Suchergebnisse

Legislative defection in political systems characterized by party dominance and cartelization is usually seen as damaging the members of parliament's (MPs') careers. Switching legislators does not portray an image of confidence and reliability and the MPs' re-election is unlikely. Drawing on a dataset that includes all defector MPs in post-communist Romania until 2008, this article indicates that one in five defectors gets re-elected. The quest for explanations focuses on individual and party features. Results indicate that re-election of defectors is a function of the strategic behavior (the choice of the destination party) and the legislative experience of the defector. All these items count against party and legislative activity.

Rosen reviews 'PATRIOTS' OR 'TRAITORS'?: A History of American-Educated Chinese Students by Stacey Bieler.

Canipe reviews 'Fools, Martyrs, Traitors: The Story of Martyrdom in the Western World' by Lacey Baldwin Smith.

AbstractFollowing the October Revolution, tens of thousands of White Russians sought refuge in China and became inevitably involved in the escalating Sino-Japanese War (1931–1945). The Japanese deployed measures of coercion, material incentives, and ideological indoctrination to recruit White Russians for Japan's military and political maneuvers in the China theater of WWII. With the conclusion of the war, the Chinese Nationalist government launched a legal campaign against all collaborators with Japan and labeled themhanjian, "traitors to the Han Chinese," regardless of the race and nationality of the defendants. Based on archival materials in Chinese, English, Japanese, and Russian, this article examines the context and process of the incrimination of White Russians in China's postwar trials of traitors. With no consular support and little diplomatic significance, the White Russians became the ideal foreigners for the Chinese government to exercise its newly recovered judicial sovereignty and to claim its legitimacy in administering justice related to war crimes. Dozens of White Russians were convicted of the crime ofhanjianand sentenced to prison terms of varied lengths.

In this paper we discuss the possible use of video games on current events as historical documents. The literature on current event games reveals the importance of timelines and temporariness in their nature and the literature on games about historical events and periods is mainly concerned how games represent the past. We question how timely games may be seen by future players and what they may reveal about the period in which they were produced. In this regard we did a comparative analysis of video games developed during the Gezi Park protest in 2013 and after the Coup attempt in 2016 in Turkey. We argue that these games not only individually represent their creators' perception and thoughts on these events but also cumulatively reflect the social and political conditions in which they were produced; akin to historical political cartoons and opinion pieces reflecting the zeitgeist of their time of production; thus, may be seen as historical documents.

In the spring of 2008, Chinese students worldwide staged demonstrations to "protect" the relay of the Olympic torch from protesters and to condemn Western media coverage of the violence in Tibet. Hundreds of thousands of mostly young Chinese then posted and discussed images and accounts of these events online, creating a transnational "protopublic space" that projected the imagery of fashionable and self-confident Chinese students marching through San Francisco and Sydney back onto the streets of Wuhan and Hefei, demonstrating the role of young Chinese outside China in shaping nationalist discourse inside the country. Based on ethnographic observation of demonstrations in Sydney and Canberra and on the analysis of the online discussion that surrounded the worldwide events on the Chinese Internet, this article explores the mobilization that led to them, the meanings of the demonstrations for participants, and the public personalities ("heroes" and "traitors") that emerged from them. Unlike constructivist and primordialist analyses of Chinese nationalism that explain its growth by referring to the role of the state or to historical memory, we interpret the displays of nationalism by Chinese youth across the globe not only as an emotional experience of identifying with the nation but simultaneously as a show of middle-class sophistication, creativity and, paradoxically, cosmopolitanism. (China J/GIGA)