The Tang dynasty is often called China’s “golden age,” a period of commercial, religious, and cultural connections from Korea and Japan to the Persian Gulf, and a time of unsurpassed literary creativity. Mark Lewis captures a dynamic era in which the empire reached its greatest geographical extent under Chinese rule, painting and ceramic arts flourished, women played a major role both as rulers and in the economy, and China produced its finest lyric poets in Wang Wei, Li Bo, and Du Fu.

The Chinese engaged in extensive trade on sea and land. Merchants from Inner Asia settled in the capital, while Chinese entrepreneurs set off for the wider world, the beginning of a global diaspora. The emergence of an economically and culturally dominant south that was controlled from a northern capital set a pattern for the rest of Chinese imperial history. Poems celebrated the glories of the capital, meditated on individual loneliness in its midst, and described heroic young men and beautiful women who filled city streets and bars.

Despite the romantic aura attached to the Tang, it was not a time of unending peace. In 756, General An Lushan led a revolt that shook the country to its core, weakening the government to such a degree that by the early tenth century, regional warlordism gripped many areas, heralding the decline of the Great Tang.

When Deng Xiaoping launched China on the path to economic reform in the late 1970s, he vowed to build “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” More than three decades later, China’s efforts to modernize have yielded something very different from the working people’s paradise Deng envisioned: an incipient kleptocracy, characterized by endemic corruption, soaring income inequality, and growing social tensions. China’s Crony Capitalism traces the origins of China’s present-day troubles to the series of incomplete reforms from the post-Tiananmen era that decentralized the control of public property without clarifying its ownership.

Beginning in the 1990s, changes in the control and ownership rights of state-owned assets allowed well-connected government officials and businessmen to amass huge fortunes through the systematic looting of state-owned property—in particular land, natural resources, and assets in state-run enterprises. Mustering compelling evidence from over two hundred corruption cases involving government and law enforcement officials, private businessmen, and organized crime members, Minxin Pei shows how collusion among elites has spawned an illicit market for power inside the party-state, in which bribes and official appointments are surreptitiously but routinely traded. This system of crony capitalism has created a legacy of criminality and entrenched privilege that will make any movement toward democracy difficult and disorderly.

Rejecting conventional platitudes about the resilience of Chinese Communist Party rule, Pei gathers unambiguous evidence that beneath China’s facade of ever-expanding prosperity and power lies a Leninist state in an advanced stage of decay.

The Chinese Maritime Customs began publishing China's foreign trade statistics in the early 1860s. Over time, its publications accumulated into an impressive collection. By arranging the relevant data of more than 80 years in a systematic form, this Handbook has removed a major stumbling block confronting research in this area. It contains all important statistical series in the Customs publications, including about 100 in commodities, 20 in countries, 10 in ports, and over 80 in shipping. It also introduces an adjusted imports and exports series which is more consistent than the Customs own data.

In addition to providing a few hundred well arranged relevant statistical series, this Handbook traces the development and changes in concept and procedure in the Customs statistics.

The problem of melding diverse ethnic groups into a single political entity is as old as human history. Marx's predictions to the contrary, modern socialist states have not escaped the tension of nationality: contentment or rebellion, pluralism or assimilation. June Teufel Dreyer, in what will be the basic study in its field, delineates China's determination to deal intelligently with its minorities.

The “forty millions” (Mongols, Tibetans, Koreans, Manchus, and some fifty other groups) are only 6 percent of China's total population, but the national government pays them special attention. First of all, these groups occupy almost two thirds of China's land area, in strategic frontier positions. Second, they occupy terrain rich in unworked minerals, undeveloped forests, and prolific supplies of domestic animals. The People's Republic attaches considerable importance to obtaining loyalty and maintaining political jurisdiction.

Dreyer examines the steps taken to achieve integration. In the process she also considers how the Communist Party's minority policy differs from that of previous Chinese governments and the Soviet Union; who the executors of this policy have been; what mechanisms have been used to carry it out; how minorities have reacted to the communist system; and how policy toward minorities differs from policy toward the Han majority. This deeply researched book is informed by considerations that transcend the Chinese setting. Many nations share the problem of race relations, and one nation's effort can lead to another nation's solution.

China is today regarded as a major player in world politics, with growing expectations for it to do more to address global challenges. Yet relatively little is known about how it sees itself as a great power and understands its obligations to the world.

In China’s Global Identity, Hoo Tiang Boon embarks on the first sustained study of China’s great power identity. Focus is drawn to China’s positioning of itself as a responsible power and the underestimated role played by the United States in shaping this face. In 1995 President Bill Clinton notably called for China to become a responsible great power, one that integrates itself into existing international institutions and becomes a leader in solving global problems. Chinese leaders were at that time already debating their future course and obligations to the world. Hoo examines this ongoing internal debate through Chinese sources and reveals the underestimated role that the United States has in this dialogue. Unraveling the big power politics, history, events, and ideas behind the emergence and evolution of China’s great power identity, the book provides fresh insights into the real-world issues of how China might use its power as it grows. The question of China’s role as a responsible power has real-world implications for its diplomacy and trajectory, as well as the responses of states adjusting to these shifts. The book offers a new lens for scholars, policy professionals, diplomats, and students in the fields of international relations and Asian affairs to make sense of China’s rise and its impact on America and global order.

China is fast emerging as a powerful player on the world stage. This book takes a closer look at the country's stance on a range of global issues, arguing that its multipolar diplomacy offers a concrete strategy to constrain the US pursuit of unipolar primacy.

Many people assume that China will follow an imperialistic strategy and therefore be in direct conflict with the American empire in a quest for world domination. Jenny Clegg shows that China is in fact taking a multilateral approach, offering real assistance to developing countries and helping to build the institutions required to run a multipolar world. Without glossing over China's own internal difficulties, the book argues that its international consensus-building strategy could lead to a more peaceful and equitable world.

This book offers a refreshing perspective on China that will be of great value to those interested in the big political questions of how to tackle war and imperialism, globalisation and development as well as to undergraduate students of politics, economics and international relations.

A Foreign Affairs Book of the Year
A Spectator Book of the Year

“Insightful…a deft, textured work of intellectual history.”
—Foreign Affairs

“A timely insight into how memories and ideas about the second world war play a hugely important role in conceptualizations about the past and the present in contemporary China.”
—Peter Frankopan, The Spectator

For most of its history, China frowned on public discussion of the war against Japan. But as the country has grown more powerful, a wide-ranging reassessment of the war years has been central to new confidence abroad and mounting nationalism at home.

Encouraged by reforms under Deng Xiaoping, Chinese scholars began to examine the long-taboo Guomindang war effort, and to investigate collaboration with the Japanese and China’s role in the post-war global order. Today museums, television shows, magazines, and social media present the war as a founding myth for an ascendant China that emerges as victor rather than victim. One narrative positions Beijing as creator and protector of the international order—a virtuous system that many in China now believe to be under threat from the United States. China’s radical reassessment of its own past is a new founding myth for a nation that sees itself as destined to shape the world.

