Volume II of David B. Honey’s comprehensive history of Chinese thought covers a vital 500-year stretch in China’s history, from national unification in 221 BCE to the first post-imperial fragmentation into rival northern and southern polities. This volume discusses the reconstitution of the classics after the textual devastation wrought by the policies of the First Emperor of Qin, who destroyed many of them, and their eventual canonization by the crown during the Western Han period.

The first volume of David B. Honey’s comprehensive history of Chinese thought offers a close study of Confucius, that tradition’s proto-classicist. This opening volume examines Confucius traditions that largely formed the views of later classicists, who regarded him as their profession’s patron saint. Honey’s survey begins by examining how these views informed the Chinese classicists’ own identities as textual critics and interpreters, all dedicated to self-cultivation for government service.

When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and other Western positions in the Asia-Pacific World in December 1941, it was unprepared to go to war with the United States and the Western Democracies generally and even realized it could not win. Its navy and air force were impressive, and its army could battle impressively against China, but Japanese small arms were terrible. Japan’s tanks could not compete with their opposite numbers. The Empire’s logistical base was undeveloped for modern warfare. While the Allies could produce large numbers of trained pilots, Japan produced very few.

In this provocative new book, Shritha Vasudevan argues that feminist international relations (IR) theory has inadvertently resulted in a biased worldview, the very opposite of what feminist IR set out to try to rectify. This book contests theoretical presumptions of Western feminist IR and attempts to reformulate it in contexts of non-Western cultures. Vasudevan deftly utilizes the theoretical constructs of IR to explore the ramifications for India.

Translator: Richard L. Bland, Archeologist (retired), U.S. National Park Service, Heritage Research Associates, University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History

In this pathbreaking collections of essays, Canada-based Chinese scholar Simin Li explores the latest insights into information, knowledge, political communication, and identity in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and their neighbors, friends, and adversaries. Discourses of Asian Societies follows the social dynamics of these East Asian nations and reflects their recent political discourses and civil practices, grouped into four themes: memory and diaspora, civil practice and discourse in China, political discourses in Hong Kong, and youth identity and nationalism in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

In this stimulating and timely book, Scott Bailey, an American teaching Russian and Eurasian history in Japan, traces the history of the dynamic Russian Geographical Society, which carried out major research expeditions to Central Eurasia during the second half of the nineteenth century. The immediate goal of its expeditions was to collect ethnographic, geographic, and natural-scientific information on these regions and their peoples. Their wider benefits established and extended Russia’s imperial control in Central Eurasia, including some regions under direct or indirect Chinese control.

In this exciting new book, Taiwanese scholar Catherine Kai-Ping Lin examines Taiwan’s diplomatic history since the 1970s through the lens of sports in the development of nationalism in foreign relations. Since 1971, when Taiwan lost its United Nations seat to the communist People’s Republic of China, the country has gradually shifted its foreign policy.

Vietnam has claimed the Paracel and Spratly Island groups for hundreds of years. China’s invasion and capture of the Paracels from South Vietnam in 1974, and its ongoing occupation of the Spratlys, have created increasing opposition and anger not only among Vienamese citizens but worldwide. This book insists that China’s illegal violation of Vietnamese sovereignty rights in the Paracels and Spratlys has included serious human rights violations and decelerated the process of human emancipation.

In this penetrating study, Mohd Aarif Rather tackles the problem of the Kashmir Valley, one of the most complex situations in international politics, from the perspective of human security. The Kashmir conflict involves disputed borders between two nuclear power, India and Pakistan, and a local population that has become increasingly alienated from Indian federal rule. Kashmir has also witnessed intense militarization, resulting in various security issues,problematized identities, and disputed demarcation of frontiers.