front cover of Capitalism from Below
Capitalism from Below
Markets and Institutional Change in China
Victor Nee and Sonja Opper
Harvard University Press, 2012

More than 630 million Chinese have escaped poverty since the 1980s, reducing the fraction remaining from 82 to 10 percent of the population. This astonishing decline in poverty, the largest in history, coincided with the rapid growth of a private enterprise economy. Yet private enterprise in China emerged in spite of impediments set up by the Chinese government. How did private enterprise overcome these initial obstacles to become the engine of China’s economic miracle? Where did capitalism come from?

Studying over 700 manufacturing firms in the Yangzi region, Victor Nee and Sonja Opper argue that China’s private enterprise economy bubbled up from below. Through trial and error, entrepreneurs devised institutional innovations that enabled them to decouple from the established economic order to start up and grow small, private manufacturing firms. Barriers to entry motivated them to build their own networks of suppliers and distributors, and to develop competitive advantage in self-organized industrial clusters. Close-knit groups of like-minded people participated in the emergence of private enterprise by offering financing and establishing reliable business norms.

This rapidly growing private enterprise economy diffused throughout the coastal regions of China and, passing through a series of tipping points, eroded the market share of state-owned firms. Only after this fledgling economy emerged as a dynamic engine of economic growth, wealth creation, and manufacturing jobs did the political elite legitimize it as a way to jump-start China’s market society. Today, this private enterprise economy is one of the greatest success stories in the history of capitalism.

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Capitalizing China
Edited by Joseph P. H. Fan and Randall Morck
University of Chicago Press, 2012
China’s economic boom over the last two decades has taken many analysts by surprise, given the ongoing role of central government planning. Its current growth trajectory suggests that the size of its economy could soon surpass that of the United States. Some argue that continued growth and the expanding middle class will ultimately exert pressure on the government to bring about greater openness of the financial market.
 
To better understand China’s recent economic performance, this volume examines the distinctive system it has developed: “market socialism with Chinese characteristics.” While its formal institutional makeup resembles that of a free-market economy, many of its practices remain socialist, including strategically placed state-owned enterprises that wield influence both directly and through controlled business groups, and Communist Party cells whose purpose is to maintain control of many segments of the economy. China’s economic system, the contributors find, also retains many historical characteristics that play a central role in managing the economy. These and other issues are examined in chapters on China’s financial regulations, corporate governance codes, bankruptcy laws, taxation, and disclosure rules.
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Carbon Technocracy
Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia
Victor Seow
University of Chicago Press, 2021
A forceful reckoning with the relationship between energy and power through the history of what was once East Asia’s largest coal mine.

The coal-mining town of Fushun in China’s Northeast is home to a monstrous open pit. First excavated in the early twentieth century, this pit grew like a widening maw over the ensuing decades, as various Chinese and Japanese states endeavored to unearth Fushun’s purportedly “inexhaustible” carbon resources. Today, the depleted mine that remains is a wondrous and terrifying monument to fantasies of a fossil-fueled future and the technologies mobilized in attempts to turn those developmentalist dreams into reality.

In Carbon Technocracy, Victor Seow uses the remarkable story of the Fushun colliery to chart how the fossil fuel economy emerged in tandem with the rise of the modern technocratic state. Taking coal as an essential feedstock of national wealth and power, Chinese and Japanese bureaucrats, engineers, and industrialists deployed new technologies like open-pit mining and hydraulic stowage in pursuit of intensive energy extraction. But as much as these mine operators idealized the might of fossil fuel–driven machines, their extractive efforts nevertheless relied heavily on the human labor that those devices were expected to displace. Under the carbon energy regime, countless workers here and elsewhere would be subjected to invasive techniques of labor control, ever-escalating output targets, and the dangers of an increasingly exploited earth.

Although Fushun is no longer the coal capital it once was, the pattern of aggressive fossil-fueled development that led to its ascent endures. As we confront a planetary crisis precipitated by our extravagant consumption of carbon, it holds urgent lessons. This is a groundbreaking exploration of how the mutual production of energy and power came to define industrial modernity and the wider world that carbon made.
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Carbon Technocracy
Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia
Victor Seow
University of Chicago Press, 2021

Audiobook edition

A forceful reckoning with the relationship between energy and power through the history of what was once East Asia’s largest coal mine.


