Yi Kwangsu's The Heartless (Mujŏng, 1917) is Korea's first mature novel and its most celebrated text, on par with Natsume Soseki's Kokoro (1914) and Lu Xun's The True Story of Ah Q (1922). Its place in world literary studies, however, has often been obscured by the author's later collaboration with the colonial state. This article attempts a new, spatialized reading of the much-studied work to reconsider alterity (Japan-Korea, city-hometown) as a precondition of modernity itself. The ancient seat of the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910), Seoul in the 1910s was swiftly transforming into the minjok national capital and, simultaneously, a colonial city-within-empire. Competing identities of nation-versus-empire dominated its surfaces, veiling the processes of “coming up” (sanggyŏng 上京) to the capital from forgotten localities, as many writers associated with Seoul were actually from provinces with regional affinities. The Heartless—a paean to the enlightenment and to the Korean minjok—surprisingly reflects this dynamic, testifying to the “loss of hometown” by northwestern (Sŏbugin 西北人) writers like Yi Kwangsu, who regularly code-switched to their local dialects, as well as to the Japanese language.

Drawing on the threat-rigidity hypothesis, we examine how managerial opportunity and threat interpretations of external environments affect a technology venture's choice of external knowledge search strategies in an emerging market. Results from a sample of 141 technology ventures in China reveal that opportunity interpretation directly and positively influences both the breadth and depth of external search, whereas threat interpretation directly and negatively influences only external search depth. Furthermore, managerial ties strengthen the positive relationship between opportunity interpretation and external search breadth but weaken the positive relationship on external search depth. Managerial ties weaken the negative relationship between threat interpretation and external search breadth but strengthen the negative relationship on external search depth. Implications for both research and practice are offered.

The present paper aims to investigate the idea of “elevating the worthy” (shang xian 尚賢) as it appears in the newly found manuscript Zhou xun 周訓. This manuscript is part of the Peking University collection (Beijing daxue cang Xi-Han zhushu 北京大學藏西漢竹書), presumably copied in the first half of the first century b.c.e. In sharp contrast to most recently discovered manuscripts promulgating “elevating the worthy,” the Zhou xun introduces the meritocratic principle to support hereditary power transfer, by positing that the right to rule should be passed on to the most able son of a ruler. I argue that this position served several purposes. First, it provided a solution to the central problem of abdication discourse, namely, the conflict between the principles of “respecting worthies” (zun xian 尊賢) and “loving kin” (ai qin 愛親). Second, this interpretation of “elevating the worthy” entailed a significant extension of the number of potential contenders to the throne, challenging the system of primogeniture, the very cornerstone of political order in early China. This fundamental challenge appears to be deliberate and can be interpreted as an attempt to formulate a new paradigm for the ruling house of Zhou. The complete absence of the idea of Heaven's Mandate (tian ming 天命) from the Zhou xun certainly underscores its radical departure from Zhou conventional claims to power. However, I argue that, given the close association between the Zhou xun and the Lüshi chunqiu 呂氏春秋, it is also plausible that the former's theory was created to justify the Zhou's overthrow by the Qin 秦. In any case, the Zhou xun provides us with new insights into how the idea of “elevating the worthy” was applied to politics in early China.

Using a localized perspective, this paper explores the gap between the eligibility criteria for a Beijing hukou (household registration) and the reality of successfully acquiring one. By comparing those who are eligible to apply with those who actually succeed in gaining a hukou, it reveals that hukou practices are operated locally to serve the city's development needs. It also reveals huge gaps between migrants, eligible applicants and hukou winners. Most migrants in Beijing are not eligible to apply for a local hukou. However, among those limited applicants who can apply, those with a postgraduate education and who serve the capital's political functions are more likely than others to win a hukou, an advantage not pointed out in government documents. These “hidden” rules are most likely set intentionally by the city so that it can maintain absolute control over hukou transfers; however, at the same time, they frustrate migrants who meet the stated requirements but who are in reality still unlikely to ever acquire a Beijing hukou. These findings open up a novel perspective for exploring the people–city nexus in China during the migration process and highlight the gaps between policy and reality for those who can apply for a Beijing hukou and those who actually win one.

