulling Strings In China

This book provides a comprehensive history of the modern Chinese navy from 1840 to the present. Beginning with a survey of naval developments in earlier imperial times, the book goes on to show how China has since the mid-19th century four times built or rebuilt its navy: after the Opium Wars, a navy which was sunk or captured by the Japanese in the war of 1894–1895; during the 1920s and 1930s, a navy again sunk or lost to Japan, in the war of 1937–1945; in the 1950s, a navy built with Soviet help, which stagnated following the Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s; and finally the present navy which absorbed its predecessor, but with the most modern sections dating from the 1990s—a navy which continues to grow and prosper. The book also shows how the underlying strategic imperative for the Chinese navy has been the defense of China’s coasts and major rivers; how naval mutiny was a key factor in the overthrow of the Qing and the Nationalist regimes; and how successive Chinese governments, aware of the potent threat of naval mutiny, have restricted the growth, independence, and capabilities of the navy. Overall, the book provides—at a time when many people in the West view China and its navy as a threat—a rich, detailed, and realistic assessment of the true nature of the Chinese navy and the contemporary factors that affect its development.

Kaiser explores the extraordinary career of Melville A. Clark (1883–1953), a musician, inventor, entrepreneur, community leader, and collector whose colorful story is largely unknown. Beginning with an account of Clark’s musical family, Kaiser chronicles the founding in 1859 of the Clark Music Company, of which Melville Clark became president in 1919. Originally just a tinker’s shed, the business ultimately moved into a six-story building in the center of Syracuse, New York. The music company celebrates its 150th anniversary in 2010. Clark also combined his talents as a gifted musician and an astute entrepreneur to start the first Syracuse Symphony Orchestra. Kaiser recounts the development of the Clark Irish Harp, the first portable harp manufactured in the United States that could easily play accidentals. There were other Clark inventions, such as the first nylon strings for instruments, a fruit picker, and balloons that the British used in 1918 to drop more than 1,250,000 pamphlets over Germany. Clark’s story unfolds in fascinating detail: a musical encounter with President Wilson, an opportunity to perform for President F. D. Roosevelt at the White House, a visit to Buckingham Palace to present Princess Elizabeth with a music box, and the journey of a Clark Irish Harp to Antarctica with Admiral Byrd. Lavishly illustrated, Pulling Strings not only uncovers the life of a musical genius but also sheds light on a forgotten chapter in Syracuse history.

A dramatic new telling of the dawn of modern East Asia, placing Korea at the center of a transformed world order wrought by imperial greed and devastating wars. In the nineteenth century, Russia participated in two “great games”: one, well known, pitted the tsar’s empire against Britain in Central Asia. The other, hitherto unrecognized but no less significant, saw Russia, China, and Japan vying for domination of the Korean Peninsula. In this eye-opening account, brought to life in lucid narrative prose, Sheila Miyoshi Jager argues that the contest over Korea, driven both by Korean domestic disputes and by great-power rivalry, set the course for the future of East Asia and the larger global order. When Russia’s eastward expansion brought it to the Korean border, an impoverished but strategically located nation was wrested from centuries of isolation. Korea became a prize of two major imperial conflicts: the Sino-Japanese War at the close of the nineteenth century and the Russo-Japanese War at the beginning of the twentieth. Japan’s victories in the battle for Korea not only earned the Meiji regime its yearned-for colony but also dislodged Imperial China from centuries of regional supremacy. And the fate of the declining tsarist empire was sealed by its surprising military defeat, even as the United States and Britain sized up the new Japanese challenger. A vivid story of two geopolitical earthquakes sharing Korea as their epicenter, The Other Great Game rewrites the script of twentieth-century rivalry in the Pacific and enriches our understanding of contemporary global affairs, from the origins of Korea’s bifurcated identity—a legacy of internal politics amid the imperial squabble—to China’s irredentist territorial ambitions and Russia’s nostalgic dreams of recovering great-power status.

Togo Heihachiro (1848-1934) was born into a feudal society that had lived in seclusion for 250 years. As a teenage samurai, he witnessed the destruction wrought upon his native land by British warships. As the legendary "Silent Admiral", he was at the forefront of innovations in warfare, pioneering the Japanese use of modern gunnery and wireless communication. He is best known as "the Nelson of the East" for his resounding victory over the Tsar's navy in the Russo-Japanese War, but he also lived a remarkable life: studying at a British maritime college, witnessing the Sino-French War, the Hawaiian Revolution, and the Boxer Uprising. After his retirement, he was appointed to oversee the education of the Emperor, Hirohito. This new biography spans Japan's sudden, violent leap out of its self-imposed isolation and into the 20th century. Delving beyond Togo's finest hour at the Battle of Tsushima, it portrays the life of a diffident Japanese sailor in Victorian Britain, his reluctant celebrity in America (where he was laid low by Boston cooking and welcomed by his biggest fan, Theodore Roosevelt), forgotten wars over the short-lived Republics of Ezo and Formosa, and the accumulation of peacetime experience that forged a wartime hero.

本书收录了《介绍一部关于我国外交史的重要参考书》《钱大昕和他的著述》《明清之际西学输入中国考略》《清代生物学家李元及其著作》《洪亮吉及其人口论》等文章。

From 1854 to 1952, the Chinese Maritime Customs Service delivered one-third to one-half of all revenue available to China’s central authorities. Much more than a tax collector, the institution managed China’s harbors and surveyed the Chinese coast. It oversaw a college training Chinese diplomats; translated legal, philosophical, economic, and scientific documents; organized contributions to international exhibitions; and pioneered China’s modern postal system. After the 1911 Revolution, the agency began managing China’s international loans and domestic bond issues, and in the 1930s, it created a coast guard to combat smuggling. The Customs Service was central to China’s post-Taiping entrance into the world of modern nation-states and twentieth-century trade and finance, and this is the first comprehensive history of the Customs Service’s activities and truly cosmopolitan nature. At times, the Service kept China together when little else did.