Highlights key issues as they developed in the People's Republic of China. This book contains articles that offer an understanding of the major events. It is organized into four thematic sections - challenges of governance, growth and structural changes, coping with rising social problems, and relations with major powers and neighbors.

Highlights key issues as they developed in the People's Republic of China. This book contains articles that offer an understanding of the major events. It is organized into four thematic sections - challenges of governance, growth and structural changes, coping with rising social problems, and relations with major powers and neighbors.

The book addresses questions such as, how should historians treat the earlier pasts of each country and the nationalism that guided the nation-building tasks? Where did political culture come in, especially when dealing with modern challenges of class, secularism and ethnicity? What part do external or regional pressures play when the nations are still being built? The authors have thought deeply about the issues of writing nation-building histories and have tried to put them not only in the perspective of Southeast Asian developments of the past five decades, but also the larger areas of...

This volume is a book of reflections and encounters about the region that the Chinese knew as Nanyang. The essays in it look back at the years of uncertainty after the end of World War II and explore the period largely through images of mixed heritages in Malaysia and Singapore. They also look at the trends towards social and political divisiveness following the years of decolonization in Southeast Asia. Never far in the background is the struggle to build new nations during four decades of an ideological Cold War and the Chinese determination to move from near-collapse in the 1940s and out...