This two-volume set analyzes dispute resolution and social risk in modern China, examining both the landscape of disputes and risks in modern China and the various resolution mechanisms for different disputes.

The first volume examines different types of disputes that occur in both rural and urban China. Using theoretical frameworks, the book describes different disputes and their characteristics, and analyzes their causes and effects. It emphasizes the importance of co-governance in dispute resolution and the development of risk control mechanisms for harmonious social construction. Based on detailed case studies, the second volume analyzes specific dispute scenarios, including civil disputes, land-related conflicts, rural transportation accidents, and interethnic social contradictions. It emphasizes the importance of using social resources beyond the legal approach and the need to establish safety valves in multi-ethnic areas to maintain social harmony.

This set will appeal to scholars, students, and policymakers in the fields of law, sociology, and Chinese studies, especially those interested in understanding the intersection of law and society, as well as social change and governance in modern China.

Botanical Imagination explores the complicated legacy and enduring lure of plant life in modern Japanese literature and media. Using critical plant studies, Jon L. Pitt examines an unlikely group of writers and filmmakers in modern Japan, finding in their works a desire to "become botanical" in both content and form. For nearly one hundred years, a botanical imagination grew in response to moments of crisis in Japan's modern history.

Pitt shows how artists were inspired to seek out botanical knowledge in order to construct new forms of subjectivity and attempt to resist certain forms of state violence. As he follows plants through the tangled histories of imperialism and state control, Pitt also uncovers the ways plants were used in the same violence that drove artists to turn to the botanical as a model of resistance in the first place. Botanical Imagination calls on us to rethink plants as significant but ambivalent actors and to turn to the botanical realm as a site of potentiality.

Misery beneath the Miracle in East Asia challenges prevailing views of the East Asian economic miracle. Existing scholarship has overlooked the severity, persistence, and harmful consequences of the social-welfare crises affecting the region. Arvid J. Lukauskas and Yumiko Shimabukuro fill this gap and put a major asterisk on East Asia's economic record.

Combining big-picture analysis, abundant data, a dynamic interdisciplinary framework, and powerful human stories, they shed light on the social ills that governments have failed to address adequately, including low wages, child abuse, elderly poverty, and substandard housing. One of the major forces behind the multidimensional welfare crises is the region's productivist welfare strategy, which prioritizes economic growth while abandoning a robust social safety net, leaving the most vulnerable segments of society largely unprotected.

Misery beneath the Miracle in East Asia brings the region into debates over the dangers of seeking growth at all costs that are currently embroiling the United States and other advanced industrialized countries.

This book is the second of a two-volume set that presents a contemporary analysis of Chinese digital platforms through an intercultural and interdisciplinary lens, highlighting the complex nature of the online ecosystem.

The book provides an overview of the complex forces shaping the Chinese cyber-landscape and their global digital implications, drawing on cross-cultural insights and spanning a range of academic disciplines. The intercultural section explores the cross-cultural potential of Chinese social media, addressing intriguing questions such as why and how international influencers maintain a presence on Chinese social media platforms, examining their motivations and communication strategies. The interdisciplinary section studies the intersections of Chinese digital platforms with sociological studies, linguistic analysis and artificial intelligence.

This volume is a valuable resource for academics and students in media and communication studies, as well as social media researchers, China studies enthusiasts, industry professionals and anyone seeking a deeper understanding of Chinese social media dynamics.

Written by Indian experts and strategic thinkers, this book comprehensively analyses the many themes which have come to characterise the Chinese Dream in the "third era" and also examines the narrative of success as well as risks and challenges facing China in various fields. The contributors of the book maintain that the focus on domestic and foreign policy issues emerging from the three last Party Congresses provides valuable insights in terms of analysing China in general, and in understanding the changes, transitions, trends and policy choices under Xi Jinping in particular.

Part I of this book consists of six chapters dealing with foreign policy, multilateralism and security issues in the 'new era'. Part II of the book comprises of five chapters and discusses the various facets of domestic politics, including the policies and ideology of the CPC, economic reforms, China's policy in its minority regions and the media. Part III of the book focuses on economic and developmental aspects, including the Chinese economic dream, global supply chain issues, environment, energy and social construction.

Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Bhutan)

Ancient Salt Roads of China is the most comprehensive book to date on the transportation routes of the ancient Chinese salt industry and offers complete coverage of extant research on the spread of the salt industry culture. It reconstructs the distribution of the salt industry and salt economy in nine salt districts and four regions (north, east, west and south) in ancient China, and analyzes the distribution of their respective salt transportation routes, covering the geographical scope of China's 18 provinces and four municipalities directly under the Central Government. Working from this basis, it then comprehensively applies research methods from various disciplines such as architecture, history, and sociology to explore how regional culture penetrates through salt as a medium, the relationship between the outside and the inside of salt communication, and the scope of salt transportation in connection with cultural boundaries. The book offers a wealth of novel perspectives, innovative methods, and sound conclusions.

