Introduction: In Search of PRC History

2006 ◽  
Vol 188 ◽  
pp. 855-869 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Strauss
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
The Political ◽  
Henry Kissinger ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
History Of ◽  
Near Future

In a perhaps apocryphal exchange in 1972, when, Henry Kissinger asked Zhou Enlai what he thought the outcome of the French revolution had been, Zhou responded that it was too early to say. This remark has taken on a life of its own precisely because it rings so true. The big, messy, contested phenomena that are revolutions inspire passionate reactions – both for and against – and each generation has a strong tendency to filter its perception of a given revolution through the political, social and epistemological concerns of its own time. This offers both paradox and opportunity. At present, the great politicalsocial revolutions are largely out of favour. Their animating grand ideologies, teleological imperatives, frank human rights abuses and consequent historical narratives have become historically and epistemologically at least suspect if not downright discredited in a post-Cold War world of globalization and market triumphalism. However, now is an enormously vibrant time for the study of the history of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in its phase of active revolution between 1949 and 1976. In addition to the collection here, there are two other edited volumes on PRC history that have either recently been published or are due to be published in the near future.

FROM THE HISTORY OF THE RELATIONS FORMATION OF CHINA WITH CENTRAL ASIAN COUNTRIES IN THE AREAS OF POLITICS, SECURITY, AND ECONOMICS

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 4-15
Author(s):  
Vladimir Paramonov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Asian Countries ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
The People ◽  
Central Asian ◽  
History Of ◽  
Central Asian Countries ◽  
Political Security ◽  
Near Future

The main purpose of the article is to identify the key trends in relations of the People Republic of China with the countries of Central Asia in the political, security and economic fields from 1992 to 2007. It seems that all this should help to scientifically evaluate the recent past of Chinese-Central Asian ties, and therefore help to build morestable and mutually beneficial formats of relations in the near future.

“What Freedom?”

2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-331
Author(s):  
John Owen Havard
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Free Condition ◽  
Narrative Design ◽  
Economic Liberalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
John Owen

John Owen Havard, “‘What Freedom?’: Frankenstein, Anti-Occidentalism, and English Liberty” (pp. 305–331) “If he were vanquished,” Victor Frankenstein states of his monstrous creation in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), “I should be a free man.” But he goes on: “Alas! what freedom? such as the peasant enjoys when his family have been massacred before his eyes, his cottage burnt, his lands laid waste, and he is turned adrift, homeless, pennyless, and alone, but free.” Victor’s circumstances approximate the deracinated subject of an emergent economic liberalism, while looking to other destitute and shipwrecked heroes. Yet the ironic “freedom” described here carries an added charge, which Victor underscores when he concludes this account of his ravaged condition: “Such would be my liberty.” This essay revisits the geographic plotting of Frankenstein: the digression to the East in the nested “harem” episode, the voyage to England, the neglected episode of Victor’s imprisonment in Ireland, and the creature’s desire to live in South America. Locating Victor’s concluding appeal to his “free” condition within the novel’s expansive geography amplifies the political stakes of his downfall, calling attention to not only his own suffering but the wider trail of destruction left in his wake. Where existing critical accounts have emphasized the French Revolution and its violent aftermath, this obscures the novel’s pointed critique of a deep and tangled history of English liberty and its destructive legacies. Reexamining the novel’s geography in tandem with its use of form similarly allows us to rethink the overarching narrative design of Frankenstein, in ways that disrupt, if not more radically dislocate, existing rigid ways of thinking about the novel.

Making It Count

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arunabh Ghosh
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Statistical Data ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Great Leap Forward ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Statistics ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Great Leap Forward

In 1949, at the end of a long period of wars, one of the biggest challenges facing leaders of the new People's Republic of China was how much they did not know. The government of one of the world's largest nations was committed to fundamentally reengineering its society and economy via socialist planning while having almost no reliable statistical data about their own country. This book is the history of efforts to resolve this “crisis in counting.” The book explores the choices made by political leaders, statisticians, academics, statistical workers, and even literary figures in attempts to know the nation through numbers. It shows that early reliance on Soviet-inspired methods of exhaustive enumeration became increasingly untenable in China by the mid-1950s. Unprecedented and unexpected exchanges with Indian statisticians followed, as the Chinese sought to learn about the then-exciting new technology of random sampling. These developments were overtaken by the tumult of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961), when probabilistic and exhaustive methods were rejected and statistics was refashioned into an ethnographic enterprise. By acknowledging Soviet and Indian influences, the book not only revises existing models of Cold War science but also globalizes wider developments in the history of statistics and data. Anchored in debates about statistics and its relationship to state building, the book offers fresh perspectives on China's transition to socialism.

Truth to Power

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Policy Issue ◽  
International Terrorism ◽  
Intelligence Community ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Government ◽  
Intelligence Support ◽  
The Cold War

This first-ever history of the US National Intelligence Council (NIC) is told through the reflections of its eight chairs in the period from the end of the Cold War until 2017. Coeditors Robert Hutchings and Gregory Treverton add a substantial introduction placing the NIC in its historical context going all the way back to the Board of National Estimates in the 1940s, as well as a concluding chapter that highlights key themes and judgments. The historic mission of this remarkable but little-understood organization is strategic intelligence assessment in service of senior American foreign policymakers. It has been at the center of every critical foreign policy issue during the period covered by this volume: helping shape America’s post–Cold War strategies, confronting sectarian conflicts around the world, meeting the new challenge of international terrorism, and now assessing the radical restructuring of the global order. Each chapter places its particular period of the NIC’s history in context (the global situation, the administration, the intelligence community) and assesses the most important issues with which the NIC grappled during the period, acknowledging failures as well as claiming successes. With the creation of the director of national intelligence in 2005, the NIC’s mission mushroomed to include direct intelligence support to the main policymaking committees in the government. The mission shift took the NIC directly into the thick of the action but may have come at the expense of weakening its historic role of providing over-the horizon strategic analysis.

