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.
China's protracted boom and political transformation is a major episode in the history of global political economy. Beginning in the late 1970s, China experienced a quarter century of extraordinary growth that raised every indicator of material welfare, lifted several hundred million out of poverty, and rocketed China from near autarky to regional and even global prominence. These striking developments transformed China into a major U.S. trade and investment partner, a regional military power, and a major influence on national economies and cross-national interchange throughout the Pacific region. Beijing has emerged as a voice for East Asian economic interests and an arbiter in regional and even global diplomacy-from the Asian financial crisis to the North Korean nuclear talks. China's accession to the World Trade Organization promises to accentuate these trends.
The contributors to this volume provide a multifaceted examination of China in the areas of economics, trade, investment, politics, diplomacy, technology, and security, affording a greater understanding of what relevant policies the United States must develop. This book offers a counterweight to overwrought concerns about the emerging “Chinese threat” and makes the case for viewing China as a force for stability in the twenty-first century.
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.
Born and raised in San Francisco, Lai was trained as an engineer but blazed a trail in the field of Asian American studies. Long before the field had any academic standing, he amassed an unparalleled body of source material on Chinese America and drew on his own transnational heritage and Chinese patriotism to explore the global Chinese experience.
In Chinese American Transnational Politics, Lai traces the shadowy history of Chinese leftism and the role of the Kuomintang of China in influencing affairs in America. With precision and insight, Lai penetrates the overly politicized portrayals of a history shaped by global alliances and enmities and the hard intolerance of the Cold War era. The result is a nuanced and singular account of how Chinese politics, migration to the United States, and Sino-U.S. relations were shaped by Chinese and Chinese American groups and organizations.
Lai revised and expanded his writings over more than thirty years as changing political climates allowed for greater acceptance of leftist activities and access to previously confidential documents. Drawing on Chinese- and English-language sources and echoing the strong loyalties and mobility of the activists and idealists he depicts, Lai delivers the most comprehensive treatment of Chinese transnational politics to date.
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.
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.
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.
Contributors. Leonard Blussé, Wen-Chin Chang, Lucille Chia, Bien Chiang, Nola Cooke, Jean DeBernardi, C. Patterson Giersch, Takeshi Hamashita, Kwee Hui Kian, Li Tana, Lin Man-houng, Masuda Erika, Adam McKeown, Anthony Reid , Sun Laichen, Heather Sutherland, Eric Tagliacozzo, Carl A. Trocki, Wang Gungwu, Kevin Woods, Wu Xiao
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.
Chinese Connections is a valuable new anthology that provides a prismatic look at the cross-fertilization between Chinese film and global popular culture. Leading film scholars consider the influence of world cinema on China-related and Chinese-related cinema over the last five decades. Highlighting the neglected connections between Chinese films and American and European cinema, the editors and contributors examine popular works such as Ang Lee’s The Hulk and Olivier Assayas’ Irma Vep to show the nexus of international film production and how national, political, social and sexual identities are represented in the Chinese diaspora.
With talent flowing back and forth between East and West, Chinese Connections explores how issues of immigration, class, race and economic displacement are viewed on a global level, ultimately providing a greater understanding of the impact of Chinese filmmaking at home and abroad.
Contributors include: Grace An, Aaron Anderson, Chris Berry, Evans Chan, Li-Mei Chang, Frances Gateward, Andrew Grossman, Peter Hitchcock, Chuck Kleinhans, Jenny Kwok Wah Lau, Helen Leung, Aaron Magnan-Park, Gayle Wald, Esther C.M. Yau, Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, Xuelin Zhou and the editors.
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.
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.
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.
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 of and interactions with 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.
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.
Louie focuses on “In Search of Roots,” a program that takes young Chinese American adults of Cantonese descent to visit their ancestral villages in China’s Guangdong province. Through ethnographic interviews and observation, Louie examines the experiences of Chinese Americans both during village visits in China and following their participation in the program, which she herself took part in as an intern and researcher. She presents a vivid portrait of two populations who, though connected through family ties generations back, are meeting for the first time in the context of a rapidly changing contemporary China. Louie situates the participants’ and hosts’ shifting understandings of China and Chineseness within the context of transnational flows of people, media, goods, and money; China’s political and economic policies; and the racial and cultural politics of the United States.
