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Publications | Department of Asian Studies

Publications By Years

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Publications

2012
The Everlasting Empire: The Political Culture of Ancient China and Its Imperial Legacy
Pines, Yuri . 2012. The Everlasting Empire: The Political Culture of Ancient China and Its Imperial Legacy. Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press.Abstract
Established in 221 BCE, the Chinese empire lasted for 2,132 years before being replaced by the Republic of China in 1912. During its two millennia, the empire endured internal wars, foreign incursions, alien occupations, and devastating rebellions — yet fundamental institutional, sociopolitical, and cultural features of the empire remained intact. The Everlasting Empire traces the roots of the Chinese empire’s exceptional longevity and
unparalleled political durability, and shows how lessons from the imperial past are relevant for China today.

Yuri Pines demonstrates that the empire survived and adjusted to a variety of domestic and external challenges through a peculiar combination of rigid ideological premises and their flexible implementation. The empire’s major political actors and neighbors shared its fundamental ideological principles, such as unity under a single monarch — hence, even the empire’s strongest domestic and foreign foes adopted the system of imperial rule. Yet
details of this rule were constantly negotiated and adjusted. Pines shows how deep tensions between political actors including the emperor, the literati, local elites, and rebellious commoners actually enabled the empire’s basic institutional framework to remain critically vital and adaptable to ever-changing sociopolitical circumstances. As contemporary China moves toward a new period of prosperity and power in the twenty- first century, Pines argues that the legacy of the empire may become an increasingly
important force in shaping the nation’s future trajectory.
More than Real
Shulman, David . 2012. More than Real. Harvard University Press.
Wartime Shanghai and the Jewish Refugees from Central Europe, Survival, Co-Existence, and Identity in a Multi-Ethnic City
Eber, Irene . 2012. Wartime Shanghai and the Jewish Refugees from Central Europe, Survival, Co-Existence, and Identity in a Multi-Ethnic City. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. . Publisher's VersionAbstract

The study discusses the history of the Jewish refugees within the Shanghai setting and its relationship to the two established Jewish communities, the Sephardi and Russian Jews. Attention is also focused on the cultural life of the refugees who used both German and Yiddish, and on their attempts to cope under Japanese occupation after the outbreak of the Pacific War. Differences of identity existed between Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews, religious and secular, aside from linguistic and cultural differences. The study aims to understand the exile condition of the refugees and their amazing efforts to create a semblance of cultural life in a strange new world.