The coal-mining town of Fushun in China’s Northeast is home to a monstrous open pit. First excavated in the early twentieth century, this pit grew like a widening maw over the ensuing decades, as various Chinese and Japanese states endeavored to unearth Fushun’s purportedly “inexhaustible” carbon resources. Today, the depleted mine that remains is a wondrous and terrifying monument to fantasies of a fossil-fueled future and the technologies mobilized in attempts to turn those developmentalist dreams into reality.

In Carbon Technocracy, Victor Seow uses the remarkable story of the Fushun colliery to chart how the fossil fuel economy emerged in tandem with the rise of the modern technocratic state. Taking coal as an essential feedstock of national wealth and power, Chinese and Japanese bureaucrats, engineers, and industrialists deployed new technologies like open-pit mining and hydraulic stowage in pursuit of intensive energy extraction. But as much as these mine operators idealized the might of fossil fuel–driven machines, their extractive efforts nevertheless relied heavily on the human labor that those devices were expected to displace. Under the carbon energy regime, countless workers here and elsewhere would be subjected to invasive techniques of labor control, ever-escalating output targets, and the dangers of an increasingly exploited earth.

Although Fushun is no longer the coal capital it once was, the pattern of aggressive fossil-fueled development that led to its ascent endures. As we confront a planetary crisis precipitated by our extravagant consumption of carbon, it holds urgent lessons. This is a groundbreaking exploration of how the mutual production of energy and power came to define industrial modernity and the wider world that carbon made.

[more]

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Career Patterns in the Ch’ing Dynasty
The Office of the Governor General
Raymond W. Chu and William G. Saywell
University of Michigan Press, 1981
The office of governor general (tsung-tu) was the highest provincial post throughout the Ch’ing dynasty. As such, it was a vital link in the control of a vast empire by a very small and alien ruling elite. This is primarily a biographical and statistical analysis of the incumbents of that office. By analyzing the biographical data of those who held the position of governor-general, much may be learned about the nature of the office itself. However, the main objective of the study is to provide information on career patterns, that is, the variety of different posts held from the first official appointment to that of governor-general, of an important cross section of successful Ch’ing bureaucrats. By plotting and analyzing the different patterns their official careers took, we should be able to determine what kind of men reached the top of China’s provincial and national administration during the final centuries of China’s imperial history; the qualifications that were required; the factors which prompted rapid promotion or sudden disgrace. We should also be able to determine the extent to which these and other factors varied markedly among Manchu, Mongol, Chinese Bannerman, and Han incumbents and whether changes throughout the dynasty can be detected in policies concerning the office or in the career patterns of its personnel. If such detection is possible, this study may lend support to the view that late imperial China was not static, but a society undergoing significant changes. [xi]
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Celestial Masters
History and Ritual in Early Daoist Communities
Terry F. Kleeman
Harvard University Press, 2016

In 142 CE, the divine Lord Lao descended to Mount Cranecall (Sichuan province) to establish a new covenant with humanity through a man named Zhang Ling, the first Celestial Master. Facing an impending apocalypse caused by centuries of sin, Zhang and his descendants forged a communal faith centering on a universal priesthood, strict codes of conduct, and healing through the confession of sins; this faith was based upon a new, bureaucratic relationship with incorruptible supernatural administrators. By the fourth century, Celestial Master Daoism had spread to all parts of China, and has since played a key role in China’s religious and intellectual history.

Celestial Masters is the first book in any Western language devoted solely to the founding of the world religion Daoism. It traces the movement from the mid-second century CE through the sixth century, examining all surviving primary documents in both secular and canonical sources to provide a comprehensive account of the development of this poorly understood religion. It also provides a detailed analysis of ritual life within the movement, covering the roles of common believer or Daoist citizen, novice, and priest or libationer.

