Stephen Maire
Stephen Maire is a Director of garment manufacturing and trading company. He has lived in East Asia for more than twenty years.
China's Last Empire by William Rowe
STEPHEN MAIRE | 09 February 2010The burden of history sits heavily and uneasily on the Qing. It is not just that the Qing was the last dynasty or the the Qing marks China's encounter with the West, but more importantly, both the Nationalist and Communist Chinese regimes that emerged from the revolution that overthrew the Qing seek to explain and justify their own existence as a response to Qing failure. CHINA'S LAST EMPIREis the concluding volume to the Belknap... [ more ]
China's Cosmopolitan Empire by Mark Lewis
STEPHEN MAIRE | 07 January 2010MARK LEWIS's CHINA'S COSMOPOLITAN EMPIRE continues Belknap Press's multi-volume history of Imperial China with a history of Tang China. The Tang dynasty was longest-lived of the dynasties, lasting nearly 300 years from 618 until 907 CE. The length of the dynasty combined with the dramatically changed political environment after a mid-dynasty rebellion and the rich cultural heritage of the Tang makes crafting a history of this dynasty a challenge... [ more ]
We Shall Suffer There by Tony Banham
STEPHEN MAIRE | 14 December 2009In 1981 a design by Maya Lin was selected for the U.S. Vietnam War memorial. The design called for a "V" shaped cut into the ground faced with black marble on which were listed in chronological order all U.S. military personnel who had died in Vietnam. There was to be no statuary or poetry glorifying combat or grieving at the loss of so many lives. The memorial was a simple and stark. The very simplicity and starkness was a... [ more ]
Strait Talk: United States-Taiwan Relations and the Crisis with China by Nancy Bernkopf Tucker
STEPHEN MAIRE | 05 October 2009Relations between the U.S. and the Republic of China (ROC) have never been easy. Whether as allies and charter members of the United Nations in World War II or as economic and political partners following the Nationalist retreat to Taiwan, the two nations have never been entirely on the same page. In Strait Talk, NANCY BERNKOPF TUCKER delivers a diplomatic history of this relationship from the Nationalist arrival on Taiwan to the... [ more ]
Military Culture in Imperial China by Nicola di Cosmo
STEPHEN MAIRE | 14 September 2009NICOLA DI COSMO's MILITARY CULTURE IN IMPERIAL CHINA joins a relatively short list of works on Chinese military history, a scarcity of works reflected in the still-regular citation of John King Fairbanks' and Frank Kierman Jr's 1974 collection Chinese Ways of Warfare. Emphasizing the point, Di Cosmo is able to cite the more significant works in two... [ more ]
China Between Empires: The Northern and Southern Dynasties by Mark Lewis
STEPHEN MAIRE | 08 July 2009In 220 CE, China's Han Dynasty collapsed and China fractured into feuding states. Until the Sui dynasty reunited the country nearly 400 years later, China was divided as states fought for control and dominance. These four centuries of disunity and chaos after more than 400 years of unity under the Qin and Han dynasties contradicts the common understanding of an eternally unified China with dynasties coming and going as they... [ more ]
Butcher & Bolt by David Loyn
STEPHEN MAIRE | 26 May 2009DAVID LOYN was introduced to Afghanistan as a journalist. Reporting on, and clearly intrigued by the West's attempt to govern Afghanistan in the aftermath of 9/11, Loyn set out to learn more of earlier foreign encounters with Afghanistan. The result is BUTCHER & BOLT. The title refers to the British policy of punitive military forays against Afghan villages in the late 1880s; Loyn's history is decidedly more comprehensive than the... [ more ]
China Witness: Voices from a Silent Generation by Xinran
STEPHEN MAIRE | 24 January 2009Well-known as a record-keeper of contemporary Chinese society, XINRAN continues her journalistic work in CHINA WITNESS: VOICES FROM A SILENT GENERATION, this time focusing on the experiences of the generation born in the 1920's and 1930's. As the generation that lived through the Sino-Japanese War as children and saw the PRC founded in their early twenties, this generation that did much to build the PRC. Although China Witness is burdened by XINRAN's own... [ more ]
