This dissertation examines the latter stages of the Second Indochina War through the lens of geography, spatial contestation, and the environment. The natural and the manmade world were not only central but a decisive factor in the struggle to control the population and territory of South Vietnam. The war was shaped and in many ways determined by spatial / environmental factors. Like other revolutionary civil conflicts, the key to winning political power in South Vietnam was to control both the physical world (territory, population, resources) and the ideational world (the political organization of occupied territory). The means to do so was insurgency and pacification - two approaches that pursued the same goals (population and territory control) and used the same methods (a blend of military force, political violence, and socioeconomic policy) despite their countervailing purposes. The war in South Vietnam, like all armed conflicts, possessed a unique spatiality due to its irregular nature. Although it has often been called a "war without fronts," the reality is that the conflict in South Vietnam was a war with innumerable fronts, as insurgents and counterinsurgents feverishly wrestled to win political power and control of the civilian environment throughout forty-four provinces, 250 districts, and more than 11,000 hamlets. The conflict in South Vietnam was not one geographical war, but many; it was a highly complex politico-military struggle that fragmented space and atomized the battlefield along a million divergent points of conflict. This paper explores the unique spatiality of the Second Indochina War and examines the ways that both sides of the conflict conceptualized and utilized geography and the environment to serve strategic, tactical, and political purposes. / History

Within recent Japanese Buddhist scholarship there is a debate over the interpretation of Karmic causality evidenced in the 75 and 12 fascicle editions of Dogen's Shobogenzo, one salient example being that found in the daishugyo and shinjin inga fascicles on the fox koan from the mumonkon. At issue is whether a Buddhist of great cultivation transcends karmic causality, with the earlier daishugyo promoting a balanced perspective of both "not falling into" and "not obscuring" causality, while shinjin inga instead strongly favors the latter over the former. Traditionalists interpret the apparent reversal in shinjin inga as an introductory simplification to aid novices, while some Critical Buddhists see Dogen as instead returning to the orthodox truth of universal causality. I argue that Dogen philosophically favored the view found in daishugyo, but moved away from it in his later teachings due to misinterpretations made by both senior and novice monks alike. / Religion

This thesis focuses on the Huaihai Campaign (Nov. 6 1948 - Jan.10 1949) in the Chinese Civil War (1927-1936, 1949-1950). This war involved the Republic of China’s (ROC) Kuomintang Party (KMT) and the emerging Communist Party of China (CPC). Over the course of a few months and around one million combatants, the Communists pulled off a resounding victory dealing the final blow to the KMT which led to the CPC’s governance over mainland China. This case study of two key turning points in the Huaihai Campaign is analyzed using Sun Tzu’s five net assessments from The Art of War. Although the KMT appeared the much superior force on paper, they were dealt a decisive blow during the Huaihai Campaign. This thesis uses Sun Tzu’s five net assessments to explain the root cause of KMT decision failings. The KMT failures stemmed from ignorance of the most basic and vital military axioms of assessing advantages and disadvantages before going into battle.

Benjamin Smith Lyman was a geologist from Northampton, Massachusetts, who was contracted by the Japanese government in 1872 to carry out coal surveys on the island of Hokkaidō 北海道. What started out as a standard geological survey, quickly evolved into a lifelong interest in Japan for Lyman. The large collection of letters, books, photographs, and other documents housed under the Benjamin Smith Lyman Collection at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, serve as a primary source on both early relations between the Japanese and the West and the beginnings of the large network of academic writings which today can be classified as Japanese Studies. His Japanese career can be broken into two parts, 1872-1881, and 1881-1920. Highlights of the first part include problems with early Japanese government bureaucracy, feuds between fellow oyatoi gaikokujin, living conditions for foreigners living in Japan, the transmission of knowledge from foreign professionals to Japanese students, and even a small insight into the Dutch community in Tokyo. Highlights of the second include interactions with men such as Murray, Chamberlain, and Satow; several articles on topics ranging from mirrors to sociology; Lyman’s adopted Japanese son; and the Japanese community in 1890s Philadelphia.

This is a full-length poetry manuscript.