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Celestial Masters
History and Ritual in Early Daoist Communities
Terry F. Kleeman
Harvard University Press

In 142 CE, the divine Lord Lao descended to Mount Cranecall (Sichuan province) to establish a new covenant with humanity through a man named Zhang Ling, the first Celestial Master. Facing an impending apocalypse caused by centuries of sin, Zhang and his descendants forged a communal faith centering on a universal priesthood, strict codes of conduct, and healing through the confession of sins; this faith was based upon a new, bureaucratic relationship with incorruptible supernatural administrators. By the fourth century, Celestial Master Daoism had spread to all parts of China, and has since played a key role in China’s religious and intellectual history.

Celestial Masters is the first book in any Western language devoted solely to the founding of the world religion Daoism. It traces the movement from the mid-second century CE through the sixth century, examining all surviving primary documents in both secular and canonical sources to provide a comprehensive account of the development of this poorly understood religion. It also provides a detailed analysis of ritual life within the movement, covering the roles of common believer or Daoist citizen, novice, and priest or libationer.

[more]

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Celluloid China
Cinematic Encounters with Culture and Society
Harry H. Kuoshu
Southern Illinois University Press, 2002

Celluloid China: Cinematic Encounters with Culture and Society by Harry H. Kuoshu is a lucid introduc­tion to the cinema of mainland China from the early 1930s to the early 1990s. Emphasizing both film contexts and film texts, this study invites film scholars and students to a broad cinematic analysis that includes investigations of cultural, cross-cultural, intellectual, social, ethnic, and political issues. Such a holistic evaluation allows for a better understanding of both the genesis of a special kind of film art from the People’s Republic of China and the culture exemplified in those films.

The fifteen films include: Two Stage Sisters; Hibis­cus Town; Farewell My Concubine; Street Angel; Three Women; Human, Woman, Demon; Judou; Girl from Hunan; Sacrificed Youth; Horse Thief; Yellow Earth; Old Well; Red Sorghum; Black Cannon Incident; and Good Morning, Beijing. Discussions of each film have an introduction, passages from the director’s own notes whenever available, and a scholarly article. Discussion ques­tions are found in an appendix. Within its complete bibliography, the book also features a suggested read­ing list for Chinese film classes. Celluloid China is the first book to provide such an exhaustive study of the art and cultural context of Chinese cinema.

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Central Documents and Politburo Politics in China
Kenneth Lieberthal, with the assistance of James Tong and Sai-cheung Yeung
University of Michigan Press, 1978
Virtually every analysis of Chinese politics views the Politburo as the nerve center of the system, but questions abound as to how this center governs itself and how it interacts with the system around it. Specifically, how much consultation occurs during the drafting of major Politburo documents, and who is brought into this process? How is information channeled up to this body, and what are the rules that govern the access of the Politburo members themselves to data generated by the bureaucracies? How are the political strategies of individual leaders and political factions attuned to this system of information channeling? What types of decisions are reached by the Politburo? To whom are they communicated? How rigidly must they be followed? How institutionalized is this entire decision making system, and has it become more—or less—institutionalized over the years? How has the factional legacy of the Cultural Revolution affected its mode of operations? Indeed, in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, how much in control of the system has the Politburo itself been?
Central Documents in Politburo Politics in China seeks to better understand these questions by analyzing a particular stream of largely bureaucratic communications in the Chinese system: the so-called “Central Documents” (CDs). This is a series of documents through which the top Party leadership directly communicates with the rest of the political system. [1]
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A Century of Travels in China
Critical Essays on Travel Writing from the 1840s to the 1940s
Edited by Douglas Kerr and Julia Kuehn
Hong Kong University Press, 2007
Writings of travelers have shaped ideas about an evolving China, while preconceived ideas about China also shaped the way they saw the country. A Century of Travels in China explores the impressions of these writers on various themes, from Chinese cities and landscapes to the work of Europeans abroad. From the time of the first Opium War to the declaration of the People’s Republic, China’s history has been one of extraordinary change and stubborn continuities. At the same time, the country has beguiled, scared and puzzled people in the West. The Victorian public admired and imitated Chinese fashions, in furniture and design, gardens and clothing, while maintaining a generally negative idea of the Chinese empire as pagan, backward and cruel. In the first half of the twentieth century, the fascination continued. Most foreigners were aware that revolutionary changes were taking place in Chinese politics and society, yet most still knew very little about the country. But what about those few people from the English-speaking world who had first-hand experience of the place? What did they have to say about the “real” China? To answer this question, we have to turn to the travel accounts and memoirs of people who went to see for themselves, during China’s most traumatic century. While this book represents the work of expert scholars, it is also accessible to non-specialists with an interest in travel writing and China, and care has been taken to explain the critical terms and ideas deployed in the essays from recent scholarship of the travel genre.
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A Certain Justice
Toward an Ecology of the Chinese Legal Imagination
Haiyan Lee
University of Chicago Press, 2023
A much-needed account of the hierarchy of justice that defines China’s unique political-legal culture.

