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This work is intended to examine the history of the formation and breakdown of Comintern-CCP relations between 1921 and 1939. Achieving such an objective entails an analysis of Braun's experiences in China, with an emphasis on the events leading up to and including the Long March. Of particular interest is the shifting emphasis from political to military strategy as the source of internal conflict within the CCP. By chronicling the political shifts within the Party, the historical events, and the factors that resulted in the Comintern's fall from grace, it is hoped that the reader will come to better understand the role of Otto Braun and the Comintern amidst the chaos of civil war.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the historiography of Qin Shi Huang. I will focus my analysis on the perspectives of scholars from three periods: the Han Dynasty, late 19th century to early 20th century, and last the 30 to 40 years of Communist Party rule. Through analysis of sources from each of the three periods, I will trace the evolution of the shifting perspectives on Qin Shi Huang to explain why this controversial figure has remained relevant throughout the ages.

This study unearths the lost world of early-nineteenth-century Canton. Known today as Guangzhou, this Chinese city witnessed the economic dynamism of global commerce until the demise of the Canton System in 1842. Records of its commercial vitality and global interactions faded only because we have allowed our image of old Canton to be clouded by China's weakness beginning in the mid-1800s. By reviving this story of economic vibrancy, I restore the historical contingency at the juncture at which global commercial equilibrium unraveled with the collapse of the Canton system, and reshape our understanding of China's subsequent economic experience. I explore this story of the China trade that helped shape the modern world through the lens of a single prominent merchant house and its leading figure, Wu Bingjian, known to the West by his trading name of Houqua. I demonstrate that a large measure of Houqua's success stemmed from his ability to maintain an intricate balance between his commercial interests and those of his Western counterparts, all in an era of transnationalism before the imposition of the Western world order. The story of Houqua is at once local, regional, and global. Houqua’s business success certainly amplified the economic vitality in Canton. However, this analysis of his business success is less an examination of the Canton system than a study of the impact of an exceptional operator within this system who, through his personal business endeavors, set in motion changes that had ramifications for China’s development and the global system at large. His success in global business illustrates the construction of networks of trust for the purpose of facilitating economic exchange in the advent of an enforceable, unified international system of arbitration. The experience of his successors tells the story of the diverging economic fortunes of global traders operating formerly on equal footing. This is a story not only of an exceptional individual but also of the dynamic setting of transnational business when regional networks negotiated their connections in the emerging modern world. / History

Whales are an enigma. It is difficult to pin them down because they straddle categories. Whales were difficult not just because of their extraordinary size, but rather because they were peculiar sorts of fish, with meat more like wild boar than tuna. In the same way that they existed at the intersection of classifications, with features of land and sea creatures, whales also were a nexus in a web of linkages between the ocean and the shore. By focusing on whales and the boundaries they straddle, this dissertation highlights the often surprising interconnections between coastal activities and inland life in early modern Japan (1600-1900). / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

<p> This thesis examines Japanese writer Saotome Katsumoto and his efforts to create a pacifist message in his 1991 film <i>Senso to Seishun</i> (War and Youth). The story presents multigenerational viewpoints on the Pacific War, and is significant for being the first film to depict the Great Tokyo Air Raid of March 9&ndash;10, 1945. I discuss how Saotome's use of fiction, metaphor, and autobiographical techniques assist the film in creating a pacifist narrative. The film's pacifist message continues to hold relevance today, as nationalist and conservative groups push strongly for revisions to Article 9 of the Japanese Peace Constitution in order to remilitarize the nation.</p>

<p> This thesis explores Japanese society through the lens of cultural hybridity and liminality to understand the shift towards nonconformity and hyper-individualism among post-postwar Japanese. This shift reflects an important point in Japan's transculturation process whereby post-postwar Japanese have developed a cultural hybridity of inbetweenness (liminality) juxtaposing their native Japaneseness (<i>wakon</i>) against their adopted Westernness (<i>y<span style="text-decoration:overline"> o</span>kon</i>). This <i> wakon-y<span style="text-decoration:overline">o</span>kon </i> hybrid construct is posing a challenge to Japan's longstanding hybrid modernity philosophy of <i>wakon-y<span style="text-decoration:overline"> o</span>sai</i> (Japanese spirit- Western things), which perpetuated the pre-modern core values and collectivist ethics of Japaneseness for nearly 150 years below its fa&ccedil;ade of Western modernity. The dilemma inherent in Japan's <i>wakon-y<span style="text-decoration:overline"> o</span>kon</i> in-betweenness is foreshadowed in the pioneering works of Abe K<span style="text-decoration:overline">o</span>b<span style="text-decoration:overline"> o</span> and Murakami Haruki, who both illuminated the conflicting juxtaposition of the core values and ethics of Japaneseness (wakon) and <i>seken</i>-Other (the jury-surrounding- the-Self) against the pursuit of the individualist ethics of Westernness (y<span style="text-decoration:overline"> o</span>kon) and Selfhood (<i> shutaisei)</i> within their imaginaries. </p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Comparative Literature, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Oct. 5, 2009). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-02, Section: A, page: 0570.

This dissertation studies the nexus of empire, environment, and market that defined Qing China in 1750-1850, when unprecedented commercial expansion and a rush for natural resources – including furs, pharmaceuticals, and precious minerals – transformed the ecology of China and its borderlands. That boom, no less than today’s, had profound institutional, ideological, and environmental causes and consequences. Nature itself was redefined. In this thesis, I show that it was the activism, not the atavism, of early modern empire that produced “nature.” Wilderness as such was not a state of nature: it reflected the nature of the state. Imperial efforts to elaborate and preserve “pure” ethnic homelands during the boom were at the center of this process. Using archival materials from Northeast China and Mongolia as case studies, the dissertation reassesses the view that homesteaders transformed China’s frontiers from wilderness to breadbasket after 1850. I argue instead that, like the Russian East and American West, the Qing empire’s North was never a “primitive wilderness” – it only seemed so to late 19th century observers. Manchuria and Mongolia, in fact, had served local and global markets. The boom years of the 1700s in particular witnessed a surge in poaching, commercial licensing, and violent “purification” campaigns to restore the environment, stem migration, and promote “traditional” land-use patterns. Results were mixed; conservation succeeded in some territories, while others suffered dramatic environmental change: emptied of fur-bearing animals, stripped of wild pharmaceuticals, left bare around abandoned worker camps. Beginning with changes in material culture in the metropole, the dissertation follows the commodity chain to production sites in the frontier, providing a fresh look at the politics of resource production and nature protection in the Qing empire. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

<p> In this thesis I argue that Hindu nationalist terminology, particularly the concepts of <i>Hindutva, Samyavada,</i> and national identity, modernized amid currents of globalization and neocolonialism in the early twentieth-century. In the theoretical section, I examine how systems of knowledge and power in India were directly and indirectly affected by the globalization of western modernity. In the primary source analysis section, I discuss three prominent Hindu nationalists and their ideas in support of the argument made in the theoretical section. Veer Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883-1966), the philosopher of Hindutva, represented the ethno-nationalistic component to Hindu nationalism and looked to cultural motifs in order to unify the &ldquo;true&rdquo; people of India. Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose (1897-1945), the militant hero who formed the Indian National Army and outright opposed the British, contributed the aggressive discourse of nationalist rhetoric. Sarsanghchalak Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar (1906-1973), the supreme leader of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), utilized Hindu nationalist rhetoric in order to mesmerize post-independence Indians and lay the foundation for the future of the RSS. Although these individuals represented a current within Indian nationalist history, their lives and literature influenced the language of Hindu nationalism.</p>