Worm-Time challenges conventional narratives of the Cold War and its end, presenting an alternative cultural history based on evolving South Korean aesthetics about enduring national division. From novels of dissent during the authoritarian era to films and webtoons in the new millennium, We Jung Yi's transmedia analyses unearth people's experiences of "wormification"-traumatic survival, deferred justice, and warped capitalist growth in the wake of the Korean War.

Whether embodied as refugees, leftists, or broken families, Yi's wormified protagonists transcend their positions as displaced victims of polarized politics and unequal development. Through metamorphoses into border riders who fly over or crawl through the world's dividing lines, they reclaim postcolonial memories buried in the pursuit of modernization under US hegemony and cultivate a desire for social transformation. Connecting colonial legacies, Cold War ideologies, and neoliberal economics, Worm-Time dares us to rethink the post-WWII consensus on freedom, peace, and prosperity.

Starving ghosts, anguished farmers, and grieving mothers. Floating heads, gaunt bodies, and masses of bodily fluids. Such are the visceral sensations, exaggerated affects, and suffering subjects that characterized leftist Korean cultural production in the 1920s and 1930s. In popular fiction, print cartoons, reportage, and other emergent forms of mass culture, scenes detailing the spectacular bodily harms endured by figures like migrant workers, tenant farmers, and everyday families proliferated. Yet at the time such representations were criticized as excessively grotesque and insufficiently political by leftist intellectuals, and they have subsequently been overlooked by scholars in favor of socialist realism and its dynamic proletarian heroes.

The Sensational Proletarian, by contrast, focuses on these textual and visual representations to tell the story of how new affects and everyday experiences introduced by imperial capitalism and colonial modernity were mediated through the lower-class body. Kimberly Chung traces the emergence of "the sensational proletarian" as a central figure of colonial Korean print culture and reads its varied manifestations as emblematic of Korean efforts not only to grapple with modernity, imperialism, and capitalism, but to do so using the new political ideology and imaginary of Marxism. This book brings to light the centrality of sensational cultures in the development of class politics in Korea, an integral relationship that continues throughout modern and contemporary Korean cultural history.

Lex Lu argues in Appearance Politics that crafting an appealing and powerful outward image has long been an essential political instrument in China. Its traces may be found in historical records, imperial portraits, physiognomic prognostications, photographs, posters, statues, and digital images. Employing rare archival materials from Beijing, Shanghai, and Nanjing, Lu tells the story of these political maneuverings. We learn the ways in which political actors and their agents designed their images, and we observe the shifting standards of male beauty that guided their decisions.

Appearance Politics examines five case studies: the usurpation of Ming Prince Zhu Di; the rise of Manchu masculinity and its mixed standards of Han Chinese and Manchu beauty at the Yongzheng court; the use of modern photography and Western male beauty standards at the turn of the twentieth century; the making of the Republican founding father Sun Yat-sen; and the creation of visual templates of Mao Zedong. Lu's rich empirical study counters systematic stereotypical descriptions of Chinese male leadership embedded in Western media and scholarship.

This book provides an ethical analysis of the ethical issues that arise in the design, nature and use of AIs as they are currently used in the delivery and planning of healthcare by hands-on healthcare professionals, institutional administrators and social policy makers. It suggests that while these issues overlap, they have distinct aspects in the respective domains. Among other things, it distinguishing between AIs as expert systems as they are currently constituted and AIs as based in quantum computers or as constituted of bio-printed material, indicates how this is evolving and outlines the ethically relevant issues that would then arise.

Border of Water and Ice explores the significance of the Yalu River as a strategic border between Korea and Manchuria (Northeast China) during a period of Japanese imperial expansion into the region. The Yalu's seasonal patterns of freezing, thawing, and flooding shaped colonial efforts to control who and what could cross the border. Joseph A. Seeley shows how the unpredictable movements of water, ice, timber-cutters, anti-Japanese guerrillas, smugglers, and other borderland actors also spilled outside the bounds set by Japanese colonizers, even as imperial border-making reinforced Japan's wider political and economic power.

Drawing on archival sources in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and English, Seeley tells the story of the river and the imperial border haphazardly imposed on its surface from 1905 to 1945 to show how rivers and other nonhuman actors play an active role in border creation and maintenance. Emphasizing the tenuous, environmentally contingent nature of imperial border governance, Border of Water and Ice argues for the importance of understanding history across the different seasons.

Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) is a promising approach to understanding our complex world and addressing contemporary social issues. But what is it? In this book, Mario I. Juarez-Garcia, straightforwardly explains to beginners what PPE is and why it's so useful. The book uses a unified PPE approach for undergraduate students that differs from a simple combination of moral philosophy, political science, and economics so that the reader can appreciate PPE's distinct and unique virtues. It focuses on two institutions that have been fundamental in making the world a better place: governments and markets. By the end, the reader can see why finding the right answer to many unprecedented questions is so difficult in a morally diverse society. But the take-away message for students is that it is the diversity of our liberal, Open Societies that has made them prosperous and well worth the frustrations of living in a complex, dynamic and uncertain world. Each chapter begins with short lists of "What You Need to Remember" and ends with "Testing the Reading" questions, helping guide the student reader throughout the book.