THE NORTHWEST QUESTION: CAPITALISM IN THE SANDS OF NATIONALIST CHINA

Abstract

At the onset of the Great Depression, right-wing intellectuals in China beseeched their compatriots to part ways with the decadence of coastal cities and rediscover their ancient homeland in the northwestern corner of their country. This article explores this intellectual reorientation through the speeches and essays of the leading Guomindang ideologue Dai Jitao, who retooled Sun Yat-sen's ideas of frontier development in order to address perceived crises of territoriality, capitalism, and spirituality. Dai's vision for a national revival structured around the material and cultural resources of the Northwest is shown to be crucial to his articulation of concepts shared with a global fascist current. In spite of widespread enthusiasm in the press and conservative intellectual circles, support for “Opening Up the Northwest” was uneven in Nanjing. To explain how this region ultimately remained underdeveloped, this article turns to the technocrat Weng Wenhao, who believed natural barriers and ecological frailty posed major challenges to economic development in the Northwest.     

Emphasising the Problem or the Solution in Charitable Fundraising for International Development

We conduct a laboratory experiment to test the effect on charitable donations to international development NGOs (INGOs) of emphasising current deprivation in a developing country, versus emphasising the potential good a donation can achieve. Using a double-blind dictator experiment with earned endowments, we find that varying the information/emphasis has no significant effect on total donations, nor on the probability of donating. We find suggestive evidence that an emphasis on current deprivation may raise the variance of donations, and thus the size of donations conditional on donating, but the effect is not significant in hurdle models that explicitly recognise this.     

Human rights fine a small price to pay for large royalty snatch

The failure of the UK government to deal expeditiously withan application to recover copyright royalties to which a formerstate employee turned spy was entitled constituted a violationof the human right to be tried in a reasonable time-frame.     

Disclosing Conflicts of Interest in Clinical Research: Views of Institutional Review Boards, Conflict of Interest Committees, and Investigators

Strategies for disclosing investigators' financial interests to potential research participants have been adopted by many research institutions. However, little is known about how decisions are made regarding disclosures of financial interests to potential research participants, including what is disclosed and the rationale for making these determinations. We sought to understand the attitudes, beliefs, and practices of institutional review board chairs, conflict of interest committee chairs, and investigators regarding disclosure of financial interests to potential research participants. Several themes emerged, including general attitudes toward conflicts of interest, circumstances in which financial interests should be disclosed, rationales and benefits of disclosure, what should be disclosed, negative effects of and barriers to disclosure, and timing and presentation of disclosure. Respondents cited several rationales for disclosure, including enabling informed decision making, promoting trust in researchers and research institutions, and reducing legal liability. There was general agreement that disclosure should happen early in the consent process. Respondents disagreed about whether to disclose the amounts of particular financial interests. Clarifying the goals of disclosure and understanding how potential research participants use the information will be critical in efforts to ensure the integrity of clinical research and to protect the rights and interests of participants.     

The MMORPG the merrier

Conducting an online search in late March 2006, an internetuser who keyed in the curious word ‘MMORPG’ wouldhave received more than 22 million hits. This confirms the growingsuspicion that MMORPGs are a phenomenon that is of increasingsocial, cultural, and economic significance and that, therefore,they will soon be creating fresh problems for intellectual propertylaw. MMORPGs (‘massively multiplayer online role-playing     

The spy who came in from the cold

Some words occur to us in pairs, often to the extent that wefind it difficult to hear the one without recalling the other.Thus ‘Romeo’ suggests ‘Juliet’; ‘Anthony’invokes ‘Cleopatra’; ‘Héloïse’follows ‘Abélard’ and so on. Many furtherexamples exist, particularly in the case of lovers. In intellectual property circles the concepts of ‘author’and ‘royalties’ are also closely linked—buttheir relationship is strained. While the author's love forroyalties is sincere and undiminished     

Mediation in War: Winning Hearts and Minds Using Mediated Condolence Payments

When an Iraqi noncombatant civilian is killed in the crossfire between the U.S. military and insurgents, the victim's family can apply for a "condolence payment" of up to $2,500 as a token of condolence and sympathy. As the process currently stands, the family member is handed a sum of money by U.S. personnel and ushered out the door. In this model, money equals apology. In this article, the author argues that the efficacy and efficiency of the current condolence payment program could be greatly increased by adding Arab-Muslim mediation techniques tailored to Iraqi culture. Mediation would fill a gap in the current program to help foster a constructive, stabilizing dialogue between the U.S. military and aggrieved Iraqi civilians. The author believes that with each positive, mediated interaction — each reconciliative engagement between an aggrieved Iraqi civilian, a mediator, and a U.S. military representative — the U.S. military can prevent today's aggrieved Iraqi parent, sibling, or child from becoming tomorrow's insurgent.
This article was written with two goals. The implementation of a mediated condolence payment program, even on a limited or pilot basis, would likely increase the chances of American success in Iraq and improve the daily lives of Iraqi civilians. If it is not possible to implement such a program in Iraq before American involvement there ends, then it may still have value as an important component of the post-conflict nation-building playbook of the U.S. and other foreign forces.     

Old wine in new bottles? The Commission and the use of environmental policy instruments

In this article, we address two main questions. First, we ask whether the alleged shift in the Commission's environmental 'policy style' from a traditional regulatory style towards a new style based on less impositional, more market-based and co-operative instruments has actually occurred in practice. We seek to answer this question (a) by employing content analysis to assess the policy instruments propagated by the Commission in both the Fourth and Fifth Environmental Action Programmes (EAP); and (b) by analysing legislative proposals introduced by the Commission in designated environmental policy fields (atmospheric pollution, waste, water). On the basis of the findings we argue that there is a discrepancy between what the Commission declares in the EAPs and what it proposes in practice. Moreover, in a second step, we highlight the factors which might make any major shift in the Commission's policy style difficult to achieve in order to account for this discrepancy.