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Since 2008, a negative image of China has prevailed in Europe, leading to the country's image crisis in the region. The state has implemented several policies to improve such a perception. This paper aims to examine the major tools of China's attempts at influence in Europe, targeting the media and public opinion. Applying the concept of soft power and public diplomacy, we analyse the tools China uses to modify and shape public opinion about itself in Europe. The research framework comprises secondary resources on China's foreign policy, soft power, public diplomacy and media strategy in Europe. We distinguish four primary influence tools: China buys European media outlets to prevent negative information about itself; it pays for inserts in leading European newspapers; it signs cooperation agreements with media organisations and holds media forums; and it limits access to its market to affect media, film and academic content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tibetan medicines are key material objects for medical treatment and have become part of a global trend of 'pharmaceuticalisation', playing increasingly important political and socio-economic roles in an 'alternative modernity'. As I argue in this paper, they also have become key 'sites of contestation' between different epistemic values and styles of practice related to efficacy and safety that are reproduced in and through specific formulation regimes. Based on my multisited ethnography of production, prescription, and use practices of Tibetan medicines in China and Europe, this paper conceptualises three distinct formulation regimes, offering a heuristic model for transnational comparison—a classical, an industrialised or reformulated, and a polyherbal regime. The first two are the major orientations while the polyherbal is a conjoint hybrid with either the classical or the industrialised formulation regime. Globalised national drug safety regulations legalise and confer legitimacy to industrialised Tibetan formulas that follow biomedically defined efficacy, safety, and disease categories, while classical formulas produced by private physicians or small-scale cottage pharmacies are increasingly marginalised as producing 'unsafe' and at times illegal medicines, and need to find new ways for adapting and circulating their formulas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The editor introduces the journal which contains several essays issued from conferences at the Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic, from September 5-6, 2014 and at the École française d'Extrême-Orient in Paris, France, on April 11, 2014 and focusing on topics including ancient Chinese philosophical masters and printing Chinese dictionaries in Europe.

This article describes how the Civil Service examination system in Vietnam responded to the crisis French military aggression posed to that nation in the late 19th Century, and how it adapted to the French protectorate in the early 20th Century. It presents evidence that contests the notion that the examination declined in relevance along with "Chinese influence" over Vietnam, and that adoption of European-style modernity led to its elimination. Instead, this essay proposes that officials adapted the examination to fit with the circumstances of the time. Furthermore, the changes within the examination were not a realignment in emphasis from "China" to "Europe" but rather a shift from envisaging a universalistic world to imagining a particularistic, nationalist one. In support of this central argument, it will consider specifically the way that examination answers represented France. The examinations of 1862, 1877, and 1904 will receive particular attention as case studies demonstrating this shift. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stemming from an examination of the zinc industry in early modern China, this article centers on a detailed survey of coal, the primary source of energy for processing zinc. On the basis of Qing archival documents, this article investigates the previously unknown spatial relationship of zinc ore deposits, coal mines, and zinc smelters; provides quantitative evidence of coal use by estimating the annual consumption of coal in processing zinc; offers a new perspective on the general use of coal in Qing China; and compares the coal-fuel efficiency problem in early European and Chinese zinc production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]