In this compelling history, award-winning journalist, Jon Mitchell, traces how the islands of Okinawa have been annexed by Japan, occupied by the United States and now menaced by China. In response, Okinawans have developed one of the world's most resilient – yet overlooked – pacifist movements.Once a wealthy kingdom, Okinawa was seized by Japan in the late-19th century and, after World War II, abandoned to US colonial rule. For twenty-seven years, ...

Suicides, excessive overtime, and hostility and violence on the factory floor in China. Drawing on vivid testimonies from rural migrant workers, student interns, managers and trade union staff, Dying for an iPhone is a devastating expose of two of the world’s most powerful companies: Foxconn and Apple.As the leading manufacturer of iPhones, iPads, and Kindles, and employing one million workers in China alone, Taiwanese-invested Foxconn’s drive to dominate global electronics...

At this moment, Americans regard China as a major threat, both economically and strategically, while Chinese regard the US as determined to contain China and impede its development. Tensions between the two countries remain high: human rights, trade, Taiwan, the South China Sea, military budgets.Yet, in spite of all these points of contention, the search for common ground through diplomatic engagement goes on as both countries' leaders recognize that constant frict...

This book is a beautiful and moving personal account of the Ainu, the native inhabitants of Hokkaidō, Japan's northern island, whose land, economy, and culture have been absorbed and destroyed in recent centuries by advancing Japanese. Based on the author's own experiences and on stories passed down from generation to generation, the book chronicles the disappearing world—and courageous rebirth—of this little-understood people. Kayano describes with disarming simplicity and frankness the p...

A striking first-person account of the Cultural Revolution in Inner Mongolia, embedded in a close examination of the historical evidence on China’s minority nationality policies to the present.During the Great Leap Forward, as hundreds of thousands of Chinese famine refugees headed to Inner Mongolia, Cheng Tiejun arrived in 1959 as a middle school student. In 1966, when the PRC plunged into the Cultural Revolution, he joined the Red Guards just as Inner Mongolia’s ...

Prior to and during the Second World War, the Japanese Army established programs of biological warfare throughout China and elsewhere. In these “factories of death,” including the now-infamous Unit 731, Japanese doctors and scientists conducted large numbers of vivisections and experiments on human beings, mostly Chinese nationals. However, as a result of complex historical factors including an American cover-up of the atrocities, Japanese denials, and inadequate responses from successive ...

Exploring contemporary Okinawan culture, politics, and historical memory, this book argues that the long Japanese tradition of defining Okinawa as a subordinate and peripheral part of Japan means that all claims of Okinawan distinctiveness necessarily become part of the larger debate over contemporary identity. The contributors trace the renascence of the debate in the burst of cultural and political expression that has flowered in the past decade, with the rapid growth of local museums an...

The third volume of The Cambridge History of Communism spans the period from the 1960s to the present, documenting the last two decades of the global Cold War and the collapse of Soviet socialism. An international team of scholars analyze the rise of China as a global power continuing to proclaim its Maoist allegiance, and the transformation of the geopolitics and political economy of Cold War conflict in an era of increasing economic interpenetration. Beneath the surface, profound politic...

Takeshi Hamashita, arguably Asia's premier historian of the longue durée, has been instrumental in opening a new field of inquiry in Chinese, East Asian and world historical research. Engaging modernization, Marxist and world system approaches, his wide-ranging redefinition of the evolving relationships between the East Asia regional system and the world economy from the sixteenth century to the present has sent ripples throughout Asian and international scholarship.His research ha...

This bestselling introduction to Chinese society uses the themes of resistance and protest to explore the complexity of life in contemporary China. An interdisciplinary and international team of China scholars draw on perspectives from sociology, anthropology, psychology, history and political science and covers a broad range of issues.Topics covered include:labour and environmental disputesrural and ethnic conflictmigrationlegal challeng...

In the confrontation between the two main economic systems that has marked the twentieth century, capitalism has been declared the winner–by default– over its adversary, socialism. Today, establishing a market economy has become the primary goal of the formerly socialist countries. The history of economic reform helps explain this remarkable turning point. Attempts to improve the old centralized system by expanding enterprise autonomy (in Poland, the Soviet Union, and East Germany) and mor...

This book presents a variety of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives on the problematic of reform in Vietnam. It explores the Vietnam's reforms in relation to those taking place in other countries of the socialist world, comparing doi moi with restructuring in other socialist states.