“A detailed and fascinating account of how the Chinese leadership’s strategy has evolved across eras…At its most interesting when probing Beijing’s motives for undertaking such an ambitious retooling of its past.”
—Wall Street Journal

“The range of evidence that Mitter marshals is impressive. The argument he makes about war, memory, and the international order is…original.”
—The Economist

Today’s intellectuals in China inherit a mixed tradition in terms of their relationship to the state. Some follow the Confucian literati watchdog role of criticizing abuses of political power. Marxist intellectuals judge the state’s practices on the basis of Communist ideals. Others prefer the May Fourth spirit, dedicated to the principles of free scholarly and artistic expression. The Chinese government, for its part, has undulated in its treatment of intellectuals, applying restraints when free expression threatened to get “out of control,” relaxing controls when state policies required the cooperation, good will, and expertise of intellectuals.

In this stimulating work, twelve China scholars examine that troubled and changing relationship. They focus primarily on the post-Mao years when bitter memories of the Cultural Revolution and China’s renewed quest for modernization have at times allowed intellectuals increased leeway in expression and more influence in policy-making. Specialists examine the situation with respect to economists, lawyers, scientists and technocrats, writers, and humanist scholars in the climate of Deng Xiaoping’s policies, and speculate about future developments. This book will be a valuable source of information for anyone interested in the changing scene in contemporary China and in its relations with the outside world.

In a brisk revisionist history, William Rowe challenges the standard narrative of Qing China as a decadent, inward-looking state that failed to keep pace with the modern West.

The Great Qing was the second major Chinese empire ruled by foreigners. Three strong Manchu emperors worked diligently to secure an alliance with the conquered Ming gentry, though many of their social edicts—especially the requirement that ethnic Han men wear queues—were fiercely resisted. As advocates of a “universal” empire, Qing rulers also achieved an enormous expansion of the Chinese realm over the course of three centuries, including the conquest and incorporation of Turkic and Tibetan peoples in the west, vast migration into the southwest, and the colonization of Taiwan.

Despite this geographic range and the accompanying social and economic complexity, the Qing ideal of “small government” worked well when outside threats were minimal. But the nineteenth-century Opium Wars forced China to become a player in a predatory international contest involving Western powers, while the devastating uprisings of the Taiping and Boxer rebellions signaled an urgent need for internal reform. Comprehensive state-mandated changes during the early twentieth century were not enough to hold back the nationalist tide of 1911, but they provided a new foundation for the Republican and Communist states that would follow.

This original, thought-provoking history of China’s last empire is a must-read for understanding the challenges facing China today.

Dazzled by the model of Japan’s Western-style constitutional government, Chinese officials and elite activists made plans to establish locally elected councils. By October 1911, government agencies had reported the establishment of about 5,000 councils.

Throughout the period, data on self-government reforms collected from localities were compiled in provincial capitals, then collated, summarized, and archived in Beijing. Simultaneously, directives were being sent from the capital to the provinces. From this wealth of previously unexamined material, Roger R. Thompson draws a portrait-in-motion of the reforms. He demonstrates the energy and significance of the late-Qing local-self-government movement, while making a compelling case that it was separate from the well-studied phenomenon of provincial assemblies and constitutionalism in general.

As the world is drawn together with increasing force, our long-standing isolation from—and baffling ignorance of—China is ever more perilous. This book offers a powerful analysis of China and the transformations it has undertaken since 1989.

Wang Hui is unique in China’s intellectual world for his ability to synthesize an insider’s knowledge of economics, politics, civilization, and Western critical theory. A participant in the Tiananmen Square movement, he is also the editor of the most important intellectual journal in contemporary China. He has a grasp and vision that go beyond contemporary debates to allow him to connect the events of 1989 with a long view of Chinese history. Wang Hui argues that the features of contemporary China are elements of the new global order as a whole in which considerations of economic growth and development have trumped every other concern, particularly those of democracy and social justice. At its heart this book represents an impassioned plea for economic and social justice and an indictment of the corruption caused by the explosion of “market extremism.”

As Wang Hui observes, terms like “free” and “unregulated” are largely ideological constructs masking the intervention of highly manipulative, coercive governmental actions on behalf of economic policies that favor a particular scheme of capitalist acquisition—something that must be distinguished from truly free markets. He sees new openings toward social, political, and economic democracy in China as the only agencies by which the unstable conditions thus engendered can be remedied.

In February 1967, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, the American Society of International Law organized a study panel of legal scholars, social scientists, lawyers, and government officials to consider problems relating to “China and International Order.” The panel was founded in the belief that the turmoil in China would not endure and that the People's Republic might soon wish to participate fully in the world community. To prepare for this day, the panel commissioned and reviewed a number of studies of China's interpretation and application of international law.

The ten essays in this volume—written by twelve scholars including Jerome Alan Cohen, who has also written a substantial introduction—are the fruit of this effort. Four of the essays deal with basic problems relating to Peking's international conduct: recognition and the establishment of diplomatic relations, the regulation of foreign diplomats serving in China, manipulation of the concept of “unequal treaties,” and the PRC's conditions for participation in international organizations. The other six essays focus on legal problems that have arisen in China's relations with a given country or international organization.

The present confrontation of Communist China and the United States, on which the future of peace in Asia hinges, is merely the latest phase in a continuing historical process--the remaking of China's ancient society under the stimulus of Western contact. How does it happen that a century of foreign trade and missionary evangelism, of modern education and the training of Chinese students in Western ways, has now resulted in a seeming rejection of the West? What has been the real nature of "China's response to the West" during the past century of our contact?

This volume gives the first inside account, on so broad a scale, of how China's leaders reacted to the invasion of Western arms and goods, persons and ideas, during the three generations from the Opium War to the rise of the Kuomintang. In 28 chapters, with translations of 65 key documents, the authors trace the stages by which the scholar-officials of the Middle Kingdom were brought to recognize successively the need for Western arms to defend their country, Western technology for making arms, modern science to support technology, its application in modern industry to strengthen the nation, and all the attendant new ideas which led them eventually into great movements for institutional reform, political revolution, and ideological reconstruction.

From the famous Commissioner un's first study of Western geography during his anti-opium crusade, through the efforts of Li Hungchang and others at "self-strengthening" by industrialization, down to the critical thought of Dr. Hu Shih and the eclecticism of Sun Yat-sen in the early 20th century, the writings of China's leaders ring the changes on a central theme how to remake their heritage and create a modern nation capable of meeting the West on equal terms. The provincial viceroys, the Reformers of 1898, the Boxers in 1900, the old Empress Dowager, and the eager students studying abroad, each in their own way, all grapple with this absorbing problem. The varied Chinese responses to the West in the formative century here analyzed give us a new insight into the springs of social action among one-fifth of mankind.

The companion volume, for the research specialist, provides Notes and Sources, Bibliography, and a Glossary of Chinese names and terms, essential bases for further exploration of this new field.

The present confrontation of Communist China and the United States, on which the future of peace in Asia hinges, is merely the latest phase in a continuing historical process--the remaking of China's ancient society under the stimulus of Western contact. How does it happen that a century of foreign trade and missionary evangelism, of modern education and the training of Chinese students in Western ways, has now resulted in a seeming rejection of the West? What has been the real nature of "China's response to the West" during the past century of our contact?

This volume gives the first inside account, on so broad a scale, of how China's leaders reacted to the invasion of Western arms and goods, persons and ideas, during the three generations from the Opium War to the rise of the Kuomintang. In 28 chapters, with translations of 65 key documents, the authors trace the stages by which the scholar-officials of the Middle Kingdom were brought to recognize successively the need for Western arms to defend their country, Western technology for making arms, modern science to support technology, its application in modern industry to strengthen the nation, and all the attendant new ideas which led them eventually into great movements for institutional reform, political revolution, and ideological reconstruction.