These studies examine writings by Protestant missionaries in China from 1819 to 1890. The initial aim of the missionaries was religious--to bring the Gospel message to a Chinese audience. The social and cultural milieu tempered missionary efforts, however, and the scope of their writings--tracts, translations of scripture, periodicals, and books in Chinese--enlarged to include secular topics and information for the Chinese about the world outside. Simultaneously, Protestant missionaries wrote about China for American readers at home and thus became the strongest link between village China and small-town America.
Nine historians contribute to this composite picture of the missionary pioneers, the literature they produced, the changes they sustained through immersion in Chinese culture, and their efforts to interpret that culture for their constituencies at home.
By 1952 the Chinese Communist Party had suppressed all organized resistance to its regime and stood unopposed, or so it has been believed. Internal party documents—declassified just long enough for historian Paul Mariani to send copies out of China—disclose that one group deemed an enemy of the state held out after the others had fallen. A party report from Shanghai marked “top-secret” reveals a determined, often courageous resistance by the local Catholic Church. Drawing on centuries of experience in struggling with the Chinese authorities, the Church was proving a stubborn match for the party.
Mariani tells the story of how Bishop (later Cardinal) Ignatius Kung Pinmei, the Jesuits, and the Catholic Youth resisted the regime’s punishing assault on the Shanghai Catholic community and refused to renounce the pope and the Church in Rome. Acting clandestinely, mirroring tactics used by the previously underground CCP, Shanghai’s Catholics persevered until 1955, when the party arrested Kung and 1,200 other leading Catholics. The imprisoned believers were later shocked to learn that the betrayal had come from within their own ranks.
Though the CCP could not eradicate the Catholic Church in China, it succeeded in dividing it. Mariani’s secret history traces the origins of a deep split in the Chinese Catholic community, where relations between the “Patriotic” and underground churches remain strained even today.
In Cinema Approaching Reality, Victor Fan brings together, for the first time, Chinese and Euro-American film theories and theorists to engage in critical debates about film in Shanghai and Hong Kong from the 1920s through 1940s. His point of departure is a term popularly employed by Chinese film critics during this period, bizhen, often translated as “lifelike” but best understood as “approaching reality.” What these Chinese theorists mean, in Fan’s reading, is that the cinematographic image is not a form of total reality, but it can allow spectators to apprehend an effect as though they had been there at the time when an event actually happened.
Fan suggests that the phrase “approaching reality” can help to renegotiate an aporia (blind spot) that influential French film critic André Bazin wrestled with: the cinematographic image is a trace of reality, yet reality is absent in the cinematographic image, and the cinema makes present this absence as it reactivates the passage of time. Fan enriches Bazinian cinematic ontology with discussions on cinematic reality in Republican China and colonial Hong Kong, putting Western theorists—from Bazin and Kracauer to Baudrillard, Agamben, and Deleuze—into dialogue with their Chinese counterparts. The result is an eye-opening exploration of the potentialities in approaching cinema anew, especially in the photographic materiality following its digital turn.
In the 1980s, writers, filmmakers, and artists began to probe the contradictions in China’s urbanization policies and rhetoric. Powerful neorealist fiction, cinema, documentaries, paintings, photographs, performances, and installations contrasted forms of glittering urban renewal with the government’s inattention to a livable urban infrastructure. Narratives and images depicting the melancholy urban subject came to illustrate ethical quandaries raised by urban life. Visser relates her analysis of this art to major transformations in urban planning under global neoliberalism, to the development of cultural studies in the Chinese academy, and to ways that specific cities, particularly Beijing and Shanghai, figure in the cultural imagination. Despite the environmental and cultural destruction caused by China’s neoliberal policies, Visser argues for the emergence of a new urban self-awareness, one that offers creative resolutions for the dilemmas of urbanism through new forms of intellectual engagement in society and nascent forms of civic governance.
Hong Kong is perched on the fault line between China and the West, a Special Administrative Region of the PRC. Leo Ou-fan Lee offers an insider’s view of Hong Kong, capturing the history and culture that make his densely packed home city so different from its generic neighbors.
