The rise of China is a major feature of global politics at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and one that raises the question of how a rising China and global politics will adapt to each other. This study argues that historical cases are also useful in addressing this question. Four cases are compared: two during the reign of Emperor Xianfeng and another two under the rule of Emperor Guangxu. Emperor Xianfeng's view of China was that it possessed a unique culture that should be separated from alien forces, which he intuitively conceived as different, whereas Emperor Guangxu accepted exchanges with the West as a civilization and was willing to learn from them as a cultural resource. Despite this difference in their political perspectives, both emperors similarly faced constraints to their power in implementing their policies. Two cases are selected for each emperor to demonstrate how they acted differently from a cultural orientation of estrangement and exchange on one hand as well as a position of strength and weakness on the other. This comparative study provides insights into how China in the twenty-first century adapts to its expanding influence.

This article analyzes the political context of industrialization in Tokugawa Japan through an analysis of merchandising policies for porcelains. With a comparison of the regions where the major sites of porcelain production were located, the study examines the processes by which arrangements for porcelain distribution were organized in the domains of Saga and Owari, and the district of Mino. The analysis shows contrasting types of arrangements in terms of the objectives and major agents who were responsible for making these policies and regulations. These policies and arrangements reflected the relationships between political authorities and those who were engaged in porcelain production and distribution in each region. The relationships varied significantly from each other, ranging from direct control by the regional authority, to relatively equal bargaining power, to extensive merchant autonomy. Comparative analysis of power relations illustrates the various ways of organizing resources that shaped the regional diversities and dynamics of industrialization in Japan. The relationships strongly influenced the ways in which resources, access, and opportunities for creating and accumulating resources for porcelain production and distribution were organized. An analysis of the merchandising policies for porcelains demonstrates the impacts that the relationships between the political authorities and those who were engaged in the production and distribution of porcelains had on industrialization in nineteenth-century Tokugawa Japan.

Although the Second Sino-Japanese War (the “War”) ended many decades ago, hostilities between China and Japan are still raw in the memory of many Chinese people, even though most of them did not directly experience the War. In particular, the Great Bombing of Chongqing—the indiscriminate, sustained bombing of the Nationalist provisional capital by Japanese warplanes from 1938 to 1943—has been retrieved from the archives as a significant event. Subsumed under the narrative of the Great Bombing, Chongqing's Great Tunnel Disaster (the “Disaster”), following a prolonged Japanese air raid on June 5, 1941, resulted in some of Nationalist China's heaviest civilian casualties. This article discusses the Disaster in detail, suggesting that at the time, it was viewed more as a human-induced “stampede” than as a Japanese “war atrocity” when the Chinese public took to the press and condemned the Nationalist government for its inability to prevent, manage, and mitigate the Disaster's effects. Chinese civilians were attempting to renew and revise a traditional social contract of disaster, according to which the state was responsible for providing adequate relief to victims, by accusing the Nationalist government of callousness, incompetence, and negligence.

Zhang Mengshi died in late 2014 at the age of ninety-two, shortly after his autobiography was published. He was born into a life of privilege because his father Zhang Jinghui was a close confidant of the Chinese warlord Zhang Zuolin. Mengshi was a boy in Harbin in the 1930s when Russian influences dominated the city, then when his father became prime minister of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo in 1935 he lived with his family in Hsinking, the new capital. He studied in Japan in the early 1940s as war in the Pacific intensified. His father upheld the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, while Mengshi secretly worked with the Communist underground to undermine the occupation. When Soviet troops arrived in 1945 to take over from the defeated Japanese, Mengshi was also arrested and sent to Siberia, though he was willing to help the Russian Communists. In 1950 he returned to the new People's Republic of China, to work with the captured Chinese and Japanese from former Manchukuo, including his own father and former emperor Puyi, teaching them about the crimes they had committed. In this article Mengshi's fascinating autobiography is summarized and commented on.