To many outsiders, China has an image as a realm of Oriental despotism where law is at best window dressing and at worst an instrument of coercion and tyranny. In this highly original contribution to the interdisciplinary field of law and humanities, Haiyan Lee contends that this image arises from a skewed understanding of China’s political-legal culture, particularly the failure to distinguish what she calls high justice and low justice.

In the Chinese legal imagination, Lee shows, justice is a vertical concept, with low justice between individuals firmly subordinated to the high justice of the state. China’s political-legal culture is marked by a mistrust of law’s powers, and as a result, it privileges substantive over procedural justice. Calling on a wide array of narratives—stories of crime and punishment, subterfuge and exposé, guilt and redemption—A Certain Justice helps us recognize the fight for justice outside the familiar arenas of liberal democracy and the rule of law.
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front cover of Challenging Beijing's Mandate of Heaven
Challenging Beijing's Mandate of Heaven
Taiwan's Sunflower Movement and Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement
Ming-sho Ho
Temple University Press, 2019

In 2014, the Sunflower Movement in Taiwan grabbed international attention as citizen protesters demanded the Taiwan government withdraw its free-trade agreement with China. In that same year, in Hong Kong, the Umbrella Movement sustained 79 days of demonstrations, protests that demanded genuine universal suffrage in electing Hong Kong’s chief executive. It too, became an international incident before it collapsed. Both of these student-led movements featured large-scale and intense participation and had deep and far-reaching consequences. But how did two massive and disruptive protests take place in culturally conservative societies? And how did the two “occupy”-style protests against Chinese influences on local politics arrive at such strikingly divergent results?

Challenging Beijing’s Mandate of Heaven aims to make sense of the origins, processes, and outcomes of these eventful protests in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Ming-sho Ho compares the dynamics of the two movements, from the existing networks of activists that preceded protest, to the perceived threats that ignited the movements, to the government strategies with which they contended, and to the nature of their coordination. Moreover, he contextualizes these protests in a period of global prominence for student, occupy, and anti-globalization protests and situates them within social movement studies.

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Chang Chih-tung and Educational Reform in China
William Ayers
Harvard University Press, 1971

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Chang Ch’un-ch’iao and Shanghai’s January Revolution
Andrew G. Walder
University of Michigan Press, 1977
Shanghai’s January Revolution was a highly visible and, by all accounts, crucially important event in China’s Cultural Revolution. Its occurrence, along with the subsequent attempt to establish a “commune” form of municipal government, has greatly shaped our understanding both of the goals originally envisaged for the Cultural Revolution by its leaders and of the political positions held by the new corps of Party leaders thrust upward during its course—most notably Chang Ch’un ch’iao. At this interpretive level, the events in Shanghai seem to embody in microcosm the issues and conflicts in Chinese politics during the Cultural Revolution as a whole, while at the same time shaping our conception of what these larger issues and conflicts were. At the more general, theoretical level, however, the events in Shanghai provide us with an unusual opportunity (thanks to Red Guard raids on Party offices) to view the internal workings of the Party organization under a period of stress and to observe unrestrained interest group formation and mass political conflict through the press accounts provided by these unofficial groups themselves. The January Revolution thus provides us with an opportunity to develop better our more abstract, theoretical understanding of the functioning of the Chinese political system and the dynamics of the social system in which it operates. [1]
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Change
Mo Yan
Seagull Books, 2010