The search for an indigenous Hong Kong takes Lee to the wet markets and corner bookshops of congested Mong Kok, remote fishing villages and mountainside temples, teahouses and noodle stalls, Cantonese opera and Cantopop. But he also finds the “real” Hong Kong in a maze of interconnected shopping malls, a jungle of high-rise residential towers, and the neon glow of Chinese-owned skyscrapers in the Central Business District, where land development, global trade, capital accumulation, consumerism, and free-market competition trump every value—except family.
Lee illuminates the relationship between Hong Kong’s geography and its colonial experience, revisiting colonial life on the secluded Peak, in the opium-filled godowns along the harborfront, and in crowded, plague-infested tenements. He examines, with a critic’s eye, the “Hong Kong story” in film and fiction: romance in the bars and brothels of Wan Chai, crime in the walled city of Kowloon, ennui on the eve of the 1997 handover.
Whether viewed from Tsing Yi Bridge or the deck of the Star Ferry, from Victoria Peak or Lion Rock, Hong Kong sparkles here in all its multifaceted complexity, a city forever between worlds.
During China's late imperial period (roughly 1400-1900 CE), men would gather by the millions every two or three years outside official examination compounds sprinkled across China. Only one percent of candidates would complete the academic regimen that would earn them a post in the administrative bureaucracy. Civil Examinations assesses the role of education, examination, and China's civil service in fostering the world's first professional class based on demonstrated knowledge and skill.
While millions of men dreamed of the worldly advancement an imperial education promised, many more wondered what went on inside the prestigious walled-off examination compounds. As Benjamin A. Elman reveals, what occurred was the weaving of a complex social web. Civil examinations had been instituted in China as early as the seventh century CE, but in the Ming and Qing eras they were the nexus linking the intellectual, political, and economic life of imperial China. Local elites and members of the court sought to influence how the government regulated the classical curriculum and selected civil officials. As a guarantor of educational merit, civil examinations served to tie the dynasty to the privileged gentry and literati classes--both ideologically and institutionally.
China did away with its classical examination system in 1905. But this carefully balanced and constantly contested piece of social engineering, worked out over the course of centuries, was an early harbinger of the meritocratic regime of college boards and other entrance exams that undergirds higher education in much of the world today.
What is lost in translation may be a war, a world, a way of life. A unique look into the nineteenth-century clash of empires from both sides of the earthshaking encounter, this book reveals the connections between international law, modern warfare, and comparative grammar--and their influence on the shaping of the modern world in Eastern and Western terms.
The Clash of Empires brings to light the cultural legacy of sovereign thinking that emerged in the course of the violent meetings between the British Empire and the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). Lydia Liu demonstrates how the collision of imperial will and competing interests, rather than the civilizational attributes of existing nations and cultures, led to the invention of "China," "the East," "the West," and the modern notion of "the world" in recent history. Drawing on her archival research and comparative analyses of English--and Chinese--language texts, as well as their respective translations, she explores how the rhetoric of barbarity and civilization, friend and enemy, and discourses on sovereign rights, injury, and dignity were a central part of British imperial warfare. Exposing the military and philological--and almost always translingual--nature of the clash of empires, this book provides a startlingly new interpretation of modern imperial history.
Studies of collaboration have changed how the history of World War II in Europe is written, but for China and Japan this aspect of wartime conduct has remained largely unacknowledged. In a bold new work, Timothy Brook breaks the silence surrounding the sensitive topic of wartime collaboration between the Chinese and their Japanese occupiers.
Japan's attack on Shanghai in August 1937 led to the occupation of the Yangtze Delta. In spite of the legendary violence of the assault, Chinese elites throughout the delta came forward to work with the conquerors. Using archives on both sides of the conflict, Brook reconstructs the process of collaboration from Shanghai to Nanking. Collaboration proved to be politically unstable and morally awkward for both sides, provoking tensions that undercut the authority of the occupation state and undermined Japan's long-term prospects for occupying China.
This groundbreaking study mirrors the more familiar stories of European collaboration with the Nazis, showing how the Chinese were deeply troubled by their unavoidable cooperation with the occupiers. The comparison provides a point of entry into the difficult but necessary discussion about this long-ignored aspect of the war in the Pacific.
