A civilizational imaginary of Western military technology

Contents: Preface 1. China Becoming a Technological Superpower: A Narrow Window of Opportunity 2. National Reform Programmes and Human Resources Development 3. Technology Access through FDI and Technology Transfer 4. Research and Technological Mastery in the Corporate Sector 5. The Information and Communication Technologies: Example of Institute Reform 6. Rising Technological Capability 7. Space and Defence Technologies 8. Regional Innovation Systems in China 9. Shanghai: From Development to Knowledge City 10. China Regaining its Position as a Source of Learning Appendix: The 2020 Plan on Science and Technology Bibliography Index

Contents: Preface 1. China Becoming a Technological Superpower: A Narrow Window of Opportunity 2. National Reform Programmes and Human Resources Development 3. Technology Access through FDI and Technology Transfer 4. Research and Technological Mastery in the Corporate Sector 5. The Information and Communication Technologies: Example of Institute Reform 6. Rising Technological Capability 7. Space and Defence Technologies 8. Regional Innovation Systems in China 9. Shanghai: From Development to Knowledge City 10. China Regaining its Position as a Source of Learning Appendix: The 2020 Plan on Science and Technology Bibliography Index

Many Chinese began to despair over the condition of China well before the Qing Dynasty collapsed in 1911. It had been apparent since perhaps the Opium War (1839–42) that the Qing imperial army was in decline and that Qing military practice had fallen behind Western military practice. Increasing emphasis on Western military technology and techniques brought radical changes to the Qing military, and by the end of the dynasty it had formed completely Western-style armies outfitted with the latest Western equipment. Chinese soldiers, like their Western counterparts, still practiced some hand-to-hand combat skills, particularly the use of rifles with bayonets, but for many soldiers and officers, traditional Chinese martial arts had become obsolete. Rifles and artillery decided battles, not spears and swords. Of course, this dichotomy was more imagined than real. The Qing army had relied upon cannon and firearms in its wars for centuries. Western military technology had been absorbed into the Qing military as it became available over the course of the nineteenth century, and indeed even before that during the late Ming Dynasty. The break with the past in the martial arts was thus much more psychological or ideological than actual. Western armies were clearly more powerful than Qing armies, and for reasons beyond technology. Focusing on technology, however, allowed the possibility of somehow adopting a material part of Western culture while leaving Chinese or Manchu culture in place. Many, perhaps most, Chinese were convinced of the value, even superiority, of Chinese culture. Few were willing simply to abandon it and adopt Western culture. The military weakness of the Qing Dynasty, and even the subsequent Western-style Republican government’s army, as compared with Western armies, was all too clear.

Dual Discovery, Dual Dialogue :Reflections on the Global Modernization of Historical Writing Q. Edward Wang (bio) In the 19th century, when Western colonialism was in full swing, non-Westerners made tremendous efforts to accommodate and integrate Western influences. These efforts determined how and when Western cultural influences appeared in non-Western regions. Non-Western intellectuals searched for ways to appropriate Western influences without totally giving up their own traditions. Moreover, the spread of modern Western culture was usually facilitated by Western military superiority and violence, which naturally fueled both resentment and resistance. These feelings, in turn, generated a strong interest among non-Westerners in reviving and reinforcing indigenous cultures and identities. Confronted by Western power, non-Western peoples harkened back to their past and searched for useful indigenous traits. Once non Western peoples discovered the efficacy of nationalism in fighting off Western incursions, historiography and nationalism became intertwined. To be sure, nationalism is a Western product. But it became attractive worldwide exactly because it offered a useful way for people to strengthen their native traditions in the face of Western incursions. Consider the case of Japan. The professionalization of historical study occurred in Japan almost at the same time as it did in major Western countries. In 1889 Japanese historians established a national association, which published Japan's first professional historical journal, Shigaku zasshi. By comparison, the Historische Zeitshrift was first published in 1859, the Revue historique in 1876, the English Historical Review in 1886, and the American Historical Review in 1895. In 1887 Japanese historians invited Ludwig Riess (1861-1928), a disciple of Ranke, to become Tokyo University's first history professor. Riess accepted, and he played an instrumental role in professionalizing the study of history in Japan after the German model. It was no accident that the Japanese singled out Riess, a Rankean. The Japanese historians who decided to issue the invitation favored Rankean historiography over other historiographical schools in the West because they found that Ranke's emphasis on source critique corresponded squarely to their own scholarly tradition, known in East Asia as "evidential learning" (kaozheng xue). "Evidential learning" originated in 18th-century China. By the end of the 18th century it had spread to Japan, where it flourished during the first half of the 19th century, just in time to prepare Japanese historians to receive Rankean historiography, which they deemed a Western form of "evidential learning." Not only did an extant paradigm influence how Western culture was received, it also determined when the reception took place. Click for larger view View full resolution Principals and students of the Peking University, 1902. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USZ62-94915]. The case of China illustrates a different kind of cultural exchange. Repeatedly defeated by Western powers in the 19th century, and then by Japan in the Sino-Japanese War (1894-95), the Chinese launched a series of reforms, including the establishment of a modern university. At first, Chinese intellectuals were more attracted to Herbert Spencer's interpretation of Darwinism and historical progress than they were to Ranke's "scientific" method. These intellectuals felt a pressing need to persuade the rulers that change was necessary for the survival of China. To this end, they used the Confucian tradition to argue that the idea of evolution was not alien to Chinese culture; indeed, according to them, Confucius had anticipated it in his works. Thanks to this representation of Confucianism, Darwinism became a dominant trend of thought in China in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The early 20th century witnessed the end of imperial China, as well as a shift in Chinese historiography. In the newly founded Republic of China (1912-1949) more serious efforts were made to turn historical study into a profession. Peking University became its main base, though other universities sprang up elsewhere. At these institutions history became an academic subject. Many of the new history professors had received advanced degrees either in the West or in Japan. They founded research institutions, published journals, and organized professional associations devoted to the study of history. In this process, Chinese historians demonstrated a serious interest in the "scientific history" of the West. Their...