From the famous Commissioner un's first study of Western geography during his anti-opium crusade, through the efforts of Li Hungchang and others at "self-strengthening" by industrialization, down to the critical thought of Dr. Hu Shih and the eclecticism of Sun Yat-sen in the early 20th century, the writings of China's leaders ring the changes on a central theme how to remake their heritage and create a modern nation capable of meeting the West on equal terms. The provincial viceroys, the Reformers of 1898, the Boxers in 1900, the old Empress Dowager, and the eager students studying abroad, each in their own way, all grapple with this absorbing problem. The varied Chinese responses to the West in the formative century here analyzed give us a new insight into the springs of social action among one-fifth of mankind.

The companion volume, for the research specialist, provides Notes and Sources, Bibliography, and a Glossary of Chinese names and terms, essential bases for further exploration of this new field.

During China’s Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao Zedong’s "rustication program" resettled 17 million urban youths, known as "sent downs," to the countryside for manual labor and socialist reeducation. This book, the most comprehensive study of the program to be published in either English or Chinese to date, examines the mechanisms and dynamics of state craft in China, from the rustication program’s inception in 1968 to its official termination in 1980 and actual completion in the 1990s.

Rustication, in the ideology of Mao's peasant-based revolution, formed a critical component of the Cultural Revolution's larger attack on bureaucrats, capitalists, the intelligentsia, and "degenerative" urban life. This book assesses the program’s origins, development, organization, implementation, performance, and public administrative consequences. It was the defining experience for many Chinese born between 1949 and 1962, and many of China's contemporary leaders went through the rustication program.

The author explains the lasting impact of the rustication program on China's contemporary administrative culture, for example, showing how and why bureaucracy persisted and even grew stronger during the wrenching chaos of the Cultural Revolution. She also focuses on the special difficulties female sent-downs faced in terms of work, pressures to marry local peasants, and sexual harassment, predation, and violence. The author’s parents were both sent downs, and she was able to interview over fifty former sent downs from around the country, something never previously accomplished.

China's Sent-Down Generation demonstrates the rustication program’s profound long-term consequences for China's bureaucracy, for the spread of corruption, and for the families traumatized by this authoritarian social experiment. The book will appeal to academics, graduate and undergraduate students in public administration and China studies programs, and individuals who are interested in China’s Cultural Revolution era.

The development of modern China’s most important export commodity, silk, is traced from the opening of the treaty ports to the 1930s. This study examines the silk industry, one of China’s most advanced traditional economic enterprises, as it moved into large-scale trade with the West. And it especially considers whether traditional economic organizations and practices encouraged or inhibited the expansion of the industry and its technological modernization.

The silk industry is presented as a microcosm of China’s encounter with the modern world market, focusing on such topics as the role of the state, the relationship between treaty ports and rural producers, the domestic market, and the financing and organization of the modern sector. Such important issues as the “sprouts of capitalism” argument and Japan’s assumption of first position in the modern world silk market are authoritatively and convincingly illuminated.

A critical look at how China’s growing strategic arsenal could impact a rapidly changing world order

China’s strategic capabilities and doctrine have historically differed from the United States’ and Russia’s. China has continued to modernize and expand its arsenal despite its policy of no first use, while the United States and Russia have decreased deployed weapons stocks.

This volume brings together an international group of distinguished scholars to provide a fresh assessment of China's strategic military capabilities, doctrines, and political perceptions in light of rapidly advancing technologies, an expanding and modernizing nuclear arsenal, and an increased great-power competition with the United States.

Analyzing China's strategic arsenal is critical for a deeper understanding of China’s relations with both its neighbors and the world. Without a doubt, China’s arsenal is growing in size and sophistication, but key uncertainties also lie ahead. Will China’s new capabilities and confidence lead it to be more assertive and take more risks? Will China’s nuclear traditions change as the strategic balance improves? Will China’s approach to military competition be guided by a notion of strategic stability or not? Will there be a strategic arms race with the United States? China's Strategic Arsenal provides a current understanding of these issues as we strive for a stable strategic future with China.

The rise of China as a great power is one of the most important developments in the twenty-first century. But despite dramatic economic progress, China’s prospects remain uncertain. In a book sure to provoke debate, Minxin Pei examines the sustainability of the Chinese Communist Party’s reform strategy—pursuing pro-market economic policies under one-party rule.

Pei casts doubt on three central explanations for why China’s strategy works: sustained economic development will lead to political liberalization and democratization; gradualist economic transition is a strategy superior to the “shock therapy” prescribed for the former Soviet Union; and a neo-authoritarian developmental state is essential to economic take-off. Pei argues that because the Communist Party must retain significant economic control to ensure its political survival, gradualism will ultimately fail.

The lack of democratic reforms in China has led to pervasive corruption and a breakdown in political accountability. What has emerged is a decentralized predatory state in which local party bosses have effectively privatized the state’s authority. Collusive corruption is widespread and governance is deteriorating. Instead of evolving toward a full market economy, China is trapped in partial economic and political reforms.

Combining powerful insights with empirical research, China’s Trapped Transition offers a provocative assessment of China’s future as a great power.

When Japan invaded China in the summer of 1937, many Chinese journalists greeted the news with euphoria. For years, the Chinese press had urged Chiang Kai-shek to resist Tokyo’s aggressive overtures. This was the war they wanted, convinced that their countrymen would triumph.

Parks Coble recaptures the experiences of China’s war correspondents during the Sino–Japanese War of 1937–1945. He delves into the wartime writing of reporters connected with the National Salvation Movement—journalists such as Fan Changjiang, Jin Zhonghua, and Zou Taofen—who believed their mission was to inspire the masses through patriotic reporting. As the Japanese army moved from one stunning victory to the next, forcing Chiang’s government to retreat to the interior, newspaper reports often masked the extent of China’s defeats. Atrocities such as the Rape of Nanjing were played down in the press for fear of undercutting national morale.

By 1941, as political cohesion in China melted away, Chiang cracked down on leftist intellectuals, including journalists, many of whom fled to the Communist-held areas of the north. When the People’s Republic was established in 1949, some of these journalists were elevated to prominent positions. But in a bitter twist, all mention of their wartime writings disappeared. Mao Zedong emphasized the heroism of his own Communist Revolution, not the war effort led by his archrival Chiang. Denounced as enemies during the Cultural Revolution, once-prominent wartime journalists, including Fan, committed suicide. Only with the revival of Chinese nationalism in the reform era has their legacy been resurrected.

Sixteen thousand staff were involved in running the project, which encountered massive bureaucratic obstacles as well as cultural differences, politicking for study designs and funding, the crisis of Tiananmen Square, and testy debates over research ethics. Nevertheless, the researchers persevered in a collaboration that lasted more than three decades and led to landmark findings on the role of folic acid in preventing spina bifida. Fortifying cereal grain products with folic acid became routine in the United States and a growing number of nations around the world: that intervention was named one of the ten great public health achievements of the last decade.

The writings of immigrants from China and their descendants in the United States reflect the changes and continuity in the Chinese American experience. Xiao-huang Yin combines literary and historical scholarship to trace the origins and development of this extensive, neglected body of literature. 