In Change, Mo Yan, the 2012 Nobel Laureate in Literature, personalizes the political and social changes in his country over the past few decades in this novella disguised as autobiography—or vice-versa. Unlike most historical narratives from China, which are pegged to political events, Change is a representative of “people’s history,” a bottom-up rather than top-down view of a country in flux. By moving back and forth in time and focusing on small events and everyday people, Mo Yan breathes life into history by describing the effects of larger-than-life events on the average citizen.

“Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives, Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition.”— Nobel Committee for Literature


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Changing Meanings of Citizenship in Modern China
Merle Goldman
Harvard University Press, 2002

This collection of essays addresses the meaning and practice of political citizenship in China over the past century, raising the question of whether reform initiatives in citizenship imply movement toward increased democratization.

After slow but steady moves toward a new conception of citizenship before 1949, there was a nearly complete reversal during the Mao regime, with a gradual reemergence beginning in the Deng era of concerns with the political rights as well as the duties of citizens. The distinguished contributors to this volume address how citizenship has been understood in China from the late imperial era to the present day, the processes by which citizenship has been fostered or undermined, the influence of the government, the different development of citizenship in mainland China and Taiwan, and the prospects of strengthening citizens' rights in contemporary China.

Valuable for its century-long perspective and for placing the historical patterns of Chinese citizenship within the context of European and American experiences, Changing Meanings of Citizenship in Modern China investigates a critical issue for contemporary Chinese society.

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Charisma and Compassion
Cheng Yen and the Buddhist Tzu Chi Movement
C. Julia Huang
Harvard University Press, 2009

The Venerable Cheng-yen is an unassuming Taiwanese Buddhist nun who leads a worldwide social welfare movement with five million devotees in over thirty countries—with its largest branch in the United States. Tzu-Chi (Compassion Relief) began as a tiny, grassroots women's charitable group; today in Taiwan it runs three state-of-the-art hospitals, a television channel, and a university. Cheng-yen, who has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, is a leader in Buddhist peace activism and has garnered recognition by Business Week as an entrepreneurial star.

Based on extensive fieldwork in Taiwan, Malaysia, Japan, and the United States, this book explores the transformation of Tzu-Chi. C. Julia Huang offers a vivid ethnography that examines the movement’s organization, its relationship with NGOs and humanitarian organizations, and the nature of its Buddhist transnationalism, which is global in scope and local in practice. Tzu-Chi's identity is intimately tied to its leader, and Huang illuminates Cheng-yen's successful blending of charisma and compassion and the personal relationship between leader and devotee that defines the movement.

This important book sheds new light on religion and cultural identity and contributes to our understanding of the nature of charisma and the role of faith-based organizations.

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Chasing the American Dream in China
Chinese Americans in the Ancestral Homeland
Leslie Kim Wang
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Few studies have highlighted the stories of middle-class children of immigrants who move to their ancestral homelands—countries with which they share cultural ties but haven’t necessarily had direct contact. Chasing the American Dream in China addresses this gap by examining the lives of highly educated American-born Chinese (ABC) professionals who “return” to the People’s Republic of China to build their careers. Analyzing the motivations and experiences of these individuals deepens our knowledge about transnationalism among the second-generation as they grapple with complex issues of identity and societal belonging in the ethnic homeland. This book demonstrates how these professional migrants maneuver between countries and cultures to further their careers and maximize opportunities in the rapidly changing global economy. When used strategically, the versatile nature of their ethnic identities positions them as indispensable bridges between the global superpowers of China and the United States in their competition for global dominance.
 
