This ambitious work provides a unique statement on the question of place-based activism and its relationship to powerful forces of international capital. Arguing that specific places around the world are sites for the defense and enhancement of daily life in the context of rapidly expanding global technologies and investment options, the contributors reach for a vision of social development that supports sustainable, humane cultures. Bringing together the local and the global, this work provides the first sustained linkage of ethnic groups in diaspora to macrocosmic processes of world capital...

Dialogues Across Civilizations sets the histories of China and Europe alongside one another. Each chapter stands as an essay that imaginatively places historical individuals and events in proximity to one another and explores a specific topicgender relations, rural politics, artistic renderings of nature, to name a fewthrough the stories of persons who reflected on similar questions but in different social and cultural settings. Through this juxtaposition, Chinese and European civilizations illuminate each other's achievements, problems, and limitations in a range of areas from urban...

From the perspective of village activists across China, this book tells the stories of farmers and rural laborers who raised the banner of opposition to constitutional reform during the first decade of the twentieth century. The author brings to life the stories of the Camel King of Zunhua county, Qu Shiwen and the Four Mountains of Laiyang county, and many others who criticized government modernization efforts, known collectively as the New Policy. Using county archives---including oral histories---as well as memoirs, periodical literature, missionary records, and official documents both...

This book offers historical and comparative analyses of changes in agrarian society forced by the globalization of capitalism, and the implications of these changes for human welfare globally. The book gives special attention to recent economic development and urbanization in the People s Republic of China which have had a major impact on contemporary transformations globally. Case studies from South and Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America in turn place these transformations in a comparative global perspective. The contributors include distinguished scholars from the UN, PRC, India,...