Chinese American Literature since the 1850s covers representative works from the 1850s to the present. Selections include journalism and autobiography by nineteenth-century Chinese authors; writings on the walls of Angel Island, the main Asian immigrant arrival point on the West Coast; writings of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century "cultivated Chinese," students and scholars who came to America to advance their educations; important writing by immigrants such as Chen Ruoxi, Yu Lihua, and Zhang Xiguo; and the works of more recent authors like Sui Sin Far, Jade Snow Wong, Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Amy Tan. 

An essential introduction and guide to the field, Chinese American Literature since the 1850s enlarges the available body of literature and provides new insights into the Chinese American immigrant experience and the writing inspired by it.

Chinese–American relations are often viewed through the prism of power rivalry and civilization clash. But China and America’s shared history is much more than a catalog of conflicts. Using culture rather than politics or economics as a reference point, Xu Guoqi highlights significant yet neglected cultural exchanges in which China and America have contributed to each other’s national development, building the foundation of what Zhou Enlai called a relationship of “equality and mutual benefit.”

Xu begins with the story of Anson Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln’s ambassador to China, and the 120 Chinese students he played a crucial role in bringing to America, inaugurating a program of Chinese international study that continues today. Such educational crosscurrents moved both ways, as is evident in Xu’s profile of the remarkable Ge Kunhua, the Chinese poet who helped spearhead Chinese language teaching in Boston in the 1870s. Xu examines the contributions of two American scholars to Chinese political and educational reform in the twentieth century: the law professor Frank Goodnow, who took part in making the Yuan Shikai government’s constitution; and the philosopher John Dewey, who helped promote Chinese modernization as a visiting scholar at Peking University and elsewhere. Xu also shows that it was Americans who first introduced to China the modern Olympic movement, and that China has used sports ever since to showcase its rise as a global power. These surprising shared traditions between two nations, Xu argues, provide the best roadmap for the future of Sino–American relations.

Chinese Animation: Multiplicities in Motion is the first edited volume that explores the multiple histories, geographies, industries, technologies, media, and transmedialities of Chinese animation, from early animated special effects to socialist classics, from computer-generated-imagery (CGI) blockbusters to edgy independent films, and from stop-motion to virtual reality.

Its fifteen chapters, grouped under the five themes of junctures, gender, identities, digitality, and practices, span a century of animation since the 1920s across mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and the diasporic world. Derived from the 2021 Inaugural Conference of the Association for Chinese Animation Studies (ACAS), this volume as a whole defines Chinese animation studies as a new field of research emerging from the peripheries of modern Chinese literature and film studies on the one hand, and from the margins of Western and Japanese animation studies on the other. Incorporating diverse academic approaches and perspectives, this groundbreaking book is an indispensable guide for a rapidly growing community of scholars, students, animators, fans, and general readers interested in Chinese and world animation.

Ellis Joffe has drawn on a lifetime of experience as an analyst of Chinese military affairs in this authoritative assessment of a highly elusive subject: military modernization and the politics of civilian-military relations in the post-Mao period. He has sifted vast amounts of evidence, primary and secondary, to show that during the past few years the Chinese army has been transformed into a relatively modern and professional force that will be the basis for future growth of China’s military power.

The author begins by describing the development of the People’s Liberation Army in the Maoist era and explains the reasons for its decline. He analyzes the political changes and the shifts in strategic outlook of Mao’s successors that have made possible a new policy of military modernization: a policy of raising the combat capability of the PLA through slow improvements of technology—including buying some material abroad—and a thorough upgrading of the nontechnological components of military power.

Joffe examines all aspects of the PLA’s modernization, focusing on the wide-ranging changes in doctrine, weapons, organization, structure, and modes of operation, and concludes with an analysis of the PLA’s political role and the state of civil–military relations. There is a particularly perspicacious chapter dissecting Deng’s maneuvers to remove the military influence in politics that had burgeoned during and after the Cultural Revolution.

For many Westerners, the words "Chinese art" evoke visions of willow pattern landscapes on porcelain plates and teapots, Chinese wallpaper decorated with flowers, birds, and pagodas, and perhaps silk brocades. This beautiful book allows readers to see beyond such ornamental exports to the true nature of the art produced in China over millennia for a Chinese audience, whether the Emperor, the scholarly elite, the ordinary folk, or the furnishing of tombs and temples.

Drawing on the British Museum's extensive collection, Chinese Art in Detail explores the traditional hierarchy of materials and techniques reaching back as far as the Han Dynasty in the third century B.C.—with calligraphy and painting most revered, followed by jades and bronzes, decorative arts such as lacquer, porcelain, and silk, and, finally, sculpture for religious and funerary use. Images of complete artifacts set against magnified details give readers the rare opportunity to appreciate the delicacies of technique and material that characterize much of Chinese art—and distinguish one form, as well as one period, from another. Illuminated throughout by two scholars thoroughly and deeply versed in the history and character of the works under scrutiny, this sumptuously illustrated book conveys an understanding of Chinese art in all its great variety, its simplicities, its complexities, its splendors, and its mysteries of craft and inspiration reaching back to Neolithic times.

Chinese Asianism examines Chinese intellectual discussions of East Asian solidarity, analyzing them in connection with Chinese nationalism and Sino–Japanese relations. Beginning with texts written after the first Sino–Japanese War of 1894 and concluding with Wang Jingwei’s failed government in World War II, Craig Smith engages with a period in which the Chinese empire had crumbled and intellectuals were struggling to adapt to imperialism, new and hegemonic forms of government, and radically different epistemes. He considers a wide range of writings that show the depth of the pre-war discourse on Asianism and the influence it had on the rise of nationalism in China.

Asianism was a “call” for Asian unity, Smith finds, but advocates of a united and connected Asia based on racial or civilizational commonalities also utilized the packaging of Asia for their own agendas, to the extent that efforts towards international regionalism spurred the construction of Chinese nationalism. Asianism shaped Chinese ideas of nation and region, often by translating and interpreting Japanese perspectives, and leaving behind a legacy in the concepts and terms that persist in the twenty-first century. As China plays a central role in regional East Asian development, Asianism is once again of great importance today.

Chiang Yee’s Chinese Calligraphy: An Introduction to Its Aesthetic and Technique remains the classic introduction to Chinese calligraphy. In eleven richly illustrated chapters, Chiang explores the aesthetics and the technique of this art in which rhythm, line, and structure are perfectly embodied. He measures the slow change from pictograph to stroke to the style and shape of written characters by the great calligraphers.

In addition to aesthetic considerations, the text deals with more practical subjects such as the origin and construction of the Chinese characters, styles, technique, strokes, composition, training, and the relations between calligraphy and other forms of Chinese art.

Chinese Calligraphy is a superb appreciation of beauty in the movement of strokes and in the patterns of structure—and an inspiration to amateurs as well as professionals interested in the decorative arts.

Communistic doctrine and Communist leadership as they developed in China, and their changing relations to the Kremlin, are the subjects of this documented, readable—and controversial—book. Benjamin Schwartz points out that we have witnessed in China not only an elemental upsurge of the masses, but also the rise to power of a vigorous new ruling group basing itself on a forceful new strategy neither planned in advance nor anticipated by the Kremlin.