Chinese art song, a type of Chinese New Music, was a musical genre referring to the songs composed particularly in the 1920s. It is undeniable that it was a product of the real contact and fusion of Chinese and Western cultures. Imagine listening to music like Schubert or Puccini, you may suddenly realise that the language is not German or Italian, but an exotic language (Mandarin, also mixed with different Chinese dialects). Chinese art songs indeed had such characteristics. Its appearance was epoch-making. Before the 19th century, the gate of Chinese traditional culture was closed and self-sufficient, but due to the invasion of Western powers, this gate soon collapsed. Western culture also swept China along with the military trend in the early 20th century, causing earth-shaking changes in China, in which Western music was also introduced into China. Some intellectuals enlightened by modern thoughts and knowledge believed that in addition to learning western military and technology, they should also absorb their philosophy and culture, so that China could rise in all directions and catch up with Western powers. The theme of this research revolves around one of the intellectuals (composers) of this period, Huang Tzu (1904-1938) who challenged and responded to the culture shock through composing Chinese New Music. After studying in the United States in 1926, he returned to Shanghai, China. Like the intellectuals at that time, in addition to being proficient in various fields like science, he also dabbled in music. Many of Huang Tzu’s music revolved around the concept of "nationality". It refers to an approach: borrowing Western compositional techniques to highlight the values of traditional Chinese aesthetics. This research did not aim at describing the characteristics of music or literature in Chinese art songs itself. Yet, it finally allowed me to discover more about how intellectuals dealt with issues of cultural exchange between the East and the West a hundred years ago. What would be the effects if Western music elements, such as harmony, form, techniques and musical instruments were added to the Chinese traditional music language and habits? From a cultural perspective, what significance did this incur?

Greek accession to NATO in February 1952 was hailed as a great accomplishment, since NATO membership offered a shield against Soviet bloc aggression, generated hopes for additional military and financial aid and tied Greece to the west, thus providing for a new long-term orientation of the country. However, soon problems emerged: the Greeks began to doubt NATO military credibility in the Balkans, and were frustrated by the alliance’s neutrality in the infra-NATO Greek–Turkish dispute. A major break in the Greek–NATO relationship involved the Greek shock at the alliance’s inactivity during the Turkish invasions of Cyprus in summer 1974. However, despite problems, NATO membership continued to be a major manifestation of Greece’s Western identity, and a pivotal aspect of contemporary Greek foreign policy.

When Europeans first reached Asia, their guns were slightly more advanced than what was locally available. Nevertheless, European weapons were quickly adopted when their superiority was demonstrated. As more and better European weapons reached Asia, they too were adopted, and in some cases both gunners and guns were brought into the service of Asian governments. Indeed, some Asian rulers preferred to employ Europeans with their guns rather than train local forces as the cheapest and least politically costly way of increasing their military striking power. Many Europeans mistook this as a rejection of the technology itself. The outcomes of European powers pushing more aggressively into Asia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, exploiting their superior military technology, were very different in different polities. This was not due so much to the different cultures' attitudes toward technology, as to the different political environments that obtained there when European and American forces began to seek more substantial political and economic engagement, and to those foreign powers' changing designs upon their territories. Asians strongly resisted Western culture but accepted Western technology. Westerners then cast the resistance to Western culture as a rejection of technology and science, and, by extension, created the idea that the more Westernized an Asian government became, the more it was able to exploit military technology. Neither impression is correct, as a comparison of the various Asian powers in the nineteenth century shows.

