Bøker av Sharron Gu

This is an original interdisciplinary study of Chinese law, its language, and political institution. Evolving within a complex literary framework over thousands of years, Chinese language has lost its conceptual distinctiveness to its multilevel and overlapping meanings and connotations. Chinese law has become inflated with contrary rulings and exceptions. This mass of rules requires an extra-lingual (legal) authority to redefine boundaries and specify applications. Interdependent upon the voice of a higher authority, China has inherited a legal tradition that is inseparable from and interwoven with state politics. As a tool of emperors and modern politicians alike, Chinese law has never functioned as a detached mechanism through which social negotiation, mediation, and distribution are carried and regulated. The personal preferences of politicians have always dominated legislation, which has in turn fostered a highly unregulated and authoritarian power. This system, lacking a legal protocol to amend itself, relies upon a constant element of military intervention to initiate and secure Chinese social and political change. Both Chiang Kai-shek s and Mao Zedong s regimes took power with armed forces and maintained order with ruthless social repression and terrorism. This political monopoly of the law made modern China into a society that operates not within levels of the law but rather around the law. Two extra levels of society in China float around the law: the above law and the under (out) law. The former refers to people who have sufficient influence to redefine the meaning of law and distribute individual shares of rights as they please without referring to any constitutional, legal, or moral principles. Chinese legal administration has a historic tendency to override legislation. In China, politics is law, and politicians are the legislator, jury, and judge. Chinese under laws refer to people who are neglected or left out of the protection provided by law. In most cases, they are repressed and stripped of all civil rights because someone who is more powerful wants to acquire a larger share. Without an opportunity to make their voice heard, the only way that they can participate in social change is through armed resistance and revolution. For thousands of years, almost every new dynasty in China has emerged through some sort of revolution. As the revolutionary outlaws crowned themselves as the new above laws, the cycle was completed and once again prepared itself to repeat. Mao Zedong came from this kind of revolution. He was the only Chinese leader who had the vision to recognise that his once revolutionary syndicate had become a privileged class (above law). Although he risked everything when he launched another revolution to amend the system, he failed to pull China away from its imbedded corruptive practice. Although he completely rewrote the law and reorganised the army to stand by it, he instantly lost control of the connotations, intended meanings, and implications of his own words within a language that has been used and abused for thousands of years. This book follows and continues Gu s book, The Boundaries of Meaning and the Formation of Law, by illustrating how language shapes the formation, application, and administration of law in various cultural environments. Law and Politics in Modern China is an important book for those interested in Chinese history, culture, law, and politics. It also provides refreshing insights about the way that law continues to function after its language matures and creates contradictions and loopholes within its system of rules one of the most important issues facing Western legal administration in the immediate future.

This innovative study examines imperialism from a cultural and linguistic perspective, portraying the rise and fall of ancient Greek, Roman, medieval Islamic, modern British, Russian and American empires as a part of the natural life of world civilizations. As these cultures matured through centuries of literary accumulation and interaction with other cultures, it shows, they finally found their confidence on the world stage and transitioned from an aggressive policy towards others to a more tolerant one.

This is a multimedia history of literary Arabic that describes the evolution of Arabic poetry and prose in the context of music, ritual performance, the arts, and architecture. It is written for scholars and educated readers of Arabic and Islamic culture whose first language is not Arabic. It focuses on what is unique about Arabic compared to other major languages of the world and how the distinct characteristics of Arabic took shape at various points of its history.

Chinese, one of the oldest active languages, evolved over 5,000 years. As such, it makes for a fascinating case study in the development of language. This cultural history of Chinese demonstrates that the language grew and responded to its music and visual expression in a manner very similar to contemporary English and other western languages. Within Chinese cultural history lie the answers to numerous questions that have haunted scholars for decades: How does language relate to worldview? What would happen to law after its language loses absolute binding power? How do music, visual, and theatrical images influence literature? By presenting Chinese not as a system of signs but as the history of a community, this study shows how language has expanded the scope of Chinese imagination and offers a glimpse into the future of younger languages throughout the world.