Schwartz studies the beginnings of Communism in China. He then analyzes the peculiar nature of the Communist-Kuomintang alliance of 1924 and the cause of its collapse, and discusses the role played by Mao Tse-tung during these years. He goes on to trace the growing isolation of the Chinese Communist Party from the urban proletariat; the shift of power to Mao Tse-tung in the countryside; and the emergence of a new strategy whose relation to the Kremlin's party line is more a matter of faith than of fact. For, under the leadership of Mao, the Chinese Party, while firmly convinced of its own orthodoxy, came to realize in the face of Marxist-Leninist doctrine that the peasantry could provide the mass basis and the motive power for a revolutionary transformation—and acted on that belief. The nature and extent of “'Titoism”' in China and elsewhere is the subject of Schwartz' thought-provoking final chapter.

Winner of the Stanislas Julien Prize
Winner of the Joseph Levenson Prize for Scholarship on Pre-1900 China

Dreaming is a near-universal human experience, but there is no consensus on why we dream or what dreams should be taken to mean. In this book, Robert Ford Campany investigates what people in late classical and early medieval China thought of dreams. He maps a common dreamscape—an array of ideas about what dreams are and what responses they should provoke—that underlies texts of diverse persuasions and genres over several centuries. These writings include manuals of dream interpretation, scriptural instructions, essays, treatises, poems, recovered manuscripts, histories, and anecdotes of successful dream-based predictions.

In these many sources, we find culturally distinctive answers to questions peoples the world over have asked for millennia: What happens when we dream? Do dreams foretell future events? If so, how might their imagistic code be unlocked to yield predictions? Could dreams enable direct communication between the living and the dead, or between humans and nonhuman animals? The Chinese Dreamscape, 300 BCE–800 CE sheds light on how people in a distant age negotiated these mysteries and brings Chinese notions of dreaming into conversation with studies of dreams in other cultures, ancient and contemporary. Taking stock of how Chinese people wrestled with—and celebrated—the strangeness of dreams, Campany asks us to reflect on how we might reconsider our own notions of dreaming.

With the Qing Dynasty reform efforts (1901–1911), abolition of the civil service examination (1905), and the end of the monarchy (1912), the first three decades of the twentieth century brought important changes to the elite of Zhejiang Province. This book examines the social backgrounds, public activities, careers, and decision-making of local and provincial elites—that is, nonprofessional men who had taken on public duties when the multiplying problems of government had resulted in a general breakdown of public functions.

While elites in early twentieth-century China have often been caricatured as militarists, corrupt bureaucrats, evil landlords, and ineffectual reformers, they have not been clearly understood or closely analyzed. Since the seventeenth century, elites had been assuming increasing responsibility for funding and managing public projects, and by the twentieth century had expanded their activities still further. In the first three decades of the century, they experienced substantial personal and communitarian development; it was the structures and processes developed by these elites that subsequent regimes—Guomindang, Japanese, or Communist—had to build upon and adapt.

Keith Schoppa divides the counties of Zhejiang Province into four zones according to level of political and economic development and scrupulously analyzes the complex processes of remolding society at the local and provincial levels. By delving beneath the heroic figures and large movements of Chinese political life in this century, he reveals the common factors that make China a part of the worldwide story of reconstruction, reform, and developmental change.

A tour de force chronicling the development of realism in Chinese cinema

 

The history of Chinese cinema is as long and complicated as the tumultuous history of China itself. Be it the silent, the Communist, or the contemporary, each Chinese cinematic era has necessitated its own form in conversation with broader trends in politics and culture. 

In Chinese Film, Jason McGrath tells this fascinating story by tracing the varied claims to cinematic realism made by Chinese filmmakers, officials, critics, and scholars. Understanding realism as a historical dynamic that is both enabled and mitigated by aesthetic conventions of the day, he analyzes it across six different types of claims: ontological, perceptual, fictional, social, prescriptive, and apophatic.

Through this method, McGrath makes major claims not just about Chinese cinema but also about realism as an aesthetic form that negotiates between cultural conventions and the ever-evolving real. He comes to envision it as more than just a cinematic question, showing how the struggle for realism is central to the Chinese struggle for modernity itself.

Dense with winding paths, dominated by huge rock piles and buildings squeezed into small spaces, the characteristic Chinese garden is, for many foreigners, so unlike anything else as to be incomprehensible. Only on closer acquaintance does it offer up its mysteries; and such is the achievement of Maggie Keswick's celebrated classic that it affords us--adventurers, armchair travelers, and garden buffs alike--the intimate pleasures of the Chinese garden.

In these richly illustrated pages, Chinese gardens unfold as cosmic diagrams, revealing a profound and ancient view of the world and of humanity's place in it. First sensuous impressions give way to more cerebral delights, and forms conjure unending, increasingly esoteric and mystical layers of meaning for the initiate. Keswick conducts us through the art and architecture, the principles and techniques of Chinese gardens, showing us their long history as the background for a civilization--the settings for China's great poets and painters, the scenes of ribald parties and peaceful contemplation, political intrigues and family festivals.

Updated and expanded in this third edition, with an introduction by Alison Hardie, many new illustrations, and an updated list of gardens in China accessible to visitors, Keswick's engaging work remains unparalleled as an introduction to the Chinese garden.

Endymion Wilkinson’s bestselling Chinese History: A New Manual has been continuously in print for fifty years. It has achieved this unusual distinction because the author expanded its scope with each new edition. In the process it has grown from a modest research guide to Chinese imperial history into an encyclopedic, 1.7-million-word introduction to Chinese civilization and the primary and secondary resources and research problems for all periods of Chinese history. In recognition of its unique value, the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (France) awarded the third edition the Stanislas Julien Prize, and in 2016, Peking University Press published the entire Manual in a three-volume Chinese edition.

The sixth edition of the Manual has been revised and expanded throughout to include the latest developments in digital tools and the two dozen ancillary disciplines essential for work on Chinese history. In addition, its temporal coverage has been extended to the death of Chairman Mao.

In celebration of a half century of continuous publication, the enlarged sixth edition consists of two volumes. Volume 1 covers topics ranging from Language, Education, and the Arts to Science, Technology, and the Environment. Volume 2 presents primary and secondary sources chronologically by period from the Neolithic to 1976.

Endymion Wilkinson’s bestselling Chinese History: A New Manual has been continuously in print for fifty years. It has achieved this unusual distinction because the author expanded its scope with each new edition. In the process it has grown from a modest research guide to Chinese imperial history into an encyclopedic, 1.7-million-word introduction to Chinese civilization and the primary and secondary resources and research problems for all periods of Chinese history. In recognition of its unique value, the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (France) awarded the third edition the Stanislas Julien Prize, and in 2016, Peking University Press published the entire Manual in a three-volume Chinese edition.

The sixth edition of the Manual has been revised and expanded throughout to include the latest developments in digital tools and the two dozen ancillary disciplines essential for work on Chinese history. In addition, its temporal coverage has been extended to the death of Chairman Mao.

In celebration of a half century of continuous publication, the enlarged sixth edition consists of two volumes. Volume 1 covers topics ranging from Language, Education, and the Arts to Science, Technology, and the Environment. Volume 2 presents primary and secondary sources chronologically by period from the Neolithic to 1976.

