Monarchy has been a universal form of government in earlier centuries, though it involves the structural problem of all decision-making stemming from one individual. Qiu Jun did not challenge the legitimacy of monarchy, but he constructed advice that would encourage his monarch to be alert to change, cautious about his decisons, and attentive to the advice of his best ministers. This chapter also considers the critique of monarchy in Europe at this time, where the Jesuits presented Ming China as an ideal monarchy, and the growing challenge to the divine right of kings, which would eventually lead to the delegitimization of this form of government.

China today is one of the most governmentalized societies in the world. State penetration into everyday life may not be as thorough as some critics insist, yet the idea that the state should be present in society persuades most Chinese to submit to state oversight in exchange for the security the state claims to provide. China is not alone in elevating the state above the citizen, but it does draw on a long tradition of state policy and political philosophy known as "Confucian statecraft" to support this orientation, for which Qiu Jun’s Supplement provides an almost complete account. This was the China that the Jesuits encountered in the seventeenth century and communicated back to Europeans at a time when the divine right of kings was in question. Qiu Jun’s method of handling monarchy was to caution the emperor on bad policy and warn him of the catastrophic effects that bad decisions could produce, and that the emperor’s main tasks were to detect latent signs of coming disasters and consult his advisors.

This chapter deals with banks as creators and stores of money. We first offer an overview of the economic theories developed in the 1960s and 1970s, where the role of banks depended on their function of transmitting monetary policy of the central bank to the rest of the economic system. We then discuss more modern interpretations that explain the role of banks based on their ability to resolve the informational asymmetry between investors (borrowers) and savers (lenders). Financial innovation raises the question of whether banks may disappear, replaced by financial markets and digital credit management techniques, including artificial intelligence, that minimize the need for human intervention. The experience of financial crises has given new life to reform proposals where banks would be split into a depositary institution providing payment services and an investment arm providing long-term credit and financing itself at long maturities. A related proposal, also aiming at reducing the risk of crises, would subject depository institutions to a 100 percent reserve constraint (the so-called Chicago proposal). At the end of the chapter, reasons are given as to why these proposals should be discarded because they would neither reduce the risk of crises nor give rise to a more efficient intermediation system.

A 63-year-old woman was referred because of decreased strength of her right leg manifesting with buckling of the knee for the past five years. Sometimes this led to falls, which made her feel insecure while walking. She experienced some aching in her right heel and in her right knee after long walks. She was able to walk for two hours. She and her husband loved to walk in the mountains, and during those hikes she used a cane. The previous history is relevant because at age 5 years she had suffered from poliomyelitis anterior acuta, which had affected both legs. She had a partial recovery in the sense that she regained normal strength of her left leg and was left with residual weakness of her right leg. She underwent surgery at age 10 years (ankle arthrodesis on the right and epiphysiodesis of the left leg).

A 53-year-old man developed a left-sided foot drop and a painful sensation on the ventral side of the foot and outer part of the lower leg. Two weeks later, the same symptoms also developed on the right side. In addition, he noticed progressive numbness of his lower legs. Three weeks later, he noticed weakness of his right hand, and was unable to spread his fingers. He had no other symptoms, and his medical history was not informative. He did not recall a tick bite or erythema migrans, or any pulmonary abnormality, and had not visited tropical countries. He does not sit with crossed legs.

This chapter focuses on quantitative EEG processing, also known as EEG trend analysis. These types of algorithms process raw EEG data in a quantitative way, and display the data in more compressed forms that may be easier for the amateur EEG reader to interpret. Specific QEEG algorithms described in this chapter include amplitude integrated EEG, FFT spectrogram, rhythmicity spectrogram, asymmetry indices, and seizure detectors. Specific roles for QEEG covered include seizure detection and detection of focal cerebral ischemia.

Chapter 4 explores cross-linguistic variation in the language of space along with the potential implications of this variation for the spatial conceptualization of time.

Given China’s position in Pacific Asia, defining its regional centrality might seem a simple task. But centralities grander than merely geographical have been alleged and contested. Currently some maintain that China is the central kingdom because of its power. But it was conquered by the Mongols and the Manchus, and its present centrality is due more to its economic mass and connectivity than to its military. Others claim that hierarchy is natural to Asian culture, and China is the apex. But neighbors were often cynical about China’s moral stature, and China’s soft power is now at a low ebb. I argue that China was the center of regional attention in the premodern era, and that it has returned to center stage since 2008. The three basic reasons for China’s original centrality and its return were situational: presence, population, and production. The salience of all three disappeared with Western imperialism’s global presence, the devaluation of mere demography, and industrial production. Traditional and current centrality created asymmetric relationships between China and its neighbors, but the regional situations differ fundamentally.

Pacific Asia, comprised of Northeast Asia, Greater China, and Southeast Asia, has surpassed the combined production of the United States and Europe, and its intraregional economic cohesiveness exceeds that of either the EU or North America. Pacific Asia has emerged gradually and without major conflict, but it should be taken seriously as a region. China is primarily a regional power, but in a prosperous region deeply interconnected to the rest of the world. The United States tends to view China as a lone global competitor, but its global presence and strength rest on its centrality to Pacific Asia. Understanding China in its region is the first task of this book, followed by the challenge of rethinking the global order in terms of a multinodal matrix rather than a bipolar competition of great powers. This requires background on the evolution of the Pacific Asian configuration, including China’s premodern centrality as well as the splintering of the region by European colonialism. Rethinking is aided by commentaries from four of Asia’s leading thinkers about international relationships.

While Pacific Asia had China as a “solid center,” a place in the middle where most of the people and production was, the West had a “liquid center,” the Mediterranean. Wealth could be pursued and neighbors conquered in different places in the West, leading to competitive, distinct empires rather than to dynastic cycles.