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Chen Jiongming and the Federalist Movement
Regional Leadership and Nation Building in Early Republican China
Leslie H. Dingyan Chen
University of Michigan Press, 2000
The local self-government movement in China began in the late Qing, and by the Revolution of 1911 no fewer than five thousand self-government councils had formed around the country. While the early revolutionaries cherished the idea of a federated state, federalist and centralist leaders engaged in a growing conflict that culminated in the defeat of federalism in the mid-1920s. The story of this movement has since remained hidden behind Nationalist and Communist accounts of the early revolutionary struggle.
Chen Jiongming and the Federalist Movement reopens the record on federalist efforts from the perspective of the son of one of the movement’s key figures. Challenging the accepted accounts of the federalist movement, Leslie Chen focuses on his father Chen Jiongming's policies and administrative achievements in Fujian and Guangdong. Chen Jiongming played a key role in the tumultuous politics of southern China from 1909 until his death in 1933. He built a relationship and then notoriously broke with Sun Yat-sen, the leader of the centralist revolutionaries. Leslie Chen argues that his father's attempts to create a democratic federalist system in Guangdong were aimed at providing a model for China as a whole. His account is lively and readable; it gives an intimate, yet historically accurate, account of Chen Jiongming's considerable role in early twentieth-century Chinese history.
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Chen Yi
Leta E. Miller and J. Michele Edwards
University of Illinois Press, 2020

Winner of the Leila Webster Memorial Music Award for the International Alliance for Women in Music of the 2022 Pauline Alderman Awards for Outstanding Scholarship on Women in Music

Chen Yi is the most prominent woman among the renowned group of new wave composers who came to the US from mainland China in the early 1980s. Known for her creative output and a distinctive merging of Chinese and Western influences, Chen built a musical language that references a breathtaking range of sources and crisscrosses geographical and musical borders without eradicating them.

Leta E. Miller and J. Michele Edwards provide an accessible guide to the composer's background and her more than 150 works. Extensive interviews with Chen complement in-depth analyses of selected pieces from Chen's solos for Western or Chinese instruments, chamber works, choral and vocal pieces, and compositions scored for wind ensemble, chamber orchestra, or full orchestra. The authors highlight Chen's compositional strategies, her artistic elaborations, and the voice that links her earliest and most recent music. A concluding discussion addresses questions related to Chen's music and issues such as gender, ethnicity and nationality, transnationalism, border crossing, diaspora, exoticism, and identity.

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Cherishing Antiquity
The Cultural Construction of an Ancient Chinese Kingdom
Olivia Milburn
Harvard University Press, 2013
Cherishing Antiquity describes the commemoration within Chinese literature and culture of the southern kingdom of Wu, which collapsed in 473 BCE. The sudden rise and tragic fall of Wu within the space of just over one century would inspire numerous memorials in and around the city of Suzhou, once the capital of this ancient kingdom. A variety of physical structures, including temples, shrines, steles, and other monuments, were erected in memory of key figures in the kingdom's history. These sites inspired further literary representations in poetry and prose—musings on the exoticism, glamour, great wealth, and hideous end of the last king of Wu. Through an analysis first of the history of Wu as recorded in ancient Chinese texts and then of its literary legacy, Olivia Milburn illuminates the remarkable cultural endurance of this powerful but short-lived kingdom.
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Cherishing Men from Afar
Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793
James L. Hevia
Duke University Press, 1995
In the late eighteenth century two expansive Eurasian empires met formally for the first time—the Manchu or Qing dynasty of China and the maritime empire of Great Britain. The occasion was the mission of Lord Macartney, sent by the British crown and sponsored by the East India Company, to the court of the Qianlong emperor. Cherishing Men from Afar looks at the initial confrontation between these two empires from a historical perspective informed by the insights of contemporary postcolonial criticism and cultural studies.
The history of this encounter, like that of most colonial and imperial encounters, has traditionally been told from the Europeans’ point of view. In this book, James L. Hevia consults Chinese sources—many previously untranslated—for a broader sense of what Qing court officials understood; and considers these documents in light of a sophisticated anthropological understanding of Qing ritual processes and expectations. He also reexamines the more familiar British accounts in the context of recent critiques of orientalism and work on the development of the bourgeois subject. Hevia’s reading of these sources reveals the logics of two discrete imperial formations, not so much impaired by the cultural misunderstandings that have historically been attributed to their meeting, but animated by differing ideas about constructing relations of sovereignty and power. His examination of Chinese and English-language scholarly treatments of this event, both historical and contemporary, sheds new light on the place of the Macartney mission in the dynamics of colonial and imperial encounters.
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Chiang Kai-shek’s Politics of Shame
Leadership, Legacy, and National Identity in China
Grace C. Huang
Harvard University Press, 2021