Endymion Wilkinson’s bestselling Chinese History: A New Manual has been continuously in print for fifty years. It has achieved this unusual distinction because the author expanded its scope with each new edition. In the process it has grown from a modest research guide to Chinese imperial history into an encyclopedic, 1.7-million-word introduction to Chinese civilization and the primary and secondary resources and research problems for all periods of Chinese history. In recognition of its unique value, the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (France) awarded the third edition the Stanislas Julien Prize, and in 2016, Peking University Press published the entire Manual in a three-volume Chinese edition.

The sixth edition of the Manual has been revised and expanded throughout to include the latest developments in digital tools and the two dozen ancillary disciplines essential for work on Chinese history. In addition, its temporal coverage has been extended to the death of Chairman Mao.

In celebration of a half century of continuous publication, the enlarged sixth edition consists of two volumes. Volume 1 covers topics ranging from Language, Education, and the Arts to Science, Technology, and the Environment. Volume 2 presents primary and secondary sources chronologically by period from the Neolithic to 1976.

Endymion Wilkinson’s bestselling Chinese History: A New Manual has been continuously in print for fifty years. It has achieved this unusual distinction because the author expanded its scope with each new edition. In the process it has grown from a modest research guide to Chinese imperial history into an encyclopedic, 1.7-million-word introduction to Chinese civilization and the primary and secondary resources and research problems for all periods of Chinese history. In recognition of its unique value, the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (France) awarded the third edition the Stanislas Julien Prize, and in 2016, Peking University Press published the entire Manual in a three-volume Chinese edition.

The sixth edition of the Manual has been revised and expanded throughout to include the latest developments in digital tools and the two dozen ancillary disciplines essential for work on Chinese history. In addition, its temporal coverage has been extended to the death of Chairman Mao.

In celebration of a half century of continuous publication, the enlarged sixth edition consists of two volumes. Volume 1 covers topics ranging from Language, Education, and the Arts to Science, Technology, and the Environment. Volume 2 presents primary and secondary sources chronologically by period from the Neolithic to 1976.

THIS EDITION HAS BEEN REPLACED BY A NEWER EDITION.

A comprehensive and up-to-date guide on the basic problems encountered in researching traditional Chinese civilization and history, this manual includes discussions of over 1,000 primary sources as well as 1,000 reference works. The first part covers the basics of language, geography, dates, time, statistics, and primary sources. The second part treats primary sources, such as archives, legal codes, literature, and science. The third part lists key sources by historical period, from the pre-Qin period through the Qing.

Endymion Wilkinson’s bestselling manual of Chinese history has long been an indispensable guide to all those interested in the civilization and history of China. In this latest edition, now in a bigger format, its scope has been dramatically enlarged by the addition of one million words of new text.

Twelve years in the making, the new manual introduces students to different types of transmitted, excavated, and artifactual sources from prehistory to the twentieth century. It also examines the context in which the sources were produced, preserved, and received, the problems of research and interpretation associated with them, and the best, most up-to-date secondary works. Because the writing of history has always played a central role in Chinese politics and culture, special attention is devoted to the strengths and weaknesses of Chinese historiography.

The new manual comprises fourteen book-length parts subdivided into a total of seventy-six chapters: Books 1–9 cover Language; People; Geography and the Environment; Governing and Educating; Ideas and Beliefs, Literature, and the Fine Arts; Agriculture, Food, and Drink; Technology and Science; Trade; and Historiography. Books 10–13 present primary and secondary sources chronologically by period. Book 14 is on historical bibliography. Electronic resources are covered throughout.

Endymion Wilkinson’s bestselling manual of Chinese history has long been an indispensable guide to all those interested in the civilization and history of China. The hugely enlarged third edition won the Stanislas Julien Prize for 2014. In the fourth edition the entire work has been corrected and updated and many sections rewritten.

Fifteen years in the making, Chinese History introduces students to different types of transmitted, excavated, and artifactual sources from prehistory to the twenty-first century. It also examines the context in which the sources were produced, preserved, and received, the problems of research and interpretation associated with them, and the best, most up-to-date secondary works. Because history has always played a central role in Chinese politics and culture, special attention is devoted to the strengths and weaknesses of Chinese historiography.

Chinese History comprises fourteen book-length parts subdivided into a total of seventy-six chapters: Books 1–9 cover Language; People; Geography and the Environment; Governing and Educating; Ideas and Beliefs, Literature, and the Fine Arts; Agriculture, Food, and Drink; Technology and Science; Trade; and Historiography. Books 10–13 present primary and secondary sources chronologically by period. Book 14 is on historical bibliography. Electronic resources are covered throughout.

Written Chinese served as a prestigious, cosmopolitan script across medieval East Asia, from as far west as the Tarim Basin to the eastern kingdom of Heian period Japan (794–1185). In this book, Brian Steininger revisits the mid-Heian court of the Tale of Genji and the Pillow Book, where literary Chinese was not only the basis of official administration, but also a medium for political protest, sermons of mourning, and poems of celebration.

Chinese Literary Forms in Heian Japan reconstructs the lived practice of Chinese poetic and prose genres among Heian officials, analyzing the material exchanges by which documents were commissioned, the local reinterpretations of Tang aesthetic principles, and the ritual venues in which literary Chinese texts were performed in Japanese vocalization. Even as state ideology and educational institutions proclaimed the Chinese script’s embodiment of timeless cosmological patterns, everyday practice in this far-flung periphery subjected classical models to a string of improvised exceptions. Through careful comparison of literary and documentary sources, this book provides a vivid case study of one society’s negotiation of literature’s position—both within a hierarchy of authority and between the incommensurable realms of script and speech.

This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)— a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of the University of California, Davis. Learn more at the TOME website, available at: openmonographs.org.

Download the open access book here.

Chinese Medicine and Healing is a comprehensive introduction to a rich array of Chinese healing practices as they have developed through time and across cultures. Contributions from fifty-eight leading international scholars in such fields as Chinese archaeology, history, anthropology, religion, and medicine make this a collaborative work of uncommon intellectual synergy, and a vital new resource for anyone working in East Asian or world history, in medical history and anthropology, and in biomedicine and complementary healing arts.

This illustrated history explores the emergence and development of a wide range of health interventions, including propitiation of disease-inflicting spirits, divination, vitality-cultivating meditative disciplines, herbal remedies, pulse diagnosis, and acupuncture. The authors investigate processes that contribute to historical change, such as competition between different types of practitioner—shamans, Daoist priests, Buddhist monks, scholar physicians, and even government officials. Accompanying vignettes and illustrations bring to life such diverse arenas of health care as childbirth in the Tang period, Yuan state-established medical schools, fertility control in the Qing, and the search for sexual potency in the People’s Republic.

The two final chapters illustrate Chinese healing modalities across the globe and address the challenges they have posed as alternatives to biomedical standards of training and licensure. The discussion includes such far-reaching examples as Chinese treatments for diphtheria in colonial Australia and malaria in Africa, the invention of ear acupuncture by the French and its worldwide dissemination, and the varying applications of acupuncture from Germany to Argentina and Iraq.

In this book, Sherman Cochran reconsiders the nature and role of consumer culture in the spread of cultural globalization. He moves beyond traditional debates over Western influence on non-Western cultures to examine the points where Chinese entrepreneurs and Chinese-owned businesses interacted with consumers. Focusing on the marketing of medicine, he shows how Chinese constructed consumer culture in China and Southeast Asia and extended it to local, national, and transnational levels. Through the use of advertisements, photographs, and maps, he illustrates the visual forms that Chinese enterprises adopted and the far-flung markets they reached.

