One of the most diverse yet accessible collections of Chinese strategies. Verstappen has unearthed sources from Lao Zi to Miyamoto Musashi in an impressive selection of historical and anecdotal evidence supporting the original Thirty-Six Strategies, one of the most influential works of East Asian philosophy. Includes illustrations and a bibliography.

The Ben cao gang mu, compiled in the second half of the sixteenth century by a team led by the physician Li Shizhen (1518Ð1593) on the basis of previously published books and contemporary knowledge, is the largest encyclopedia of natural history in a long tradition of Chinese materia medica works. Its description of almost 1,900 pharmaceutically used natural and man-made substances marks the apex of the development of premodern Chinese pharmaceutical knowledge. The Ben cao gang mu dictionary offers access to this impressive work of 1,600,000 characters. This first book in a three-volume series analyzes the meaning of 4,500 historical illness terms.

China has evolved from a nation with local and regional security interests to a major economic and political power with global interests, investments, and political commitments. It now requires a military that can project itself around the globe, albeit on a limited scale, to secure its interests. Therefore, as Larry M. Wortzel explains, the Chinese Communist Party leadership has charged the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) with new and challenging missions that require global capabilities. Advances in technology and the development of indigenous weapons platforms in China, combined with reactions to modern conflicts, have produced a military force very different from that which China has fielded in the past. Wortzel presents a clear and sobering picture of the PLA’s modernization effort as it expands into space and cyberspace, and as it integrates operations in the traditional domains of war. This book will appeal to the specialist in security and foreign policy issues in Asia as well as to the person interested in arms control, future warfare, and global military strategies. The book puts China’s military growth into historical context for readers of recent military and diplomatic history.

The Ben cao gang mu, compiled in the second half of the sixteenth century by a team led by the physician Li Shizhen (1518–1593) on the basis of previously published books and contemporary knowledge, is the largest encyclopedia of natural history in a long tradition of Chinese materia medica works. Its description of almost 1,900 pharmaceutically used natural and man-made substances marks the apex of the development of premodern Chinese pharmaceutical knowledge. The Ben cao gang mu dictionary offers access to this impressive work of 1,600,000 characters. This third book in a three-volume series offers detailed biographical data on all identifiable authors, patients, witnesses of therapies, transmitters of recipes, and further persons mentioned in the Ben cao gang mu and provides bibliographical data on all textual sources resorted to and quoted by Li Shizhen and his collaborators.

Focusing specifically on the stories of the Han Chinese (the largest ethnic group in China, numbering over a billion people), this collection presents more than 50 tales, both well known and obscure—from Monkeys Fishing the Moon and The Butterfly Lovers to Painted Skin and Dragon Princess. These are stories that will enchant listeners of all ages, while providing a glimpse into Chinese traditions and ways of thought. To further enhance cultural understanding, the tales are supplemented with historical and cultural background, notes on storytelling, crafts and games, recipes, proverbs, color photos, a map, a glossary, and more. In the past decades, the doors between China and the West have been flung open. Explosive economic growth and massive increases in travel and immigration have engendered curiosity and interest in this burgeoning nation. Yet modernization has a dark side too, threatening traditional Chinese culture, including stories and storytelling. This new gathering of stories from a variety of sources, captures the fading storytelling traditions of a vast and diverse country. Focusing specifically on the stories of the Han Chinese (the largest ethnic group in China, numbering over a billion people), the collection presents more than 50 tales, both well known and obscure—from Monkeys Fishing the Moon and The Butterfly Lovers to Dragon Princess and Painted Skin. These are stories that will enchant listeners of all ages, while providing a glimpse into Chinese traditions and ways of thought. Tales are organized into seven sections: Animal Tales; Tales of Magic, Love and Romance; Myths, Legends and Immortals; Moral Stories; How Things Came to Be; and Proverbial Tales. To further enhance cultural understanding, the stories are supplemented with historical and cultural background, notes on storytelling and other folk traditions, recipes, proverbs, color photos, a map, a glossary, and more. All grade levels.

In the first study of its kind about the role played by intimate memory in the mourning literature of late imperial China, Martin W. Huang focuses on the question of how men mourned and wrote about women to whom they were closely related. Drawing upon memoirs, epitaphs, biographies, litanies, and elegiac poems, Huang explores issues such as how intimacy shaped the ways in which bereaved male authors conceived of womanhood and how such conceptualizations were inevitably also acts of self-reflection about themselves as men. Their memorial writings reveal complicated self-images as husbands, brothers, sons, and educated Confucian males, while their representations of women are much more complex and diverse than the representations we find in more public genres such as Confucian female exemplar biographies.

Hedging is an essential part of everyday communication. It is a discourse strategy which is used to reduce commitment to the force or truth of an utterance to achieve an appropriate pragmatic effect. In recent years hedges have therefore attracted increased attention in Pragmatics and Applied Linguistics, with studies approaching the concept of hedging from various perspectives, such as speech act - and politeness theory, genre-specific investigations, interactional pragmatics, and studies of vague language. The present volume provides an up-to-date overview of current research on the topic by bringing together studies from a variety of fields. The contributions span a range of different languages, investigate the use of hedges in different communicative settings and text types, and consider all levels of linguistic analysis from prosody to morphology, syntax and semantics. What unites the different studies in this volume is a corpus-based approach, in which various theoretical concepts and categories are applied to, and tested against, actual language data. This allows for patterns of use to be uncovered which have previously gone unnoticed and provides valuable insights for the adjustment and fine-tuning of existing categories. The usage-based approach of the investigations therefore offers new theoretical and descriptive perspectives on the context-dependent nature and multifunctionality of hedges.

This is a full-text English translation of Jin Gui Yao Lue, a classic book of traditional Chinese medicine. It is the oldest clinical book dedicated to internal, external, gynecological and obstetrical diseases. It is also the first medical book on differential diagnosis of diseases and symptoms, along with treatment and prescriptions.This book was originally written by Zhang Zhongjing (Zhang Ji) (150-219 CE), an eminent Chinese physician in the Eastern Han dynasty. The book consists of 25 chapters. The first chapter serves as an introduction. Chapters 2-22 discuss the diagnosis and treatment of sixty diseases, involving internal medicine, external medicine, and gynecology & obstetrics. Chapter 23 discusses emergency treatments. Chapters 24 and 25 discuss food contraindications (fowls, beasts, fruits, vegetables and grains) and treatment. The text can serve as a reference for education, research and clinical practice.

When two people from different cultures meet, they both act in accordance with what is self-evident, that is to say natural, to them, The only problem is that the what is self-evident to some may not coincide with what is self-evident to others. Also, as people have a tendency to consider their way as going without saying or as universal, when others do not act in the same way as they do and there is conflict, they get easily annoyed. As a French businessman in China once cried out « The Chinese ask me if I eat snake. I say to them: ‘I do not eat snake, but swallow insults every day’ ». In fact, in intercultural contacts, when people seem strange to others, often, it is perhaps not that they are strange, but because others judge their behaviour with their own cultural criteria. Every culture has its own behavioural logic. However, the logic of some does not correspond to that of others. Individuals often have the same objectives, but to reach them, they take different cultural paths.

The authors review Chinese values and characteristics using Western strategic thinking to understand the new perspective. This book will enable the global practitioner, Western or Eastern, to develop this new world-view and to avoid only taking leads from global standardization, especially of regulatory and legal environments.