Widely recognized experts present the first comparative analysis of recent developments among six Eastern and Western nations concerning population aging and its consequences. Chapters focus on demographic trends, sociocultural contexts, and policy implications. Nations selected as case studies include: the Peopleís Republic of China, the Republic of Korea, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The editors and contributors call attention to the varied trajectories and effects of population aging in culturally diverse societies that are often at different stages or on different paths of economic development. Such analyses bring into sharper focus those conditions that are unique, or similar, and emphasize the ways in which cultural stereotypes of aging and the elderly complicate our understanding of the effects of world-wide population aging.

Pearl Buck tells the heart-seaching and tender story of a young Chinese girl's troubled acceptance of an alien way of life, with all its sorrows and rewards.

Philosophical reflections on journeys and crossings, homes and habitats, have appeared in all major East Asian and Western philosophies. Landscape and travelling first emerged as a key issue in ancient Chinese philosophy, quickly becoming a core concern of Daoism and Confucianism. Yet despite the eminence of such reflections, Landscape and Travelling East and West: A Philosophical Journey is the first academic study to explore these philosophical themes in detail. Individual case studies from esteemed experts consider how philosophical thought about places and journeys have inspired and shaped major intellectual and cultural traditions; how such notions concretely manifested themselves in Chinese art, particularly in the genres of landscape painting and garden architecture. The studies present a philosophical dialogue between Confucianism and Daoism on issues of social space and belonging and include discussion on travel and landscape in Buddhism as well as Japanese and Tibetan contexts. Approaching the topic from an inter-cultural perspectives, particularly East Asian philosophies, and using these to enrich contemporary reflections on space, the environment, and traversing, this unique collection adds an important voice to present philosophical, political, and cultural discourses.

Covers the period of the Chmielnicki Massacre and the Thirty Years War, and the movement of impoverished Jewish refugees into Western Europe. Migration has been a major factor in the life of the Jewish people throughout the two and a half millennia of their dispersion. And yet, the history of the Jewish migratory movements has not been fully explored in Jewish history. While the Jewish migratory movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and especially immigration to the New World, have attracted the attention of scholars, earlier such movements did not. In the present book I propose to discuss such a movement of an earlier period, that from Eastern Europe to the countries of the West, from its inception at the beginning of the seventeenth century to the dissolution of the old Polish commonwealth. Since this book deals with the history of a Jewish migratory movement, it should be understood that unless otherwise indicated, the terms emigrants, immigrants, and migrants refer to Jews

How many people have migrated from central and Eastern Europe since the 1989 revolutions? Are fears of mass migration from eastern Europe well-founded? What are the causes and effects, in both the sending and receiving countries, of such population movements? What are the policy reactions in the East and the West and how is this phenomenon likely to develop and to be regulated over the near future? These are some of the key questions addressed in this book by sixteen east and west European experts on international migration.