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This paper discusses several toponyms in Chinese sources, which may possibly be identified with Armenia. First, Aman country, which can be found in the "History of the Later Han" (compiled 3rd–5th centuries) and in the "Account of the Wei Dynasty" (compiled between 239 and 265), is discussed, and it is suggested that there are reasons for an identification, though doubts remain. Armenia was well known by the Mongols and the "Korean Worldmap", which originates in Chinese geographical scholarship during the Mongol period and depicts possibly even Greater and Lesser Armenia. Another source of that period that mentions Armenia is "Muslim Prescriptions" (Huihui yaofang), which names Armenian materia medica known in China. Finally, two other Chinese geographical texts of the 16th and early 18th century that deal with Armenia and the Caucasus region are discussed. This paper shows that Armenia was described in Chinese texts since at least the Mongol period, and that China had a profound knowledge of the geographical situation in Western Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the question of proselytism as an active practice of shaping other people's identities. Specifically, it looks at the identity discourse promoted by ethnic Chinese evangelicals and compares it to that of Jehovah's Witnesses. Both Christian churches proselytise among contemporary transnational migrants from the People's Republic of China (PRC) in Europe, each making use of a sophisticated organisation adapted to the transnational practices of these migrants. Yet while evangelicals promote a transnational ethnic identity quite compatible with the secular discourse of the global Chinese migrant, Jehovah's Witnesses promote an anti-secular, non-ethnic cosmopolitanism. As a result, global Chinese evangelical ties more easily become part of global migratory and business networks. The paper is based on fieldwork among Chinese evangelical organisations and Jehovah's Witnesses in Italy, Hungary, Russia, and the United Kingdom, supplemented with interviews in the United States (the headquarters of many Chinese evangelical organisations) and a survey of printed and online resources used in proselytising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The papers in this special issue are the products of a conference, 'History and China's Foreign Relations: The Achievements and Contradictions of American Scholarship, ' held at the University of Southern California in February 2008. All of us, professors, policy advisors and policy-makers, think it would be helpful if there was more informed discussion among the general public of the challenges of China's rise in the world and our responses to it, but we all acknowledge that the American public sphere is a big mess, fragmented by the apparent riches of the Internet, dumbed down to the vanishing point in the major media. Can we as scholars make some beginnings in drawing on China's long and complex history of relations with other peoples to find generalizations and patterns that help to illuminate the present for the policy elite and for the concerned public? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I began my graduate studies at Harvard in September 1958. In the summer and fall of 1959, I started groping for ways to think about China in the seventeenth century, discovered that there had been some very interesting European eyewitnesses of the Ming-Qing wars, and wrote my first seminar paper for John King Fairbank on the first Dutch embassy, 1655.1657. The rest, shall we say, is history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fifteenth century witnessed Ming China expanding its interactions with areas to the south—areas which we today refer to as Southeast Asia. This involved overland political expansion, the gradual incorporation of Tai polities, as well as their economic exploitation. The twenty-year incorporation of the Dai Viêt policy was also part of this process. In the maritime realm, following the early fifteenth-century sending of massive armadas in an attempt to achieve a pax Ming in the region, the Ming court made efforts to ban maritime commerce by non-state players. This paper examines the effects that these various Ming policies had on Southeast Asia in the political, economic, technological, and cultural spheres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes modern China's dilemma of how to deal with the legacy of its imperial past as the starting point for a discussion of the drawn-out re-creation of China in the twentieth century. The particular focus is on the important role of non-Han ethnic minorities in this process. It is pointed out that the non-recognition and forced assimilation of all such minorities, in favour of a unified citizenship on an imagined European, American or Japanese model, was actually considered as a serious alternative and favoured by many Chinese nation-builders in the wake of the overthrow of the last imperial dynasty in 1911. The article then proceeds to a discussion of why, on the contrary, ethnic minorities should instead have been formally identified and in some cases even actively organised as official minorities, recognised and incorporated into the state structure, as happened after 1949. Based on the formal and symbolic qualities of the constitution of these minorities, it is argued that new China is also a new formulation of the imperial Chinese model, which resurrects the corollary idea of civilisation as a transformative force that requires a primitive, backward periphery as its object. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]