Much of Western anthropology, since its origins in the 19th century, has emphasized man the hunter and has seen in males hunting animals the primary roots of human culture. This view has put a deep mark on exhibits in museums of anthropology and thereby on the public image of human nature and development. There is reason to question this view. First, humans belong to the ape family. Early hominids split from tlleir common ancestors with apes about 4 million years ago. Baboons and chimpanzees are primarily herbivores and insect eaters, who eat other animals occasionally, roughly about 5% of their diet. The human digestive tract remains that of its herbivore ancestors, and humans lack the canine teeth ofbaboons to strip meat from bones. While early hominids, like other apes, occasionally ate animals, for perhaps tlrree million years these were generally not large, but small or weak, young animals, or the scavenged bodies of animals already dead. It is interesting that this scavenging aspect of early animals have been entirely ignored in popular culture. Clearly it doesn't lend itself to the same ideology of male dominance and aggression as does that of man the hunter going up against mammotlls with spears. Only when stone tools developed could humans strip meat effectively from bones. Later, fire aided humans in the digestion of meat by allowing them to roast it. Large-scale hunting awaited the development of more sophisticated hunting weapons, roughly about half a million years ago. But for most of the last two million years of human development, humans lived in small, fairly stable, hunting-gathering communities. Although the ratio of animal food to plant food varied with the environment, the general pattern in the tropics, where humans ftrst developed and predominated until about 100,000 years ago, was one in which female plant-gathering activity accounted for about 70% of the human diet. Women were seen as owning and controlling the houses of the village, as well as the food supply they gathered and processed. Meat from male hunting was given high status, but in fact the males often returned empty-handed. A strong ethic of sharing controlled relations of all members of the village. Food was not saved or stored or regarded as the private possession of individual households. A rough equality of labor and power seems to have prevailed between men and women in most of these societies.

This article presents a small state’s perspectives on military socialization by examining military interactions at political and strategic, operational, and tactical as well as educational tiers. Transnational military socialization creates learning and socializing environments for militaries. However, the transnational military socialization process in Asia has received little scholarly attention, although its nature changed dramatically after the Cold War and 9/11. A small state often enters into asymmetric socialization with major powers. Mongolia presents an interesting case to capture these changes and impacts of transnational military interactions. The Mongolian military internalized Soviet military norms, ideas, and values during its seventy-year military socialization process. Since then, it has been attempting to disconnect from its communist past by internalizing the Western military norms, ideas, and culture even though it is isolated from the Western world. Interactions between Sino-Mongolian militaries over the past two decades have not resulted in any in-depth exchanges of ideas due to political, historical, and cultural factors. In the absence of explicit pressures from these three major powers, today the Mongolia military has consolidated a new identity, similar to a Western military. It has increased its contribution to peace support operations while attempting to disconnect its Soviet past and avoiding absorption from the growing Chinese military initiatives toward Central Asia. At the same time, Mongolia’s military socialization with Russian or American militaries often triggers uncertainty for Chinese security.

