Re-gendering Chinese History: Zhao Mei’s Emperor Wu Zetian

Historians who share the written Chinese language as a carrier of cultural signification have negotiated the image of female emperor Wu Zetian with the signs of the times designated by the needs of the present. The female writer Zhao Mei's new biography Woman: Wu Zetian deconstructs the historical and cultural representation of Wu Zetian as the 'bad unwoman'; links a woman's private, and subjective experiences with her public and political activities; and demonstrates that how the former influences the latter. This paper examines how the participation of contemporary biographers in knowledge production constructs, legitimises and maintains the image of Wu Zetian as a woman and a ruler. It argues that Zhao Mei's biography of Wu Zetian manages to confront the established dominance of male hierarchy, questions the 'stigmatised identity' of this historical character as being stable and universal and, consequently re-genders an important chapter in Chinese history.     

Europeans of the Peruvian Andes: A Family History, 1860s–1940s

Liberal elites in nineteenth-century Peru were eager to attract European immigrants to help modernise their country. The majority arrived independently bringing commercial skills, while a minority, contracted as colonists, settled in the tropical lowlands. This article focuses on two European communities established in the central Andean region, where immigrants from northern Italy excelled as merchants and families from the Austrian Tyrol became smallholders. Through a reconstruction of one family's history, which draws on personal letters and a photograph, the article explores the experiences, character and socio-economic transformation of these communities and the significance given to European-ness and whiteness.     

Anxiety and Diminished Hope: The Potential Impact of Trump’s Presidency on Security in the Pacific Islands Region

Abstract

The election of Donald Trump as the next president of the US has caused much international consternation and anxiety. Reactions have been based on distrust and rejection of Trump’s political ideology, behavioural disposition and unpredictable policy positions. His campaign speeches were filled with provocative utterances which were racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-environment and self-centred. This article examines some possible impacts of Trump’s presidency on the Pacific island countries (PICs). The first issue refers to how Trump’s proposed isolationist and militarisation policies may affect regional geopolitics. The two policies tend to contradict each other because while isolationism means pulling back on US economic and strategic presence in the Pacific, a reversal of the pivot to Asia-Pacific policy, militarisation implies greater strategic reach, regionally and globally. What does this seemingly contradictory approach mean for the PICs? Second, the article looks at the impact of Trump’s climate change denial stance and the responses by PICs, given the fact that climate change is the single most significant foreign policy and development initiative of the PICs since their independence. The third issue deals with the potential impact of Trump’s restrictive migration policies on remittance flow to the PICs and how these affect the small island economies and well-being.     

Identifying intentions: Latvian policy-makers’ perceptions of Russia’s intentions

There is much disagreement on the specific aspects of behavior that are the most useful for estimating intentions of potential adversaries. One view is that military capabilities are the most useful. Alternative views consider that an adversary’s domestic politics, or symbolic-normative aspects of its behavior, contain valuable information for assessing its intentions. This article tests these three competing views on Latvia as a case study, based on in-depth interviews with 10 high-ranking decision-makers. The article concludes that although the interviewees regarded information on the potential adversary’s military capabilities to be crucial for inferring its intentions, other indicators were also regarded as important.     

Vietnam’s and China’s Diverging Industrial Relations Systems: Cases of Path Dependency

ABSTRACT

This article explains why Vietnam and China, one-party states that allow only one official trade union, are traversing different paths in their trade unions’ institutional structures, the state’s and trade union’s attitudes towards strikes, their willingness to allow independent trade unions and willingness to engage with the international labour union movement. These will be examined in terms of the path dependency of their recent histories, in which changes have been incremental on a path laid down by pre-existing entrenched institutions, until each national system no longer operated properly and new contingencies obliged the leadership to revamp the system. As a consequence of China’s and Vietnam’s divergent path dependencies, when external contingencies finally forced institutional change, countries have veered onto divergent trajectories – the Trans-Pacific Partnership energising Vietnam to debate the acceptance of autonomous trade unions, while Xi Jinping in China has intensified Party control over industrial relations.     

Tammsaare’s Constructions of Femininity in Light of Weininger’s Concept of Sex Difference

The texts of Estonian literary classic A. H. Tammsaare (1878–1940) can be read as mediating contradictory fin de siècle discourses of modernity. The emergence of these discourses was the effect of an accelerated process of socioeconomic modernization. This article analyzes constructions of femininity in Tammsaare’s literary texts through his women protagonists. The construction of these protagonists can meaningfully be traced to the increasingly insistent presence of women in the public sphere throughout Europe and in Estonia at the period of fin de siècle. Although Tammsaare’s texts speak by means of feminist discourses, his constructions of femininity lean toward the negative, misogynistic pole of these reactions to emancipated and “new” women. His analysis of womanhood often refers to the misogynist theory of gender in Otto Weininger’s popular treatise Geschlecht und Charakter. Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung (Sex and Character. An Investigation of Fundamental Principles), which came out 1903.