The following paintings depicting the Great Tokyo Air Raid of March 10, 1945 were featured in a special exhibit hosted by the Sumida Local Culture Resource Center (墨田郷土文化資料館) in 2004. The Center staff originally settled on the idea of collecting amateur and professional artwork as a unique way of contributing to the preservation of the public memory regarding the March 10 incendiary air raid. Each painting is accompanied by a short explanatory text written by the artist. As well as giving insight into the particular scene depicted in the painting, these explanations generally touch on the artist's overall air raid experience. We appreciate the permission provided by the Sumida Local Culture Resource Center to feature the paintings here. The paintings were published as part of a greater collection in 2005 as That Unforgettable Day—The Great Tokyo Air Raid Through Drawings (Japanese title: あの日を忘れない・描かれた東京大空襲). Head Editor: Kimura Toshiko. Editors: Tanaka Yoshiaki, Sueki Yoriko, Aoki Toshiro, Ogawa Shigenori, Yoshikawa Katsuyo, Takahashi Toshie, Tsuchiya Naotsugu

Excavated from the Western Han tomb M336 at Zhangjiashan 張家山, Hubei 湖北, and published in 2022, the *Ci Mamei 祠馬禖 bamboo manuscript has yet to receive much attention. This article serves as a preliminary study of the manuscript, providing an annotated translation of its contents, a description of its codicological features, an examination of the ritual it documents, and a survey of its linguistic characteristics. The *Ci Mamei manuscript is studied in close comparison with the Ma 馬 text from the Qin 秦 tomb M11 at Shuihudi 睡虎地, as well as bamboo strip fragments from the Han 漢 (202 bce–220 ce) Jianshui Jinguan 肩水金關 frontier that document a similar ritual. I argue that *Ci Mamei, like the Shuihudi Ma text, is a ritual manual recording instructions on the performance of a sacrificial ritual. I show that the main purpose of the *Ci Mamei and Ma rituals is to pray for the overall well-being of horses, not specifically for having more newborn foals. I then illustrate that rhyme changes in the *Ci Mamei text denote different phases of the sacrifice. Lastly, I discuss the generic and formulaic properties of the language in *Ci Mamei, noting the possibility that the manuscript was interred because its language was believed to possess apotropaic qualities.

The Laozi is a well-loved and oft-translated ancient text, whose popularity with interpreters and translators seems to have hardly ebbed in over two thousand years. This is attested in part by the number of bamboo and silk manuscript versions of the text unearthed in recent years from the Warring States (475–221 b.c.e.) and Western Han (221–206 b.c.e.), such that few transmitted Chinese texts have so many corresponding manuscript versions. The Laozi's popularity and relative abundance have also made the text instrumental in shaping theoretical approaches to book formation in early Chinese manuscript culture. In particular, the Laozi has been central to the study of how books were assembled out of pre-existent, stable, coherent molecules of text, or zhang 章 (chapters). Emerging from a case study of Laozi chapter 13, in which interpretive problems of the written commentarial tradition are shown to be continuous with those in manuscript culture, this article re-examines the theory of molecular coherence in the Laozi's formation, showing ultimately that the textual and rhetorical patterns by which zhang cohere internally are created by the same forces that deposit zhang in proximity to one another. Moving from the molecular to organismic level, the article also examines the use of conjoining phrases in Peking University's Laozi manuscript to demonstrate how editors, compilers, and interpreters may sacrifice coherence at one level of organization to achieve perfection at another.

The resource-based view of the firm has previously been expanded by including relational rents and rent from network and alliance participation. This paper extends the Dyer-Singh-Lavie synthesis by considering the special circumstances arising from the relationships, alliances, and networks of a mega-event, using the Beijing Olympics as a case for our analyses. The mega-event that is organized as a cartel increases the pricing power of the participants, produces relational rent, and is an ideal venue to introduce innovations. We discuss six factors that can influence the rent creation and capture from a mega-event and offer related propositions: periodicity (Proposition 1), event location (Proposition 2), governance structure (Proposition 3), media coverage (Proposition 4), network connectivity (Proposition 5), and membership rules (Proposition 6). We identify four innovation types associated with such mega-events and contend that the same factors can affect the entrepreneurial rent creation and capture within these innovation types (Proposition 7).