Prologue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter D. McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Expression ◽  
Intangible Heritage ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Print Literacy

The section introduces Part II, which spans the period 1946 to 2014, by tracing the history of the debates about culture within UNESCO from 1947 to 2009. It considers the central part print literacy played in the early decades, and the gradual emergence of what came to be called ‘intangible heritage’; the political divisions of the Cold War that had a bearing not just on questions of the state and its role as a guardian of culture but on the idea of cultural expression as a commodity; the slow shift away from an exclusively intellectualist definition of culture to a more broadly anthropological one; and the realpolitik surrounding the debates about cultural diversity since the 1990s. The section concludes by showing how at the turn of the new millennium UNESCO caught up with the radical ways in which Tagore and Joyce thought about linguistic and cultural diversity.

The Entitlements of Merit

Sans-Culottes ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Sonenscher
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Political History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Dimensions ◽  
Military Reform ◽  
War Finance ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Louis Xvi ◽  
Modern War

This chapter shows how the moral and social dimensions of the subject of army reform grew out of the range of questions that it generated about property and inheritance, as against merit and distinction, in determining both the composition of the French nobility and its relationship to the French royal government. Getting the peacocks to pay raised a number of political dilemmas, however. These, in turn, helped to rule out the old vision of a powerful reforming monarch as the solution to absolute government's financial problems. The political history of the French Revolution thus began with the unavailability of this alternative. Irrespective of the damage done by the argument over military reform to any plausible prospect of relying on Louis XVI to be a patriot king, the model itself pulled strongly against both the realities of modern war finance and the more urgent political need to consolidate the royal debt.

The Homeland Debate, Redux: The Political–Cultural Impact of the 1946–1949 Repatriation to Soviet Armenia

2020 ◽  
pp. 84-125
Author(s):  
Tsolin Nalbantian
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Impact ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Armenian Identity ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Heating Up

Chapter 2 deals with the 1946-1949 Soviet repatriation drive to collect all worldwide Armenians and “return” them to the ASSR and, specifically, the Lebanese Armenian political-cultural understandings of it. I explore how that initiative formed a chapter of Lebanese (and other Middle Eastern) Armenians’ renegotiation of national belonging in early post-colonial times. And although about a third of all Armenian repatriates travelled via Beirut, I also look at those who remained in Lebanon and in other countries in the Middle East. The emerging Cold War was more than a backdrop to this story. Heating up, the Cold War – and the very divergent readings of, and responses to, the repatriation initiative among Lebanese Armenians – reinforced tensions between Armenian rightists and leftists. Armenians’ response to repatriation did not simply reflect their extant political-cultural positions. Rather, repatriation sharpened those positions. Responses to repatriation echoed issues on the changing Lebanese/Syrian/Armenian identity complex at the dawn of the post-colonial nation-state. The responses to repatriation included a retelling and a reconstitution of the history of the tragedy of the genocide. They also automatically triggered questions about the location and nature of the Armenian homeland, adding fuel to the division between Dashnaks and Armenian leftists.

Picked-Up Pieces

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holly Walters
Keyword(s):  
Political History ◽  
River Valley ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
The Political ◽  
Vital Part ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
History Of

The history of Mustang, Nepal is complicated and can vary significantly depending on the textual sources one uses. For local Mustangis and pilgrims, however, issues of place, space, and time are a vital part of what it means to be Hindu or Buddhist as well as Nepali, Indian, or Tibetan, even though these categories remain continuously blurred and fluid. Beginning with the paleontological history of Mustang’s extensive fossil formations and ending with an overview of the political history of the region, this chapter focuses on the ways in which historical narratives have affected access to the Kali Gandaki River Valley, and to Shaligrams specifically, since the earliest days.

Latin America between the Second World War and the Cold War: Some Reflections on the 1945–8 Conjuncture

1988 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie Bethell ◽  
Ian Roxborough
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Political ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Second World

The importance of the years of political and social upheaval immediately following the end of the Second World War and coinciding with the beginnings of the Cold War, that is to say, the period from 1944 or 1945 to 1948 or 1949, for the history of Europe (East and West), the Near and Middle East, Asia (Japan, China, South and East Asia), even Africa (certainly South Africa) in the second half of the twentieth century has long been generally recognised. In recent years historians of the United States, which had not, of course, been a theatre of war and which alone among the major belligerents emerged from the Second World War stronger and more prosperous, have begun to focus attention on the political, social and ideological conflict there in the postwar period – and the long term significance for the United States of the basis on which it was resolved. In contrast, except for Argentina, where Perón's rise to power has always attracted the interest of historians, the immediate postwar years in Latin America, which had been relatively untouched by, and had played a relatively minor role in, the Second World War, remain to a large extent neglected. It is our view that these years constituted a critical conjuncture in the political and social history of Latin America just as they did for much of the rest of the world. In a forthcoming collection of case studies, which we are currently editing, the main features of the immediate postwar period in Latin America, and especially the role played by labour and the Left, will be explored in some detail, country by country.1In this article, somewhat speculative and intentionally polemical, we present the broad outlines of our thesis.

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