Reunification deadlocked: The United States,China and Taiwan

Abstract

Since the New China News Agency's release on March 15, 1949, of an editorial entitled “The Chinese People Are Determined to Liberate Taiwan,” that theme has been a cardinal principle of Peking's national policy. To appreciate fully the Chinese position, one must recognize not only Peking's claim that Taiwan is legally, ethnically, and historically an integral part of China, but also modern China's yeaming for national reunification and territorial integrity. On the ethnic question, China points to the fact that except for an extremely small number of aborigines, the inhabitants on the island today, including the so-called “native Taiwanese,” are of Chinese ancestry. They speak southeastern Chinese dialects and share with their compatriots on the mainland all the other basic Chinese cultural traits. Historically, as a Chinese spokesman once put it, “long before Christopher Columbus discovered America, the Chinese people were already in Taiwan. Long before the United States achieved its own independence, Taiwan had already become an inseparable part of the territory of China.” Although imperialist Japan occupied the island from 1895 to 1945, the island was returned to China in 1945 after Japan's surrender at the end of the Pacific War.     

Economic calculation in the Soviet Union

The article seeks to analyse the relationship between different forms of economic calculation in the Soviet Union, concentrating on monetary calculations used by the State Bank and on the use of ‘material balances’ and of input‐output analysis in planning the Soviet economy. It provides a critique of Bettelheim's analysis of the role of monetary calculation in the Soviet Union and, using the work of Lavigne, attempts to provide a foundation for a specific analysis of economic calculation (and hence, relations of production) in the Soviet Union. The article concludes by arguing that the variety of methods of calculating used in the Soviet Union, and the generation of ‘needs’ by organisational exigencies which may not be fully taken into account in the main methods of calculation, undermine the common conception of planning as the rational pursuit of certain ideal ends, a conception which is unfortunately still influential in many socialist conceptions of planning. Finally, in rejecting the view that one can conceive of socialism as a certain ideal state of affairs, the article argues that political critiques of the Soviet Union do not entail the rejection of the view that it is a socialist society.     

Mark Swatek-Evenstein: A History of Humanitarian Intervention

Liverpool Law Review -     

Michael P. Scharf,Milena Sterio & Paul R. Williams: The Syrian Conflict’s Impact on International Law: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020, 378 pp, £85 hardback,ISBN: 9781108491532

Liverpool Law Review -     

Race and the Recall: Racial and Ethnic Polarization in the California Recall Election

In the 2003 recall election in California, Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante received more than 1.25 million fewer votes in the replacement election than votes cast against the recall of Gray Davis. A much smaller group voted "yes" on the recall but voted for Bustamante. The principal underlying explanation is racial and ethnic polarization. Using L.A. Times exit poll data, we compare the characteristics of voters who displayed the two unusual behavioral patterns with those who voted in more conventional ways. We find that Latinos and African Americans are far less likely than non-Hispanic whites and Asian Americans to have defected from Bustamante given a "no" vote on the recall, and far more likely to have voted for Bustamante given a potentially strategic "yes" vote on the recall. The patterns of defection are consistent with racial polarization on Proposition 54, lending further credence to our claim that race and ethnicity persists as an important factor in vote choice, even in environments with a history of minority electoral success.     

Postmortem Computed Tomography in Firearm Homicides: A Retrospective Case Series,

Postmortem computed tomography (PMCT) is integrated into the evaluation of decedents in several American medical examiner offices and medicolegal death investigative centers in many other countries. We retrospectively investigated the value of PMCT in a series of firearm homicide cases from a statewide centralized medical examiner’s office that occurred during 2016. Autopsies were performed or supervised by board-certified forensic pathologists who reviewed the PMCT scans prior to autopsy. PMCT scans were re-evaluated by a forensic radiologist blinded to the autopsy findings and scored by body region (head–neck, thoracoabdominal, and extremities). Injury discrepancies were scored using a modified Goldman classification and analyzed with McNemar’s test. We included 60 males and 20 females (median age 31 years, range 3–73). Based on PMCT, 56 (79.1%) cases had injuries relevant to the cause of death in a single body region (24 head–neck region, 32 thoracoabdominal region). Out of these 56 cases, 9 had a missed major diagnosis by PMCT outside that region, including 6 extremity injuries visible during standard external examination. Yet all had evident lethal firearm injury. We showed that PMCT identifies major firearm injuries in homicide victims and excludes injuries related to the cause of death in other regions when a single body region is injured. Although PMCT has a known limited sensitivity for soft tissue and vascular pathology, it can be combined with external examination to potentially reduce or focus dissections in some of these cases depending on the circumstances and medicolegal needs.     

The quest for inclusion and citizenship in Ghana: challenges and prospects

Ghana's tortuous journey to democracy received a major boost in the year 2006 with the enactments of two human-rights-related pieces of legislation. In this article the author contends, on the one hand, that the recent enactments of an amendment to the law on representation of the people and the persons with disability law in Ghana constituted a noteworthy landmark in the search for inclusive citizenship. On the other hand, the relation between society and the political authority during the processes of the enactments highlighted characteristics of a post-colonial African state. The author explores the antagonisms that surrounded the enactments of these laws. The article concludes that although the Ghanaian experience represents a new wave of re-thinking of rights in Africa, it also underscores the deep-seated issues of contestation and negotiations that unavoidably accompany the expansion of democracy and extension of rights to the excluded and the marginalized.