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 1039 disappointing in comparison with his earlier Supplying War, this is a good book that will be of most use to the specialist and the novice. Alex Roland Dr. Roland teaches military history and the history of technology at Duke University. He is working on a history of the evolution of military technology in Western civilization. Achse, Rad und Wagen: FiinftausendJahre Kultur- und Technikgeschichte. Edited by Wilhelm Treue. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986. Pp. 412; illustrations, notes. DM 88.00. This heavily illustrated volume bears the same name as a book published in 1965 under the auspices of the industrial concern Bergische Achsenfabrik Fr. Kotz and Sohne. This is an entirely new book, however, that combines the work of twelve scholars, one from the company’s museum, in an effort to cover the entire history of wheeled transportation from earliest times to the advent of the automobile. Part 1 consists of nine essays dealing with wheeled vehicles in the ancient Near East (Wolfram Nagel), ancient Egypt (Wolfram Decker), ancient Greece (Hajo Hayen), the prehistoric Sahara desert (Hayen), Rome (Winfried Weber), prehistoric Europe (Hayen), Central Asia (Alexander Hausler), India (Adalbert J. Gail), and early China (Magdalene von Dewall). The emphasis in the essays is quite consis­ tently on the technical details, including measurements, of wheel and vehicle construction. The technology of harnessing and the social and economic contexts of changes in vehicle design are, by comparison, only lightly touched on. Coverage of regions where physical remains are scarce or absent, such as the Sahara, therefore is rather slight. The issues raised by other scholars about the provenance, meaning, and style of the vehicles depicted in Saharan rock art do not fit well with a technologically focused discussion. Though the chapters are impeccably scholarly in tone and appara­ tus, they do not represent much new scholarship. For the European regions, Stuart Piggott’s The Earliest Wheeled Transport: From the Atlantic Coast to the Caspian Sea (Ithaca, N.Y., 1983) gives fuller discussions of specific technical matters and broader coverage in terms of topics addressed. Unlike Piggott, however, the present authors do not go into vexing and controversial questions of chronology and priority of invention. Their approach is more that of the museum curator than the archaeologist. For the ancient Near East and Egypt, similarly, scholars will prefer to consult the more extensive discussions in M. A. 1040 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Littauer and J. H. Crouwel’s Wheeled Vehicles and Ridden Animals in the Ancient Near East (Leiden, 1979). The chapters on India and China are understandably not as developed as the others since there has been much less scholarly work on these areas, but the chapter on China includes interesting materials from recently uncovered Chou Dynasty burials. Despite the comparative lack of new theories or interpretations, there is a virtue in having so many regions encompassed in a single volume. Anyone interested in getting an expert overview of the technological history of wheeled vehicles can find it all in one place, and the up-to-date bibliographies included in the notes point the way for those who want a more specialized treatment. Part 2 contains five chapters. The first, by Herbert Haupt, discusses vehicles in medieval Europe in a manner similar to that of the chapters in part 1. The next three, however, on coaches up to the end of the 17th century (Rudolf H. Wackernagel), from the beginning of the 18th century to the advent of the motor car (GeorgJ. Kugler), and on the diffusion of European vehicle designs into colonial regions, most notably North America and South Africa (Wilhelm Treue), concentrate on personal transportation, particularly the more luxu­ rious varieties. Farm vehicles, wagons for carrying goods, and military transport receive little mention. In terms of technical developments, of course, this emphasis is fully justified since springs, one of the most important inventions, were designed to increase comfort. Yet the transference of new techniques from luxury to the everyday vehicles would have been interesting to investigate. Also of interest in these chapters are several discussions of the evolution of the business of vehicle building. Illustrations from coachbuilders’ catalogs displaying the wide variety of vehicles avail...

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The article examines the content of such key concepts of international aid in the paradigm of defense capability of Ukraine as “international aid”, “international technical aid”, “military aid”, “humanitarian aid”, “charitable activity”. It was found that the system of ensuring the defense capability of the state is not limited by internal resources, but actively attracts external resources for the needs of the security and defense sphere. It is pointed out that there is no concept of “international aid” in the legislation of Ukraine, but the definition of the content of international technical aid, humanitarian aid and charitable activities. It was determined that the concept of “military aid” is also absent in national legislation, but in scientific doctrine it is considered as a type of international aid, and in conditions of armed aggression as assistance to Ukraine in ensuring the realization of its national interests. Forms of providing military aid to Ukraine by partner countries were considered. It was noted that the meaning of the concept of “military aid” is not limited to the provision of weapons and military equipment, but also includes the training and training of military personnel, the construction of infrastructure facilities, the provision of assistance in the development of battle plans, etc. It was emphasized that today military aid is provided by donor countries as international technical assistance, humanitarian aid or charity in accordance with the terms of the concluded agreement. A conclusion was drawn on the expediency of the legislative separation of military aid, as well as the development of a regulatory basis for its attraction, accounting, distribution, and use, which, taking into account the volume and importance of such aid to support Ukraine’s defense capabilities, will simplify its receipt from donor countries. Keywords: international aid, international technical aid, military aid, humanitarian aid, charitable activity.

