Just the Two of Us? Civil Conflicts,Pro-State Militants,and the Violence Premium

Quantitative literature discussing violence in civil conflicts tends towards a typical model of engagement between governments and revolutionaries. Whilst recent work has shown the significant impact of multiple anti-government groups, a further feature remains understudied—the role of pro-state militants. This article theorizes a “violence premium” when such groups arise, which leads to all connected groups devoting greater energy to conflict than they would in isolation. Employing duration analysis and data from The Troubles in Northern Ireland, where Republicans act as revolutionary insurgents, Loyalists as pro-state militants, and the British Army as government forces, the violence premium is empirically confirmed. Both Loyalists and Republicans deviate from their underlying strategies to attack more frequently when violence by their rivals increases, with Republicans and the British Army engaging in the same way. An extended analysis, accounting for the status of the victim, shows that the violence premium resulting from interaction between Loyalists and Republicans targeted only the civilian population of Northern Ireland, elucidating the sectarian component of The Troubles. These results show that including all conflict parties and considering how they are linked are important features in studies that aim to determine the net level of violence in civil conflicts.     

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke's uncanny travels in Republican-era China

This study focuses on Akutagawa Ryūnosuke's Shina yūki (Travels in China): an account of a four-month journey through eastern, central, and northern China in the spring and summer of 1921. Due to Akutagawa's reputation as a writer and the account's vantage point on a transitional period in Japan's expansion abroad, Travels in China has traditionally enjoyed a prominent place in the canon of twentieth-century Japanese travel writing. What has received less attention, however, is the relation of the work to the rest of Akutagawa's literary corpus. In this paper, I situate Travels in China within the larger context of Akutagawa's ongoing interest in Chinese fiction and drama. Rather than reading Travels in China as a work of journalism, as Akutagawa initially invited his readers to do, I argue that the work is an extended exploration not only of the relationship between ‘New China’ and Akutagawa's beloved traditional Chinese culture, but also of the boundaries separating journalism, fiction, and other literary genres. Ultimately, I connect Travels in China to Akutagawa's later work: texts that similarly interrogate and deconstruct the distinctions between genres and modes of narrating experience.     

Memory and forgetting: examining the treatment of traumatic historical memory in Grave of the Fireflies and The Wind Rises

Within Japanese popular culture, manga and anime have played a significant role in mediating responses to the outcome of the Pacific War. Miyazaki Hayao's (possibly) final feature-length film, The Wind Rises, has been an important addition to the preceding body of popular media ‘texts’ that raise such themes. This article aims to address the question of how far cinematic animation can reasonably be obliged to follow the kinds of historiographical concerns that inevitably arise when engaging with Japan's militarist past. To answer this question, considerable space is devoted to examining the historical context of what others have done in the post-war period and integrate that commentary into an analysis of how the works of Takahata Isao and Miyazaki Hayao fit amongst a succession of creative works that have been co-opted in the reshaping of historical perceptions of the Japanese at war amongst the Japanese themselves. This will also require some incidental discussion of methodological issues that arise when dealing with such cases as vehicles for understanding transformations in historical consciousness. Ultimately it is argued that Miyazaki does indeed make an important contribution to the commentary on the Japanese war experience, although it must, perhaps unavoidably, be on highly personal terms so far as The Wind Rises is concerned.     

浅谈职业院校日语教学质量的提高

为适应社会对外语人才高质量的要求,高校日语教学除保留传统教学的优势之外需要采取新的教学方式,加强日语基础知识教育的同时,把语言学习和文化学习相结合,培养学生的语言交际能力、大胆实践口语、增强独立学习的能力,以培养适应社会发展的综合型人材。     

创建中国发展的新模式

该文分析了人类的生俘与社会发展的关系、社会的发展与人类文明的关系以及人类文明的演替与转折进程,并针对中国工业化历程的分析,提出要在科学发展观的统领下,创建中国发展的新模式。     

民间对日索赔与中国实施外交保护的可行性

基于人权的推动,传统外交保护的国家自由裁量特征开始发生转变。这既是义务限定,也是权利工具。至于民间对日索赔,中国政府无论是在法理基础上,还是在政治基础上,都具备了实施外交保护的可行性。     

Taiwan: An Internal Affair! How China’s Domestic Politics and Foreign Policy Interact on the Taiwan Issue?

Taiwan may be an internal affair but the domestic public opinion is not invited to participate very much in a debate and a decision-making process that have remained confined to the Chinese Communist Party and the military top leadership and, on purpose, involves a very small number of officials and experts. Conservative and nationalist forces do constrain Beijing’s Taiwan policy. And some leaders are tempted to use the Taiwan issue for unrelated domestic or foreign policy purpose. Nevertheless, what is striking is the potential for flexibility in China’s Taiwan policy. While Chinese local governments and companies’ increasing interests in business-as-usual in the Strait and the unbearable cost of any armed conflict tend to narrow the government’s options, concentration of power and the efficiency of the propaganda machine allow it to rather smoothly manage, in particular vis-à-vis the elites’ conservative opinion group as well as its own public opinion, this flexibility.     

多重三边关系影响下的中亚地区

作者通过总结和分析中亚的态势,提出在中亚存在的多重三边关系.首先,作为中亚区域的核心三角关系:例如在上海合作组织框架下的中亚国家、俄罗斯、中国三边关系; 其次,跨欧亚区域的三边关系,包括俄罗斯、欧洲、中亚国家,其中包含俄罗斯、中国、印度等国家; 第三,全球层面的三边关系,例如:俄罗斯、美国、中国的关系,俄罗斯、欧洲、美国的关系.从长远来看,中亚地区内部的多元化以及外部的多样化共同深刻地影响这个区域的发展.作为中亚外部环境的基本形式,三边关系应以尊重国家基本安全利益为目标,并考虑在不可避免的合作与竞争的外部行为过程中采用共同的价值标准.     

The political economy of global firms from India and China

This article attempts to build a bridge between contemporary studies of global firms from emerging economies and existing theories in comparative political economy. It argues that given the primacy of the state as an economic actor in developing countries, the variety of capitalism literature could provide a theoretical foundation for firm-level analyses of emerging market multinationals. For example, the authors suggest that China and India may be moving towards a ‘hybrid market economy’. They also offer a typology of Indian and Chinese corporates to demonstrate an empirical approach to analysing domestic business–government relationships and the ways in which these firms are shaped by the peculiarities of their respective institutional setting. Finally, they identify some of the likely pitfalls of doing cross-national comparisons of emerging market multinationals, particularly with respect to the reliability of corporate data.