This insightful book explores evolving perceptions of China, contrasting dominant Western narratives with Chinese perspectives. Highlighting the complexities of these discourses, the book critiques three prevailing views of China’s rise: the return of geopolitics, challenges to liberal order and prospects for collaborative governance.Bridging China Studies, International Relations and Global Political Economy, the book examines the politics of knowledge production to present a nuan...

Tim Summers provides an engaging introduction to video game music aimed at gamers, music enthusiasts, budding composers, music professionals, and anyone with an interest in the topic. Pixel Soundtracks explore a wide variety of topics, including:the history of game musicsound technology and chip musicinteractive and generative music compositionhow game music tells stories, creates worlds & characters, and evokes emotions classical and pop music in gamesbattle and boss music...

Video game music is a significant site of queerness where normative demands are questioned, suspended or loosened. Games resist hegemonic musical logics, challenge musical value systems and use music to complicate essentialist notions of identity. This Element proposes three areas of queerness, each representing different relationships between 'queer design' and 'queer engagement', ranging fromunintentionally resistive to explicit engagement with identity. First, this Element examines musi...

Video game music has been permeating popular culture for over forty years. Now, reaching billions of listeners, game music encompasses a diverse spectrum of musical materials and practices. This book provides a comprehensive, up-to-date survey of video game music by a diverse group of scholars and industry professionals. The chapters and summaries consolidate existing knowledge and present tools for readers to engage with the music in new ways. Many popular games are analysed, including Su...

Understanding Video Game Music develops a musicology of video game music by providing methods and concepts for understanding music in this medium. From the practicalities of investigating the video game as a musical source to the critical perspectives on game music - using examples including Final Fantasy VII, Monkey Island 2, SSX Tricky and Silent Hill - these explorations not only illuminate aspects of game music, but also provide conceptual ideas valuable for future analysis. Music is n...

The rise of China has been shaped and driven by its engagement with the global economy during a period of intensified globalization, yet China is a continent-sized economy and society with substantial diversity across its different regions. This means that its engagement with the global economy cannot just be understood at the national level, but requires analysis of the differences in participation in the global economy across China’s regions.This book responds to this challenge b...

The Chinese Government's five-year strategy for social and economic development to 2015 includes the aim of making the southwestern province of Yunnan a bridgehead for 'opening the country' to southeast Asia and south Asia. Yunnan - A Chinese Bridgehead to Asia traces the dynamic process which has led to this policy goal, a process through which Yunnan is being repositioned from a southwestern periphery of the People's Republic of China to a 'bridgehead' between China and its regional neig...

Some 22 years after its creation, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is still held in high critical regard as one of the finest examples of the video game medium. The same is true of the game’s music, whose superlative reception continues to be evident, whether in the context of the game or in orchestral concerts and recordings of the game’s music.Given music’s well-established significance for the video game form, it is no coincidence that music is placed at the forefro...

Winner of the Lionel Gelber PrizeNational Book Critics Circle Award FinalistAn Economist Best Book of the Year | A Financial Times Book of the Year | A Wall Street Journal Book of the Year | A Washington Post Book of the Year | A Bloomberg News Book of the Year | An Esquire China Book of the Year | A Gates Notes Top Read of the YearPerhaps no one in the twentieth century ...

China has become the powerhouse of the world economy and home to 1 in 5 of the world's population, yet we know almost nothing of the people who lead it. How does one become the leader of the world's newest superpower? And who holds the real power in the Chinese system? In The New Emperors, the noted China expert Kerry Brown journeys deep into the heart of the secretive Communist Party. China's system might have its roots in peasant rebellion but it is now firmly under the control of a powe...

Can techniques traditionally thought to be outside the scope of literature, including word processing, databasing, identity ciphering, and intensive programming, inspire the reinvention of writing? The Internet and the digital environment present writers with new challenges and opportunities to reconceive creativity, authorship, and their relationship to language. Confronted with an unprecedented amount of texts and language, writers have the opportunity to move beyond the creation of new ...

Rising superpower China duly anointed a new generation of leaders led by Xi Jinping at the Communist Party's 18th National Congress held in November 2012. While the conclave itself passed off with smoothly choreographed efficiency, the months leading up to this once-a-decade transition were anything but orderly. Intense factional wrangling behind the scenes was accompanied by scandals very much in public view. In the most spectacular furore the political aspirations of Communist aristocrat...