This book explores the characteristics of China's outward foreign investment, its motivation, its sector distribution, and its geographical distribution in order to illustrate the current pattern of 'merchant-state dualism' in China's overseas foreign direct investment. Merchant-state dualism is a hybrid relationship between the state and society that maintains state control over merchants, while giving them some autonomy. By investigating the interactions between business and government elites to determine Chinese outward foreign investment, and by exploring the reasons for selecting certain foreign investments in light of internal political and economic concerns and the external effect of investing in politically sensitive countries, the book highlights the political underpinnings and calculations of China's foreign investment. It thus sheds light on current merchant-state dualism by concluding that merchant-state dualism is the most suitable model for explaining contemporary Chinese government-business relations.

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.

As a nineteenth-century commercial development, the alleyway house was a hybrid of the traditional Chinese courtyard house and the Western terraced one. Unique to Shanghai, the alleyway house was a space where the blurring of the boundaries of public and private life created a vibrant social community. In recent years however, the city’s rapid redevelopment has meant that the alleyway house is being destroyed, and this book seeks to understand it in terms of the lifestyle it engendered for those who called it home, whilst also looking to the future of the alleyway house. Based on groundwork research, this book examines the Shanghai alleyway house in light of the complex history of the city, especially during the colonial era. It also explores the history of urban form (and governance) in China in order to question how the Eastern and Western traditions combined in Shanghai to produce a unique and dynamic housing typology. Construction techniques and different alleyway house sub-genres are also examined, as is the way of life they engendered, including some of the side-effects of alleyway house life, such as the literature it inspired, both foreign and local, as well as the portrayal of life in the laneways as seen in films set in the city. The book ends by posing the question: what next for the alleyway house? Does it even have a future, and if so, what lies ahead for this rapidly vanishing typology? This interdisciplinary book will be welcomed by students and scholars of Chinese studies, architecture and urban development, as well as history and literature.

This book assesses the plight of the European Jewish refugees who fled to Japanese-occupied China during the Second World War. It examines the Nationalist government's policy towards the Jewish refugee issue and the most thorough and subtle analysis of Japanese diplomacy concerning this matter. The story of the wartime "Shanghai Jews" is not merely a side-bar to the history of modern China or modern Japan. It is a story that illuminates how the "Jewish issue" complicated the relationships among China, Japan, Germany, and the United States before and during World War Two. Both the Chinese Nationalist government and the Japanese occupation authorities thought very carefully about the Shanghai Jews and how they could be used to win international financial and political support in their war against one another. Thus, the Holocaust had complicated repercussions that extended far beyond Europe. The diaspora of Jews to East Asia in the era of the Second World War is a rich and complex story that deserves our attention as well. Firmly grounded in archival sources from the People's Republic of China, Taiwan, Japan, the United States, Britain, and Israel, this book is comparative and transnational in scope and makes an important contribution to the international history of the period.