Cochran brings to light enduring features of the Chinese experience with consumer culture. Surveying the period between the 1880s and the 1950s, he observes that Chinese businesses surpassed their Western counterparts in capturing Chinese and Southeast Asian sales of medicine in both peacetime and wartime. He provides revealing examples of Chinese entrepreneurs’ dealings with Chinese and Japanese political and military leaders, particularly during the Sino–Japanese War of 1937–45. The history of Chinese medicine men in pre-socialist China, he suggests, has relevance for the twenty-first century because they achieved goals—constructing a consumer culture, competing with Western-based corporations, forming business-government alliances, capturing national and transnational markets—that their successors in contemporary China are currently seeking to attain.

Winner of the Ray Allen Billington Prize
Winner of the Ellis W. Hawley Prize
Winner of the Sally and Ken Owens Award
Winner of the Vincent P. DeSantis Book Prize
Winner of the Caroline Bancroft History Prize

“A powerful argument about racial violence that could not be more timely.”
—Richard White

“A riveting, beautifully written account…that foregrounds Chinese voices and experiences. A timely and important contribution to our understanding of immigration and the border.”
—Karl Jacoby, author of Shadows at Dawn

In 1885, following the massacre of Chinese miners in Wyoming Territory, communities throughout California and the Pacific Northwest harassed, assaulted, and expelled thousands of Chinese immigrants. The Chinese Must Go shows how American immigration policies incited this violence, and how this gave rise to the concept of the “alien” in America.

Our story begins in the 1850s, before federal border control established strict divisions between citizens and aliens—and long before Congress passed the Chinese Restriction Act, the nation’s first attempt to bar immigration based on race and class. When this unprecedented experiment failed to slow Chinese migration, armed vigilante groups took the matter into their own hands. Fearing the spread of mob violence, policymakers redoubled their efforts to seal the borders, overhauling immigration law and transforming America’s relationship with China in the process. By tracing the idea of the alien back to this violent era, Lew-Williams offers a troubling new origin story of today’s racialized border.

“The Chinese Must Go shows how a country that was moving, in a piecemeal and halting fashion, toward an expansion of citizenship for formerly enslaved people and Native Americans, came to deny other classes of people the right to naturalize altogether…The stories of racist violence and community shunning are brutal to read.”
—Rebecca Onion, Slate

Few social issues have received more public attention and scholarly debate than the death penalty. While the abolitionist movement has made a successful stride in recent decades, a small number of countries remain committed to the death penalty and impose it with a relatively high frequency. In this regard, the People’s Republic of China no doubt leads the world in both numbers of death sentences and executions. Despite being the largest user of the death penalty, China has never conducted a national poll on citizens’ opinions toward capital punishment, while claiming “overwhelming public support” as a major justification for its retention and use.

Chinese Netizens’ Opinions on Death Sentences: An Empirical Examination uses a forum of public comments to explore and examine Chinese netizens’ opinions on the death penalty. Based on a content analysis of 38,512 comments collected from 63 cases in 2015, this study examines the diversity and rationales of netizens’ opinions, netizens’ interactions, and their evaluation of China’s criminal justice system. In addition, the book discusses China’s social, systemic, and structural problems and critically examines the rationality of netizens’ opinions based on Habermas’s communicative rationality framework. Readers will be able to contextualize Chinese netizens’ discussions and draw conclusions about commonalities and uniqueness of China’s death penalty practice.

The Chinese overseas now number 25 to 30 million, yet the 2,000-year history of Chinese attempts to venture abroad and the underlying values affecting that migration have never before been presented in a broad overview. Despite centuries of prohibition against leaving the land and traveling and settling overseas, the "earthbound" Chinese--first traders, then peasants and workers--eventually found new sources of livelihood abroad. The practice of sojourning, being always temporarily away from home, was the answer the Chinese overseas found to deal with imperial and orthodox concerns. Today their challenge is to find an alternative to either returning or assimilating by seeking a new kind of autonomy in a world that will come to acknowledge the ideal of multicultural states.

In pursuing this story, international scholar Wang Gungwu uncovers some major themes of global history: the coming together of Asian and European civilizations, the ambiguities of ethnicity and diasporic consciousness, and the tension between maintaining one's culture and assimilation.

The political novel, which enjoyed a steep yet short rise to international renown between the 1830s and the 1910s, is primarily concerned with the nation’s political future. It offers a characterization of the present, a blueprint of the future, and the image of the heroes needed to get there. With the standing it gained during its meteoric rise, the political novel helped elevate the novel altogether to become the leading literary genre of the twentieth century worldwide.

Focusing on its adaptation in the Chinese context, Catherine Vance Yeh traces the genre from Disraeli’s England through Europe and the United States to East Asia. Her study goes beyond comparative approaches and nation-state- and language-centered histories of literature to examine the intrinsic connections among literary works. Through detailed studies, especially of the Chinese exemplars, Yeh explores the tensions characteristic of transcultural processes: the dynamics through which a particular, and seemingly local, literary genre goes global; the ways in which such a globalized literary genre maintains its core features while assuming local identity and interacting with local audiences and political authorities; and the relationship between the politics of form and the role of politics in literary innovation.

Imperialism, pernicious as it was in most respects, served as the prime catalyst for social change in China throughout the turbulent period from 1895 to 1913. Starting with this premise, Edward Rhoads traces the social, political, and economic history of the republican revolution. In his view, after the Boxer uprising, the Manchu court, usually called supine and reactionary, instituted a program of reform that was a serious, comprehensive, and often successful attempt at radical social transformation. It failed, but it politicized the Chinese people to an unprecedented degree--and it marks the entrance of China into the modern era.

The post-Boxer reforms attracted many revolutionaries and defused a serious revolutionary threat. Contrary to traditional accounts, Sun Yat-sen and his Revolutionary Alliance did not move easily from success to success. On the eve of the 1911 revolution, in fact, the movement was disorganized and demoralized. Its ultimate victory came less from its own efforts than from the failure of the incumbent rulers to win the support of the nonrevolutionary elite.

During the centuries of its popularity, early Chinese vernacular fiction was never adequately preserved or even documented. The great popular appeal of the short stories saved them from oblivion, but it was only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that they were first collected and published.

Mr. Hanan's erudite study is the first thorough attempt to uncover the history of the Chinese short story. Using a variety of techniques, but principally that of stylistic analysis, the author solves the fundamental problem of dating the stories in terms of periods. He is able to place each story in one of three broad categories, early (ca. 1250-1450), middle (ca. 1400-1575), and late (ca. 1550-1627), and to assign some of them to,the earlier or later part of the time span. In many,cases he offers evidence of sources and influences, place of origin, and possible or probable authorship.

On the basis of the author's research, it is possible to see in minutely researched detail how the short story developed in China, what kind of men composed it, its relationship to other kinds of literature, and the main social preoccupations with which it deals.

The results of Mr. Hanan's study are vitally important to all scholars of Chinese literature. Historians and linguists will also find it valuable as a model of the innovative use of stylistic analysis.

By the late 1970s, state communism was everywhere in retreat. First in Eastern Europe, then in China and the Soviet Union, party leaders were compelled to devise fundamental departures from the economic procedures and structures they had confidently installed at the outset of their revolutionary victories. Perhaps no country departed more rapidly from communist economic structures than China.