Military technology has developed rapidly in recent years, and this development challenges existing norms. It has produced countless debates about the application of international humanitarian law (IHL) to areas of war and technology including cyber military operations, military artificial intelligence (including autonomous weapons), the use of drones, and military human enhancement. Despite these rapid progressions, the prospect of creating new treaties to specifically regulate their use by militaries and in armed conflicts is very low. This is largely due to the unequal allocation of military technology among States and the differing interests that result from this inequality. The absence of formal regulation means that State and non-State actors are increasingly embracing informal means of law-making. This is similar to other areas of IHL, such as the regulation of asymmetric conflicts, where norms are contested. In such cases, State and non-State actors employ various informal law-making techniques to advance their normative positions through treaty interpretation and the identification of customary international law.However, the discussion on military technology differs from other contemporary IHL debates. First, due to the rapid development of such technology and uncertainty about how it will be employed in practice, the interests of the various actors are less clear. Second, there are significant challenges in obtaining accurate information about new military technologies. This makes even the informal law-making path in the context of new technologies more challenging.This paper explores the dynamics of contemporary international law-making as it relates to the regulation of new military technologies. It identifies the main techniques that are used by the relevant actors and explores the common themes among the various debates over military technology, as well as the potential specific challenges in relation to certain technologies.

SEER, 93, 4, OCTOBER 2015 778 Johnston, Timothy. Being Soviet: Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life under Stalin 1939–1953. Oxford Historical Monographs. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2011. lii + 240 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £55.00. Since the 1995 publication of Stephen Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization, the concept of ‘speaking Bolshevik’ has been influential in Soviet studies. This allowed historians to demonstrate the state’s ability to subordinate people’s minds to ideology, but it also enabled scholars to reveal subjects’ agency in using, (re-)interpreting and manipulating official language to advance personal interests and making individual meanings of life under the Communist dictatorship. Inspired by the idea of ‘speaking Bolshevik’, Timothy Johnston puts at the centre of his analysis questions about how ordinary citizens interacted with ‘Official Soviet Identity’ in imagining and experiencing the outside world between 1939 and 1953. Johnston uses a wide range of primary sources from Russian central and regional archives (Murmansk and Arkhangel´sk) and oral history interviews to demonstrate how an ‘Official Soviet Identity’ was constructed through state-sponsored mass media, films, plays and music. Instead of examining the internal factors of violence, terror and suffering of Stalinist Russia, i.e., rather than focusing on the victim’s perspective, the author shows that the defining feature of Sovietness was the perception of its radical difference from Western ideas, things and people. Sovietness stood in opposition not only to Germany (as the main enemy) but, above all, to Great Britain and the United States. These countries were ‘first antagonists, then uncertain allies, and later clear enemies of the USSR’ (p. xxvii). From this fresh starting point, each chapter offers careful analyses of ‘little tactics of the habitat’ — agents’ strategies for negotiating everyday life through ‘bricolage’, ‘reappropriation’ and ‘avoidance’. By zeroing in on these tactics, Johnson masterfully sheds light on ‘grey zones’ in Soviet citizens’ everyday life (the black market, meeting friends at nightclubs, sexual relationships). These were spheres of contact, conflict and bargaining about what was and was not Soviet. These practices enabled Soviet citizens to get by and get on. He convincingly shows that the question of what could and could not be Soviet did not involve binaries like belief or disbelief, acceptance or resistance but rather, was a matter of negotiations between the individual, the system and the imagined West. The book is very well structured. The first and second chapters examine the period from 1939 to 1945 by showing the increasing militarization of pre-war society and the creation of the USSR’s image as a liberator state offering freedom, opportunity and abundance. The image of the Allies as powers who benefited from the USSR’s leading role in the war persisted throughout the period analysed. Soviet citizens’ deeply rooted mistrust of the Allies, which grew out of Russian national and imperial ambitions, contributed to this negative image. REVIEWS 779 Chapters four and five examine the question of post-war Soviet identity when the Cold War turned the former Allies and the Soviet Union into open enemies. Chapter three, the book’s most innovative part, explores interactions between Soviet citizens and foreign sailors/military experts in Arkhangel´sk and Murmansk. In these port cities the Western world became not only imagined but also lived experiences of everyday encounters. Johnston’s fascinating exploration of Soviet citizens’ everyday contacts with foreigners presents multiple strategies through which Soviet male and female citizens of different generations redefined the boundaries separating Soviet and NonSoviet through their interactions with Allied soldiers. After 1941, Hollywood movies and jazz were rehabilitated, the Soviet public welcomed new magazines (Britanskii Soiuznik and Amerika) and academic/scientific exchanges as sources of information about the West but, in the shadow zone there were exchanges of military hardware, clothing and food that were difficult to control. Being Soviet meant feeling Soviet. Throughout the book the author stresses the tension between shame and pride constantly attached to ‘Official Soviet Identity’: people were deeply ashamed of the country’s low living standards but also proud of belonging to the most peaceful and humane liberator state. This pride was expressed in narratives of military and moral greatness, especially after the siege of Stalingrad...