Wendy Gan’s Comic China investigates the circumstances and motivations of cross-cultural humor. How do works that trade in laughter shape our understanding of Western discourses about China? Is humor meant to be inclusive or exclusive? Does it protect or challenge the status quo? Gan suggests that the simple, straightforward laugh may actually be a far more intricate negotiation of power relations.
Gan unpacks texts by authors who had little real contact with China as well as writers whose proximity to China influenced their representations. Looking beyond the familiar canon of serious modernist texts and the Yellow Peril classics of popular fiction, Gan analyzes turn-of-the-twentieth-century musical comedies set in the Far East, Ernest Bramah’s chinoiserie-inspired tales, and interwar travel writing. She also considers the comic works of the missionary Arthur Henderson Smith, the former Maritime Customs Officer J.O.P. Bland, and the Shanghai journalist and advertising man Carl Crow.
Though it includes humor that is less than complimentary to the Chinese, Comic China reminds us that laughter is tied to our common humanity. Gan navigates the humor used in comic depictions ultimately to find, not superiority or ridicule, but common ground.
In the summer of 2005, distinguished geographer Yi-Fu Tuan ventured to China to speak at an international architectural conference, returning for the first time to the place he had left as a child sixty-four years before. He traveled from Beijing to Shanghai, addressing college audiences, floating down the Yangtze River on a riverboat, and visiting his former home in Chongqing.
In this enchanting volume, Tuan’s childhood memories and musings on the places encountered during this homecoming are interspersed with new lectures, engaging overarching principles of human geography as well as the changing Chinese landscape. Throughout, Tuan’s interactions with his hosts, with his colleague’s children, and even with a garrulous tour guide, offer insights into one who has spent his life studying place, culture, and self.
At the beginning of his trip, Tuan wondered if he would be a stranger among people who looked like him. By its end, he reevaluates his own self-definition as a hyphenated American and sheds new light on human identity’s complex roots in history, geography, and language.
Yi-Fu Tuan is author of Cosmos and Hearth, Dear Colleague, and Space and Place, all from Minnesota. He retired from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1998.
Sibao today is a cluster of impoverished villages in the mountains of western Fujian. Yet from the late seventeenth through the early twentieth century, it was home to a flourishing publishing industry. Through itinerant booksellers and branch bookshops managed by Sibao natives, this industry supplied much of south China with cheap educational texts, household guides, medical handbooks, and fortune-telling manuals.
It is precisely the ordinariness of Sibao imprints that make them valuable for the study of commercial publishing, the text-production process, and the geographical and social expansion of book culture in Chinese society. In a study with important implications for cultural and economic history, Cynthia Brokaw describes rural, lower-level publishing and bookselling operations at the end of the imperial period. Commerce in Culture traces how the poverty and isolation of Sibao necessitated a bare-bones approach to publishing and bookselling and how the Hakka identity of the Sibao publishers shaped the configuration of their distribution networks and even the nature of their publications.
Sibao's industry reveals two major trends in print culture: the geographical extension of commercial woodblock publishing to hinterlands previously untouched by commercial book culture and the related social penetration of texts to lower-status levels of the population.
How global health practices can end up reorganizing practices of care for the people and communities they seek to serve
Commodities of Care examines the unanticipated effects of global health interventions, ideas, and practices as they unfold in communities of men who have sex with men (MSM) in China. Targeted for the scaling-up of HIV testing, Elsa L. Fan examines how the impact of this initiative has transformed these men from subjects of care into commodities of care: through the use of performance-based financing tied to HIV testing, MSM have become a source of economic and political capital.
In ethnographic detail, Fan shows how this particular program, ushered in by global health donors, became the prevailing strategy to control the epidemic in China in the late 2000s. Fan examines the implementation of MSM testing and its effects among these men, arguing that the intervention produced new markets of men, driven by the push to meet testing metrics.
Fan shows how men who have sex with men in China came to see themselves as part of a global “MSM” category, adopting new selfhoods and socialities inextricably tied to HIV and to testing. Wider trends in global health programming have shaped national public health responses in China and, this book reveals, have radically altered the ways health, disease, and care are addressed.
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