Thought reform campaigns aimed at the psychological transformation of captives have long been tools to enhance national security and political legitimacy in East Asia. Fusing Soviet concepts of human perfectibility and Confucian ideals of transformation through education, sophisticated systems have evolved to convert political opponents. Whether labelled as tenkō in Japan, ‘self-renovation’ in Nationalist China, or ‘new learning’ in the People’s Republic of China, these programmes shared the fundamental goal of pressuring individuals to renounce previous beliefs and adopt state-sanctioned ideologies. This article examines how Japanese war crimes prisoners, political dissidents, and former Chinese Nationalist officers experienced these campaigns. Despite differences in implementation, each regime used confession, group study, and psychological coercion. This historical perspective is particularly relevant today as China’s leadership continues to weaponise historical narratives – including the ‘correct’ understandings of WWII history – with implications for contemporary tensions between China and Taiwan.

The Manchurian Candidate myth that Americans could be psychologically manipulated and turned into secret agents of a foreign power emerged in the early Cold War. The belief combined fears that Soviet/Chinese mind manipulators were so adept that they could transform honorable American soldiers into turncoats. However, while disquiet about the efficacy of communist brainwashing remained palpable in the aftermath of World War II, the result of China's communist treatment of prisoners of war did not create, as was greatly feared, actual Manchurian candidates capable of misleading their native publics once repatriated. If brainwashing in the American understanding of the term did not occur, what was the actual outcome and what sort of processes were used on Asians who were not part of the communist masses? We need to unravel the PRC's take on the processes of “thought reform” to understand why it kept returning to a policy designed to “re-educate” prisoners of war, often doubly labeled as war criminals. These policies not only reveal how the CCP aimed to render justice beyond the conclusion of its war with Japan but also demonstrate how this practice then grew into a later catalyst for unification plans in PRC-ROC relations during the 1970s.

In this paper, we develop three different subjects. We study and prove alternative versions of Hrushovski’s ‘stabilizer theorem’, we generalize part of the basic theory of definably amenable NIP groups to $\text{NTP}_{2}$ theories, and finally, we use all this machinery to study groups with f-generic types definable in bounded pseudo real closed fields.

This article examines how management-labor relations and labor legislation have evolved in China since Deng Xiaoping's “Open Door” reforms were introduced in 1979 and how they have changed over the two decades since then. We reconsider the role of Chinese trade unions, enterprises and the state agencies involved, as they move from an employment system that was once called the “iron rice bowl” to a new one based on market forces. This change raises serious dilemmas and issues: are there contradictions between preserving workers' rights and at the same time, enhancing productivity? Does such a transition constitute the onset of “collective bargaining” and a labor-market in the Western sense? How are such shifts likely to be affected by China's entry into the WTO in late 2001? These and other related questions are analysed in the article.