California has long been credited for being an environmental policy pioneer. It only achieved this status after allowing pollution to develop for decades, however. As the aerospace and other manufacturing industries took off during World War II, the environment was sacrificed for industrial capitalism. In the 1950s, California began to respond to pollution after concern was expressed by the state and its residents. Today, the US EPA has adopted California emissions standards and looks to the state for guidance when establishing its policies regarding mobile emissions; California is an environmental policy leader. While California is recognized as an environmental leader, China is perceived as having forfeited the environment in exchange for rapid industrial growth starting in 1978. As pollution has worsened in China, the rest of the world has watched the Chinese Communist Party ignore its growing problem. Recently, the Chinese government started to acknowledge the growing concerns and expressed an interest in learning what it can do to mitigate its pollution problem. To this end, the Chinese government has been sending delegations of policymakers and researchers to California to learn from California’s successes and failures regarding environmental policy. This thesis compares California’s and China’s environmental degradation and policy response to the issue of pollution. Both California and China developed by way of industrial capitalism and have worked together in the past. California and China are inextricably linked, and have an opportunity to learn from one another and to work together to reach a common goal of pollution reduction.

The Japanese government has a vested interest in either avoiding discussion of its war-torn past or arguing for a revisionist take. The need to play up Japanese victimization over Japanese aggression during World War II has led to many museums having their exhibits censored or revised to fit this narrative goal. During the 1990’s, Japan’s national discourse was more open to discussions of war crimes and the damage caused by their aggression. This in turn led to the creation of many “peace museums” that are intended to discuss and confront this history as frankly as possible. At the beginning of the 21st century, public discourse turned against these museums and only private museums have avoided censorship. Some museums, like the Osaka International Peace Center, have been devastated by the censorship. This museum and other museums with similar narrative issues raise questions about appropriate narrative on display. What is appropriate to censor for the sake of respect for the dead? What must be included for the sake of historical accuracy and honesty about the past? These questions are investigated at four different peace museums throughout Japan.

<p>This dissertation examines the visual production of capital in socialist realist images during the Maoist era (1949-1976). By deconstructing the pseudo-opposition between capitalism and socialism, my research demonstrates that, although the country was subject to the unchallenged rules of capital and its accumulation in both domestic and international spheres, Maoist visual culture was intended to veil China's state capitalism and construct its socialist persona. This historical analysis illustrates the ways in which the Maoist regime recoded and resolved the versatile contradictions of capital in an imaginary socialist utopia. Under these conditions, a wide spectrum of Maoist images played a key role in shaping the public perception of socialism as a reality in everyday lives. Here the aesthetic protocols of socialist realism functioned to create for the imagined socialist world a new currency that converted economic values, which followed the universal laws of capital, into the fetish of socialism. Such a collective "cognitive mapping" in Fredric Jameson's words - which situated people in the non-capitalist, socialist world and inserted them into the flow of socialist time - rendered imperceptible a mutated capitalism on the terrain of the People's Republic of China under Mao. This research aims to build a conversation between the real, material space subordinated to the laws of capital and the visual production of imaginary capital in the landscapes of socialist realism, for the purpose of mapping out how uneven geographical development contributed to activating, dispersing, and intensifying the global movement of Soviet and Chinese capital in the cultural form of socialist realism. This study also illustrates how, via the image-making process, socialist realist and Maoist images influenced by Mao's romantic vision of the countryside were meant to neutralize this uneven development in China and mask its on-going internal colonialism. Through this analysis, I argue that, in the interesting juncture where art for art's sake and art for politics intersected, Maoist visual culture ended up reproducing the hegemony of capital as a means of creating national wealth.</p> / Dissertation

No description available.

According to the firsthand account of James Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak, it appears that piracy in the state of British Malaya in the mid-1800s was community-driven and egalitarian, led by the interests of heroic figures like the Malayan pirate Si Rahman. These heroic figures share traits with Eric Hobsbawm’s social bandit, and in this case may be ascribed as social pirates. In contrast, late 20th-century and early 21st-century pirates in the region operate in loosely structured, hierarchical groups beholden to transnational criminal syndicates. Evidence suggests that contemporary pirates do not form the egalitarian communities of their colonial counterparts or play the role of ‘Robin Hood’ in their societies. Firsthand accounts of pirates from the modern-day pirate community on Batam Island suggest that the contemporary Southeast Asian pirate is an operative in the increasingly corporate interest of modern-day criminal organizations.