Zarrow,Peter.Educating China: Knowledge,Society, and Textbooks in a Modernizing World, 1902-1937

For students,textbooks are boring and tedious.They read them to keep up their grades and memorize them to pass examinations.But for Peter Zarrow—the author of the well-acclaimed books China in War and Revolution and After Empire—textbooks are valuable sources through which to examine the socio-political changes in early twentieth-century China.In his new book,Educating China,Zarrow demonstrates that as China was building a nation-state to replace its imperial system,textbooks played an important role in producing civic-minded citizens.In textbooks,he contends,we find intense debates about the concept of the Chinese nation.     

民国女道德社暨世界妇女红卐字会史事考

女道德社暨世界妇女红卐字会是民国时期源起于山东济南,随后发展遍布大半个中国且波及海外的数位一体的新兴民间宗教慈善组织道院暨世界红卐字会的重要组成部分.女道德社是妇女修行的场所,世界妇女红卐字会是妇女从事社会慈善活动的组织.女道德社暨世界妇女红卐字会只是道院暨世界红卐字会的内部划分.其对外依然以道院暨世界红卐字会为依托开展活动.由于诸种原因,女道德社暨世界妇女红卐字会的各项史事活动隐而不显.对近代中国这一颇具特色的妇女组织的相关史事进行梳理、考辨,不仅有利于从深层次认识道院组织的发展概貌,还可从一个侧面了解当时中国社会妇女的动向及其所反映的某些社会思潮走向,乃至中国传统文化的变迁轨迹.     

Afghanistan and the Opium World Market: Poppy Production and Trade

The Afghan poppy cultivation is presented here as a case in point to exemplify the linkages between external influences and local effects. World market and power relations have influenced cultivation patterns, processing, and trafficking. At the same time, poppy cultivation pinpoints an internal development which is strongly linked to deteriorating state control, warlordism, and regional power politics. Opium production has served as a major source of revenue for the upholding of disparate political structures which reflect the present political map of Afghanistan. Poppy cultivation in Afghanistan gained a substantial push during the last quarter century, from an annual production of 200 tons in 1979 to 4,200 tons in 2004, making use of former development efforts in creating irrigated oases in Helmand and Nangarhar. Prices rose after the Taliban's 2001 ban on production, raising farmers' incomes substantially and turning opium into an unrivalled cash crop. Fairly new production zones have been added in recent times; for example, Badakhshan—the stronghold of the Northern Alliance—has gained the third position with major increases in the last few years. Afghanistan's poppy cultivation and opium production has to be interpreted in terms of globalization and fragmentation. Drug trafficking affects the neighboring states, namely, Iran, Tajikistan, and Pakistan, as they function as consumer markets as well as trade routes for contraband drugs heading towards the West. Consequently, the Afghan poppy cultivation is interpreted in a holistic manner.     

The World Bank on Mind,Behaviour and Society

This article critically analyses the use of psychological and behavioural knowledge in development policy and practice with reference to the World Development Report 2015. It examines the main proposition of the WDR 2015, highlighting the behavioural change framework and policy techniques promoted in the report. The shifts that have taken place in development policy are reviewed from a governmentality perspective which offers a critical view on the psychological and behavioural focus in contemporary development policy. The article focuses specifically on the behavioural techniques the WDR 2015 promotes to show how a certain kind of subjectivity is advanced which not only homogenizes and problematizes non‐Western knowledge systems, subjectivities and agency, but also justifies the economization of social life through development.     

Frugality and Luxury: Morality,Market, and Consumption in Late Imperial China

This article contributes to a wider critique of the use of European capitalist, patterns of industrialization in studies of the economic history of modern China—patterns commonly assumed to be universally valid. This sort of analytical framework denies not only the value of alternative economic models, but also that of Chinese independent economic thought. In this context, the present article argues that most of the intellectual changes of seventeenth-century Europe that led to the formulation of liberal capitalism—resistance to government intervention, support for luxury consumption as well as a new understanding of the market and of the relationship between private interests and morality—had taken place in China more than a century earlier. The background against which the two processes emerged, however, varied significantly, leading to distinctive ramifications. Unprecedented population growth and a widening gap between hinterland and coastal economies led Chinese officials and intellectuals to discard ideas of free market and focus instead on solutions for increasing production, maximizing the circulation of resources, and fighting poverty. It was not, therefore, a lack of a “scientific” understanding of the economy that led China to turn away from European-style laissez fare, but rather an evaluation of the Empire’s circumstances, raising questions on whether the European model is indeed universally applicable regardless of local conditions.     

Becoming Rafinesque: Market Society and Academic Reputation in the Early American Republic

This article focuses on how knowledge came to be valued in conflicting ways in the American Republic during the 1820s and 1830s – one based on a market model that considered knowledge to be a commodity for sale, and another that produced cultural value through social connections created in new academic institutions. Constantine Rafinesque, who taught at Transylvania University in Kentucky, and his research in the natural sciences serve as an example of the first sort of scholarship. His life also illustrates how a market society could lead to dandies, like Rafinesque himself, even in academia, and how that threatened both new middle class social proprieties and a system of clubby social relations that had come to dominate America’s colleges and universities in the early nineteenth century.     

我国世界文化遗产的时空分布——兼论我国世界文化遗产的申报

世界文化遗产已经成为许多旅游目的地的核心吸引物。我国的世界文化遗产数量居于世界第三,主要分布在黄河、长江流域,从遗产项目入选的时间看呈突变型、渐变型和平稳型三阶段特征,入选项目以符合世界文化遗产遴选标准第Ⅱ项和第Ⅲ项的居多,且以佛教文化遗存为多。目前我国比较重视对线性文化遗产、工业遗产、文化景观等的保护。本文认为：下一步开展申报时,要重视目前还没有世界文化遗产的部分省市,以体现文化的权力与利益平衡;在竞争性和选择性语境中,要宽容地对待各种历史文化遗产。