Zhang Mengshi died in late 2014 at the age of ninety-two, shortly after his autobiography was published. He was born into a life of privilege because his father Zhang Jinghui was a close confidant of the Chinese warlord Zhang Zuolin. Mengshi was a boy in Harbin in the 1930s when Russian influences dominated the city, then when his father became prime minister of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo in 1935 he lived with his family in Hsinking, the new capital. He studied in Japan in the early 1940s as war in the Pacific intensified. His father upheld the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, while Mengshi secretly worked with the Communist underground to undermine the occupation. When Soviet troops arrived in 1945 to take over from the defeated Japanese, Mengshi was also arrested and sent to Siberia, though he was willing to help the Russian Communists. In 1950 he returned to the new People's Republic of China, to work with the captured Chinese and Japanese from former Manchukuo, including his own father and former emperor Puyi, teaching them about the crimes they had committed. In this article Mengshi's fascinating autobiography is summarized and commented on.

The rise of China is a major feature of global politics at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and one that raises the question of how a rising China and global politics will adapt to each other. This study argues that historical cases are also useful in addressing this question. Four cases are compared: two during the reign of Emperor Xianfeng and another two under the rule of Emperor Guangxu. Emperor Xianfeng's view of China was that it possessed a unique culture that should be separated from alien forces, which he intuitively conceived as different, whereas Emperor Guangxu accepted exchanges with the West as a civilization and was willing to learn from them as a cultural resource. Despite this difference in their political perspectives, both emperors similarly faced constraints to their power in implementing their policies. Two cases are selected for each emperor to demonstrate how they acted differently from a cultural orientation of estrangement and exchange on one hand as well as a position of strength and weakness on the other. This comparative study provides insights into how China in the twenty-first century adapts to its expanding influence.

During the Exclusion Crisis (1678–83), political opinion polarized around the issue of who, or indeed what, should succeed Charles II. In addition to the labels “Whigs” and “Tories,” the rapid polarization of politics after 1681 resulted in the adoption of blue and red ribbons distinguishing the two movements. This article focuses on the Whigs’ blue ribbon, arguing that the device created the sense of an “imagined consensus” within the group's varied support base. The Whigs’ enemies used memories of Britain's troubled past in order to claim that ribbon wearing replicated the behavior of the Covenanter and Parliamentarian movements of the 1630s to 1650s. The history of ribbon wearing in England and Scotland since the 1630s suggests the Whigs were conscious of the blue ribbon's significance. This consciousness reflected an identification with the Covenanter and Parliamentarian movements that survived the Restoration. Evident in contemporary writings and speech, it has been overlooked by scholars of Restoration memory and remembering.