Digging in the Dark: The Underground War on the Western Front in World War I

Throughout the First World War, with the trenches largely static, the combatants tried to break the deadlock by tunnelling under one another’s trenches. The Tunnelling Companies of the British Royal Engineers were engaged in a bitter struggle against German Pioneers that left both sides with heavy casualties. A project to determine the location of one particular act of heroism in that underground war has resulted in the erection of a monument to the Tunnellers at Givenchy-lès-la-Bassée in northern France.     

党的第三代领导集体统战理论的历史地位与特点

第三代领导集体统战理论是在我们党准确地判断自己所处历史方位、并自觉地由革命党转变为执政党的历史背景下产生的,是由邓小平统战理论开始的我们党的统战理论形态转型的继续与初步完成.这一作为新形态的建设统战理论,是唯一能够正确地指导我国新世纪爱国统一战线和统战工作健康发展的理论,它具有空前的广泛性、高度的整合性与包容性、高度的规范性与有序性、与国际因素的关联性与互动性增大等新特点.     

The Nature of Things: Dead Labor, Nonhuman Actors, and the Persistence of Marxism

This article is about the question of social agency in the animation of things , and about how this problematic has been conceptualized in Marxist and Actor-Network Theory (ANT) approaches to human–nature–technology relations. Notwithstanding many obvious differences, we note that each tradition was founded on a radical shift to a relational ontology, a world of relations and processes and not things-in-themselves, and that each has developed, partly as a consequence of this move, analytically useful ways of investigating and talking about the work that things do, or appear to do, in the world. By relating the ANT category of non-human actors to the Marxist concept of dead labor, and by revisiting Marx's own dialectics of technology as embodied in his figure of the "living machine" in Capital , we explore the different implications of these approaches for our understandings of the nature, materiality, and the efficacy of social agents. We argue that ANT's reconfiguration of agency as a collective social and technical process—a process wherein the "nonhuman" can have very real social effects—can be deepened and given some political efficacy only if we take seriously the ontological problems of causality, accountability, and the directedness of social relations (and things) which ANT, and its wider, still evolving ethos among the social sciences and cultural studies, would have us forestall.     

危机事件下中国入境旅游的受损格局与影响机制研究

本文基于计量经济学模型及统计分析方法,以1991~2011年中国入境旅游相关数据为基础,探究金融危机等事件下中国入境旅游的受损格局与影响机制.研究发现:(1) 各客源国或地区到中国旅游人数均出现2010年恢复效果明显、2011年恢复效果较弱的特征,但受损幅度差异很大,恢复状况也不尽相同.截至2011年底,各客源国或地区到中国旅游人数均未恢复至预测水平.(2) 各客源国或地区收入水平、自身价格和替代价格的变化量,与各客源国或地区到中国旅游人数的减少量具有长期协整关系.收入水平、自身价格和替代价格的变化最终导致了入境旅游人数的减少.游客在考虑到中国旅行时,个人收入成为大部分客源国或地区游客的主要决定因素,自身价格和替代价格的影响效果也不可忽视.     

资本贪婪与金融危机:资本的本性、特点、霸权、转嫁危机和思维方式

回顾西方资本的历史,有利于认识它的今天,预计其未来行动. 马克思在<资本论>中科学地分析资本的融资流通等经济作用的同时,特意指出:资本需要流通,"只是在这个不断更新的运动中才有价值的增殖.因此,资本的运动是没有限度的."他进一步指出:资本家的目的"不是取得一次利润,而只是谋取利润的无休止的运动".马克思称之为"绝对的致富欲,价值追逐狂",而且,"资本来到世间,从头到脚,每个毛孔都滴着血和肮脏的东西".[1]     

Crisis,challenge and choice: recent theoretical trends of anti-modernism and Western studies in Chinese history

During the last three decades, so-called “postism” (a Chinese non-professional, invented referent to postcolonialism, postmodernism and poststructuralism) has powerfully criticized and challenged the hegemonic ideology of the long-standing Euro–American centralism and the authoritative discourse of modernism in Western intellectual and academic circles, albeit it with various different resonances in Chinese and other non-Western societies. By tracing the trajectory of Western conceptual ideas from classical “rational” interpretations of history, this article tries to construct the inner connections and evolution between these conceptions and ways of thinking, and to summarize their impacts on and reactions from the field of Chinese historical studies. This article suggests that these new trends have definitely cast light on macro ideological and perspective concerns but have been less fruitful in concrete historical studies.     

Laying the Foundations for the Wheat Scandal: UN Sanctions,Private Actors and the Cole Inquiry

Throughout 2006, Commissioner Terence Cole QC conducted an inquiry into the involvement of Australian companies in the United Nations' Oil-for-Food Programme in Iraq. The inquiry generated headlines about sanctions-busting behaviour on the part of AWB Limited and whether or not government ministers knew or should have known what was happening during the life of the Programme from 1996 to 2003. An element of the scandal that has received little attention is whether AWB Limited's behaviour was actually that extraordinary, given its status as a private company whose obligation to its shareholders was to maximise profits and which, had it not complied with the Iraqi government's demands to bypass the sanctions regime, could have cost the company a very important market. Drawing on the sanctions literature, this paper examines an essential problem at the heart of sanctions implementation; namely, that while states sign on to these international obligations, it is private companies and individuals that generally bear their cost. The paper considers legislative changes prompted by Commissioner Cole's Report but emphasises their limitations. A key and persistent difficulty for Australia and other states is that enforcing their international obligations depends on the goodwill and integrity of private actors.