Within five years of Mao Zedong’s death, reformers led by Deng Xiaoping had dismantled the people’s communes and created a range of markets that established the institutional foundations for a new form of socialism. But, unlike the Soviets and Eastern Europeans, the Chinese reformers refused to consider parallel changes in political institutions. The demonstrations in Beijing in 1989 made it clear that post-Mao economic policies had created unavoidable political consequences for the society and its leaders. In individual case studies, the twelve contributors to this volume document the uneven decollectivization and decentralization of China’s economy in the post-Mao years and the great diversity of the social and political consequences. They deal with the effects of the more materialistic and individualistic reward system on both public and private life in the countryside and in urban settings and the new expectations that economic changes engendered.

Since Singapore declared independence from Malaysia in 1965, Chinese street opera has played a significant role in defining Singaporean identity. Carefully tracing the history of amateur and professional performances in Singapore, Tong Soon Lee reflects on the role of street performance in fostering cultural nationalism and entrepreneurship. He explains that the government welcomes Chinese street opera performances because they combine tradition and modernism and promote a national culture that brings together Singapore's four main ethnic groups--Eurasian, Malay, Chinese, and South Asian.

Chinese Street Opera in Singapore documents the ways in which this politically motivated art form continues to be influenced and transformed by Singaporean politics, ideology, and context in the twenty-first century. By performing Chinese street opera, amateur troupes preserve their rich heritage, underscoring the Confucian mind-set that a learned person engages in the arts for moral and unselfish purposes. Educated performers also control behavior, emotions, and values. They are creative and innovative, and their use of new technologies indicates a modern, entrepreneurial spirit. Their performances bring together diverse ethnic groups to watch and perform, Lee argues, while also encouraging a national attitude focused on both remembering the past and preparing for the future in Singapore.

The huaben, or vernacular story, was one of the richest, most varied, and appealing genres in all Chinese literature, often reaching a larger audience than works in Classical Chinese. And yet, because of its very popularity, the huaben was almost entirely disregarded by official, learned society. Now, Patrick Hanan brings this intriguing half-buried literature to light, tracing its development from the thirteenth through the seventeenth century—when it became, indeed, the most vital form of Chinese fiction.

Hanan begins by explaining the position of vernacular language within Chinese language and literature as a whole. He then goes on to show how the huaben acquired a tremendous range of subjects and interests from the most serious moral and philosophical problems to crime stories, romances, and ribald satires. Hanan consistently relates the stories and their authors to China’s changing social and political life. At the same time, he carefully evaluates the best of the stories, giving fresh and detailed information about their composition, performance, and reception.

Sanchun (a pseudonym) is a small rural market center in Malaysia made up of predominantly Chinese shopkeepers, wage laborers, and rubber tappers and small holders. It is one of the so-called “new villages” originally set up during the communist insurgency as forced relocation camps to contain rural Chinese. Judith Strauch lived in Sanchun for eighteen months, conducting lengthy socioeconomic family surveys, examining local records, documents, and census data, and participating in community life.

This study offers detailed analysis of the manipulative strategies of local rivals active over several decades in the competition for local status and power. But significantly, it treats relevant aspects of the broader Malaysian political environment as well, situating local-level politics firmly in the larger context of national politics. Special attention is given to a rural mass-mobilization movement undertaken by the major Chinese-Malaysian political party in the early 1970s. The focus is on the interconnections between the various levels of a modern multi-ethnic political system, demonstrating the ways in which local political actors are both constrained and supported by power structures and resources that lie outside the local system.

The book draws together in an innovative manner important intellectual strands of both anthropology and political analysis. It should be of interest not only to Southeast Asia area specialists and students of contemporary ethnic Chinese society but also to those concerned with the problems of plural societies everywhere.

Drawing from literary, historical, dramatic, and anecdotal sources, Yenna Wu conducts a rich exploration of an unusually prominent theme in premodern Chinese prose fiction and drama: that of jealous and belligerent wives, or viragos, who dominate their husbands and abuse other women. Focusing on Chinese literary works from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, she presents many colorful perspectives on this type of aggression, reviewing early literary and historical examples of the phenomenon.

Wu argues that although the various portraits of the virago often reveal the writers' insecurities about strong-willed women in general, the authors also satirize the kind of man whose behavioral patterns have been catalysts for female aggression. She shows that various elements of these portraits constitute a subversive form of parody that casts a revealing light on the patriarchal hierarchy of premodern China.

How did modern Chinese painters see landscape? Did they depict nature in the same way as premodern Chinese painters? What does the artistic perception of modern Chinese painters reveal about the relationship between artists and the nation-state? Could an understanding of modern Chinese landscape painting tell us something previously unknown about art, political change, and the epistemological and sensory regime of twentieth-century China?

Yi Gu tackles these questions by focusing on the rise of open-air painting in modern China. Chinese artists almost never painted outdoors until the late 1910s, when the New Culture Movement prompted them to embrace direct observation, linear perspective, and a conception of vision based on Cartesian optics. The new landscape practice brought with it unprecedented emphasis on perception and redefined artistic expertise. Central to the pursuit of open-air painting from the late 1910s right through to the early 1960s was a reinvigorated and ever-growing urgency to see suitably as a Chinese and to see the Chinese homeland correctly. Examining this long-overlooked ocular turn, Gu not only provides an innovative perspective from which to reflect on complicated interactions of the global and local in China, but also calls for rethinking the nature of visual modernity there.

Popular views of medieval chivalry—knights in shining armor, fair ladies, banners fluttering from battlements—were inherited from the nineteenth-century Romantics. This is the first book to explore chivalry’s place within a wider history of medieval England, from the Norman Conquest to the aftermath of Henry VII’s triumph at Bosworth in the Wars of the Roses.

Saul invites us to view the world of castles and cathedrals, tournaments and round tables, with fresh eyes. Chivalry in Medieval England charts the introduction of chivalry by the Normans, the rise of the knightly class as a social elite, the fusion of chivalry with kingship in the fourteenth century, and the influence of chivalry on literature, religion, and architecture. Richard the Lionheart and the Crusades, the Black Death and the Battle of Crecy, the Magna Carta and the cult of King Arthur—all emerge from the mists of time and legend in this vivid, authoritative account.

Thomas Schelling is a political economist “conspicuous for wandering”—an errant economist. In Choice and Consequence, he ventures into the area where rationality is ambiguous in order to look at the tricks people use to try to quit smoking or lose weight. He explores topics as awesome as nuclear terrorism, as sordid as blackmail, as ineffable as daydreaming, as intimidating as euthanasia. He examines ethical issues wrapped up in economics, unwrapping the economics to disclose ethical issues that are misplaced or misidentified.

With an ingenious, often startling approach, Schelling brings new perspectives to problems ranging from drug abuse, abortion, and the value people put on their lives to organized crime, airplane hijacking, and automobile safety. One chapter is a clear and elegant exposition of game theory as a framework for analyzing social problems. Another plays with the hypothesis that our minds are not only our problem-solving equipment but also the organ in which much of our consumption takes place.

What binds together the different subjects is the author’s belief in the possibility of simultaneously being humane and analytical, of dealing with both the momentous and the familiar. Choice and Consequence was written for the curious, the puzzled, the worried, and all those who appreciate intellectual adventure.