Once a powerful figure who reversed the disintegration of China and steered the country to Allied victory in World War II, Chiang Kai-shek fled into exile following his 1949 defeat in the Chinese civil war. As attention pivoted to Mao Zedong’s communist experiment, Chiang was relegated to the dustbin of history.

In Chiang Kai-shek’s Politics of Shame, Grace C. Huang reconsiders Chiang’s leadership and legacy by drawing on an extraordinary and uncensored collection of his diaries, telegrams, and speeches stitched together by his secretaries. She paints a new, intriguing portrait of this twentieth-century leader who advanced a Confucian politics of shame to confront Japanese incursion into China and urge unity among his people. In also comparing Chiang’s response to imperialism to those of Mao, Yuan Shikai, and Mahatma Gandhi, Huang widens the implications of her findings to explore alternatives to Western expressions of nationalism and modernity and reveal how leaders of vulnerable states can use potent cultural tools to inspire their country and contribute to an enduring national identity.

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Chiang Kai-shek’s Politics of Shame
Leadership, Legacy, and National Identity in China
Grace C. Huang
Harvard University Press, 2021

Once a powerful figure who reversed the disintegration of China and steered the country to Allied victory in World War II, Chiang Kai-shek fled into exile following his 1949 defeat in the Chinese civil war. As attention pivoted to Mao Zedong’s communist experiment, Chiang was relegated to the dustbin of history.

In Chiang Kai-shek’s Politics of Shame, Grace C. Huang reconsiders Chiang’s leadership and legacy by drawing on an extraordinary and uncensored collection of his diaries, telegrams, and speeches stitched together by his secretaries. She paints a new, intriguing portrait of this twentieth-century leader who advanced a Confucian politics of shame to confront Japanese incursion into China and urge unity among his people. In also comparing Chiang’s response to imperialism to those of Mao, Yuan Shikai, and Mahatma Gandhi, Huang widens the implications of her findings to explore alternatives to Western expressions of nationalism and modernity and reveal how leaders of vulnerable states can use potent cultural tools to inspire their country and contribute to an enduring national identity.

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Chiang Yee
The Silent Traveller from the East--A Cultural Biography
Zheng, Da
Rutgers University Press, 2010
A young man arrives in England in the 1930s, knowing few words of the English language. Yet, two years later he writes a successful English book on Chinese art, and within the following decade publishes more than a dozen others. This is the true story of Chiang Yee, a renowned writer, artist, and worldwide traveler, best known for the Silent Traveller series--stories of England, the United States, Ireland, France, Japan, and Australia--all written in his humorous, delightfully refreshing, and enlightening literary style.

This biography is more than a recounting of extraordinary accomplishments. It also embraces the transatlantic life experience of Yee who traveled from China to England and then on to the United States, where he taught at Columbia University, to his return to China in 1975, after a forty-two year absence. Interwoven is the history of the communist revolution in China; the battle to save England during World War II; the United States during the McCarthy red scare era; and, eventually, thawing Sino-American relations in the 1970s. Da Zheng uncovers Yee's encounters with racial exclusion and immigration laws, displacement, exile, and the pain and losses he endured hidden behind a popular public image.

