Jin Chengyu ed., Hekeben Zhongguo guyishu congkan （A Series of Ancient Chinese Books Missing from China but Preserved and Printed in Japan）

China has long boasted a time-honored tradition of reverence for books, but this tradition has been subject to periodic countercurrents that have occasionally led to the widespread, deliberate destruction of books by political authorities. The two most notorious historical examples of this phenomenon are the massive book-burning carried out by the First Emperor of the Qin dynasty,     

The ‘China model’ and the global crisis: from Friedrich List to a Chinese mode of governance?

The global financial crisis reinvigorated ongoing debates over whether China has its own distinct and separate ‘model’ of political economy and/or development. There is much that connects this Chinese model with previous systems of national political economies; partly in terms of specific policy preferences, but also in terms of shared basic conceptions of the distribution of power in the global order. Like these previous systems, China has come to stand as an example of an alternative to following dominant (neo‐)liberal models of development. In this respect, what the China model is not and what China does not stand for might be more important than what it actually is and what it does stand for. However, the idea of a coherent and unique Chinese model has considerable purchase, and is both informed by and also feeds into considerations of China's uniqueness and difference from the norms, ideas and philosophies that dominate the rest of the world.     

The Year of the Establishment and the Naming of the Domed （mdo smad） Pacification Commission of the Yuan Dynasty

Much resarch has been carried out on the threeCombined Pacification Commissions and Chief Mili-tary Commands (宣慰使司都元帅府),and on the Com-mission for Buddhist and Tibetan Affairs (宣政院)sincepublication of the essay,How the Tuan Central Govern-ment Managed Tibetan LocalAffairs written by Han Rulinsome forty years ago.However,owing to the areas in-habited by Tibetans having being large,due to the greatdifferences in social customs,history,and religiousactivities,that existed,and because many Yuan Dy-     

Rosner,Erhard, Guide Signs of the Empire： Programmatic Place Names in the History of China （in German）

Successive dynasties used to emblazon their respective political agendas on the Chinese landscape by bestowing programmatic names on the towns and cities of their empire. Depending on the ruling elites＇ propagandistic aims, these messages could be allusive or blunt, bellicose or pacific, deprecating towards outsiders or culturally inclusive.     

Restituting Church Buildings and Negotiating Church Factions： Missionary Mapmakers and the Making of Local Networks （1712-1716）

At the turn of the 18th century, the Kangxi emperor initiated a large project to map the vast territories of the Qing. The land surveys that ensued were executed by teams of Qing officials and European missionaries, most of them French Jesuits first sent to China in 1685 and actively supported by the French crown. Early 18th century Jesuit publications foster a much-heralded claim that these missionary-mapmakers drew on their status of imperial envoys during the surveys to locally advance the position of the Catholic church. This article strives to explore the format/on of such local networks by these missionaries as they passed through the cities and towns of the Chinese provinces. On the basis of archival material, details emerge of contacts with local Qing administrators and Chinese Christians, and of attempts to purchase and recover local churches. This is then discussed against the background of the Rites Controversy, in an attempt to evaluate how such local networks relate to the rivalry between missionaries of different orders. The article emphasizes that there was （and perhaps is） no such thing as ＂pure science＂ by underscoring that important technical achievements such as the Qing mapping project are often shaped by complex networks and historical contingencies.     

Chen Yao-huang,Integrate and Divide： The Communist Revolution in Hebei Area, 1921-1949 （in Chinese）

For decades, the victory of the Chinese Communist Party （CCP） has been fascinating historians of modem China who work outside of the People＇s Republic of China. After recognizing the complexity of the Chinese Revolution, they have tended to focus on specific regions, applying the approaches of a variety of disciplines including sociology, a trend that gave rise to the field of ＂base area studies,＂ marked by the publishing of Mark Sheldon＇s The Yenan Way in 1971. This new book by Chen Yao-huang is another remarkable contribution to the study of base areas.