This volume ties together the histories of Japan and China for the modern period prior to the 20th century. The chapters look at Chinese and Japanese works which were written in response to events in the other country. None of these works has received any sustained attention in the west. As a result we get a view of how Chinese and Japanese saw each other at a time when there were few personal contacts allowed. Many of these texts were built on fanciful embellishments of stories that migrated from one land to the other. But the unique qualities of the Sino-Japanese cultural bond seem to have conditioned the interaction so that these texts all reveal a fascinatingly well-defined area.

Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang examines the human exodus from China to Taiwan in 1949, focusing on trauma, memory, and identity.

Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday was published in 2005 to a great fanfare. The book portrays Mao as a monster – equal to or worse than Hitler and Stalin – and a fool who won power by native cunning and ruled by terror. It received a rapturous welcome from reviewers in the popular press and rocketed to the top of the worldwide bestseller list. Few works on China by writers in the West have achieved its impact. Reviews by serious China scholars, however, tended to take a different view. Most were sharply critical, questioning its authority and the authors’ methods , arguing that Chang and Halliday’s book is not a work of balanced scholarship, as it purports to be, but a highly selective and even polemical study that sets out to demonise Mao. This book brings together sixteen reviews of Mao: The Unknown Story – all by internationally well-regarded specialists in modern Chinese history, and published in relatively specialised scholarly journals. Taken together they demonstrate that Chang and Halliday’s portrayal of Mao is in many places woefully inaccurate. While agreeing that Mao had many faults and was responsible for some disastrous policies, they conclude that a more balanced picture is needed.

The authors of this book focus on transcultural entanglements in Manchuria during the first half of the twentieth century. Manchuria, as Western historiography commonly designates the three northeastern provinces of China, was a politically, culturally and economically contested region. In the late nineteenth century, the region became the centre of competing Russian, Chinese and Japanese interests, thereby also attracting global attention. The coexistence of people with different nationalities, ethnicities and cultures in Manchuria was rarely if ever harmoniously balanced or static. On the contrary, interactions were both dynamic and complex. Semi-colonial experiences affected the people’s living conditions, status and power relations. The transcultural negotiations between all population groups across borders of all kinds are the subject of this book. The chapters of this volume shed light on various entangled histories in areas such as administration, the economy, ideas, ideologies, culture, media and daily life.

From pirates singing Ricky Martin to mob hits carried out with samurai swords, Bertil Lintner offers a fascinating look at organized crime in the Asia Pacific. Both Western and Asian pundits assert that shady deals are an Asian way of life. Some argue that corruption and illicit business ventures - gambling, prostitution, drug trafficking, gun running, oil smuggling - are entrenched parts of the Asian value system. Yet many Asian leaders maintain that their cities are safer than Sydney, Amsterdam, New York, and Los Angeles. Making use of expertise gained from twenty years of living in Asia, Lintner exposes the role crime plays in the countries of the Far East. In Blood Brothers , he takes you inside the criminal fraternities of Asia, examining these networks and their past histories in order to answer one question: How are civil societies all over the world to be protected from the worst excesses of increasingly globalised mobsters?

Constituting over ninety percent of China's population, Han is not only the largest ethnonational group in that country but also one of the largest categories of human identity in world history. In this pathbreaking volume, a multidisciplinary group of scholars examine this ambiguous identity, one that shares features with, but cannot be subsumed under, existing notions of ethnicity, culture, race, nationality, and civilization.