中国沿海外商直接投资外移趋势分析

受外商投资区位优势加速变迁,国际经济环境剧烈变动,尤其是全球金融危机冲击实体经济,各国对国际直接投资(FDI)的争夺日趋激烈等因素影响,中国沿海地区劳动密集型制造业的FDI大量外移。减少FDI向国外转移,促进其向内地转移,既有利于沿海发达地区经济结构升级,又有利于推动内地经济发展和对外开放,加快中国工业化进程,增加国内就业机会。促进沿海劳动密集型制造业的FDI内移,必须正视中国二元经济结构的现实,避免工业化进程中好高骛远,选择内地区域中心,形成产业集群效应,拓展产业链条,降低外商投资内地的综合成本。     

The Political Power of Words: The Birth of Pro-democratic Discourse in the Nineteenth Century in the United States and France

Comparing France and the United States, I propose a general model for assessing the birth of pro-democratic discourse. I first explain why founders of the modern 'democracies' were openly and vehemently anti-democratic. Next, I focus on two types of situation where the word 'democracy' is used on the political stage – when political actors want to distinguish themselves from their opponents and when political actors want to sanctify the political regime. The first case covers three specific modes of the use of the term 'democracy': (i) distinguishing oneself negatively by discrediting the opponent (the term 'democracy' is pejorative and associated with the 'enemy'); (ii) distinguishing oneself positively by asserting one's worthiness (the term 'democracy' is positive and associated with 'us'); (iii) fighting for an exclusive claim to the term in order to set oneself apart (several camps proclaim themselves 'democrat' and mutually accuse each other of usurping or even 'stealing' the title). I conclude that the use of the word 'democracy' generally results from a single motivation – to increase one's own political power or to diminish the power of one's opponents.     

Communal violence and ethnic polarization before and after the 2015 elections in Turkey: attacks against the HDP and the Kurdish population

Given its duration and intensity, the decades-old civil war in Turkey between the Turkish state and the PKK has resulted in relatively low levels of lethal inter-communal conflict between Kurdish and Turkish populations. However, around the June 2015 elections an unprecedented wave of systematic anti-Kurdish violence swept across western Turkey. The paper will assess these events in relation to literature on communal riots and electoral violence. It will consider the impact of state led anti-Kurdish discourse and the growth of the HDP, as potential factors that aggravated the dormant tensions and laid the groundwork for widespread inter-communal violence.     

Religious Innovation and Competition in Contemporary African Christianity

ABSTRACT

This introductory essay lays out the main themes of a special issue of Journal of Contemporary African Studies which brings together six empirically grounded papers by African social scientists of different disciplinary backgrounds. These works touch on various aspects of the social impact of religious innovation and competition in present day African Christianity. They represent the first fruits on the social science side of an interdisciplinary initiative that made 23 research grants for theologians and social scientists to study Christianity and social change in contemporary Africa. These articles focus on a variety of dynamics in contemporary African religion (mostly Christianity), including gender, health and healing, social media, entrepreneurship, and inter-religious borrowing and accommodation. The editors conclude that the research and learning reflected in this volume will enhance understanding of religion’s vital entanglement in contemporary African society. The articles reveal problematic ethical and psychological dynamics in some of these new movements, particularly among some of the neo-Pentecostal groups. Yet the authors are determined to go beyond perspectives that are overly fixated with African problems and victimisation. They are keen to explore opportunities for understanding African agency and African wellsprings of hope. The editors conclude that scholars of religion and religiosity in Africa need to invest new conceptual and methodological energy in researching what it means to be actively religious in Africa today.     

How does the context make a translation happen? An activity theory perspective

Context is a critical topic in translation studies. The research into translation context has undergone a shift from the multidisciplinary investigation into one or a few contextual factors to conceptualizing it as contextualization, i.e. a dynamic process of the interactions among the contextual factors. Nevertheless, the mechanism of translation contextualization, namely, the problem of how the interactive factors enable a translator to bring a meaningful target text into being, is yet to be explored. Activity Theory is a cultural-historical framework to analyze social practices. It can provide an account of translation contextualization. In light of the framework, an activity itself is the context of a translator’s decision-making and translation contextualization is no other than the rule-governed actualization process of a translation activity, which is hierarchically realized through chains of actions and operations.     

THE DEVELOPMENT OF A DEATH CULT IN 1930s JAPAN AND THE DECISION TO DROP THE ATOM BOMB

In the 1930s Japan developed a death cult which had a profound effect on the conduct of the Japanese armed forces in the Pacific War, 1941–1945. As a result of government directed propaganda campaign after the overthrow of the Shogunate in 1868, the ruling military cliques restored an Imperial system of government which placed Emperor Meiji as the Godhead central to the constitution and spiritual life of the Japanese nation. A bastardised Bushido cult emerged. It combined with a Social-Darwinist belief in Japan's manifest destiny to dominate Asia. The result was a murderous brutality that became synonymous with Japanese treatment of prisoners of war and conquered civilians. Japan's death cult was equally driven by a belief in self-sacrifice characterised by suicidal Banzai charges and kamikaze attacks. The result was kill ratios of Japanese troops in the Pacific War that were unique in the history of warfare. Even Japanese civilians were expected to sacrifice their lives in equal measure in the defence of the homeland. It was for this reason that American war planners came to the shocking estimate that as many as 900,000 Allied troops could die in the conquest of mainland Japan – Operation DOWNFALL. Contrary to the view of numbers of revisionist historians in the post-war period, who have variously argued that the atom bombs were used to prevent Soviet entry into the war against Japan, Francis Pike, author of Hirohito's War, The Pacific War, 1941 – 1945 [Bloomsbury 2015] reaffirms that the nuclear weapon was used for one purpose alone – to bring the war to a speedy end and to save the lives of American troops.