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China, 1898-1912
The Xinzheng Revolution and Japan
Douglas Reynolds
Harvard University Press, 1993

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China
A New History
John King Fairbank
Harvard University Press, 1992
THIS EDITION HAS BEEN REPLACED BY A NEWER EDITION.
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China
A New History, Second Enlarged Edition
John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman
Harvard University Press, 2006
John King Fairbank was the West's doyen on China, and this book is the full and final expression of his lifelong engagement with this vast ancient civilization. It remains a masterwork without parallel. The distinguished historian Merle Goldman brings the book up to date, covering reforms in the post-Mao period through the early years of the twenty-first century, including the leadership of Hu Jintao. She also provides an epilogue discussing the changes in contemporary China that will shape the nation in the years to come.
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China
Adapting the Past, Confronting the Future
Thomas Buoye, Kirk Denton, Bruce Dickson, Barry Naughton, and Martin K. Whyte, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2002
Completely updated, China: Adapting the Past, Confronting the Future is the latest in a series of classroom units on China from the Center of Chinese Studies at The University of Michigan. It is not only ideal for courses on contemporary China but also an excellent supplement for courses in area studies, international affairs and economics, and women's studies.
Each section, in addition to essay and excerpts, also includes a bibliography of additional topical works as well as suggestions for complementary video and internet teaching resources.
Geography and History: Presents a broad sketch of Chinese history from earliest times and a detailed discussion of the forces that have shaped modern Chinese history. Geography sharpens the focus to China’s rich ecological and ethnic diversity.
Politics: Addresses political issues in post-Tiananmen China, including corruption, human rights, US-China relations, democratic reform, and religious and political dissidents.
Society: Examines contemporary social problems that have emerged in the post-Mao era, including divorce, migrant labor, family planning, problems facing Chinese women, and the proliferation of Chinese and Western religions.
Economy: Assesses the post-Mao economy after twenty years of experimentation and reform, including development of private enterprises, income disparities, case studies in rural and urban economic development, and the prospects for future growth.
Culture: Reviews 20th century Chinese literature, the intersection between politics and the arts, the explosion of popular culture, and changing visual culture in modern China.
Future Trends: Explores the prospects for democratization, generational change in leadership, the direction of modernization, and China’s prospects for political liberalization.
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China
An Introduction to the Culture and People
Kai Strittmatter
Haus Publishing, 2010
It's time we got to know a little more about the Chinese. Did you know they don't eat soup, they drink it? That their surnames come before their first names? That their good sense is to be found not in their heads but in their hearts? Or that white is their colour of mourning? This guide to avoiding the numerous pitfalls of Chinese etiquette is both amusing and informative. The writer and journalist Kai Strittmatter lived and worked in China for ten years. This amusing, affectionate and perceptive book provides a fascinating guide to this lively, sociable and friendly people and their complex and often contradictory society. As the author says: "Be prepared for everything when you come to Beijing. It really is unbelievable what can happen here." The new material in this edition takes a critical look at the challenges posed by this, the next global superpower.
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China and Albert Einstein
The Reception of the Physicist and His Theory in China, 1917–1979
Danian Hu
Harvard University Press, 2005

China and Albert Einstein is the first extensive study in English or Chinese of China’s reception of the celebrated physicist and his theory of relativity. Tracing the influence of Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century and Western missionaries and educators in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as they introduced key concepts of Western physical science and paved the way for Einstein’s radical new ideas, Danian Hu shows us that Chinese receptivity was fostered by the trickle of Chinese students sent abroad for study beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and by the openness of the May Fourth Movement (1916–1923).

In a series of biographical studies of Chinese physicists, Hu describes the Chinese assimilation of relativity and explains how Chinese physicists offered arguments and theories of their own. Hu’s account concludes with the troubling story of the fate of foreign ideas such as Einstein’s in the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), when the theory of relativity was denigrated along with Einstein’s ideas on democracy and world peace.

China and Albert Einstein is an important contribution to Einstein studies and a landmark work in the history of Chinese science.

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China and Charles Darwin
James Reeve Pusey
Harvard University Press, 1983

Although Charles Darwin never visited China, his ideas landed there with force. Darwinism was the first great Western theory to make an impact on the Chinese and, from 1895 until at least 1921, when Marxism gained a formal foothold, it was the dominant Western “ism” influencing Chinese politics and thought. The authority of Darwin, sometimes misinterpreted, influenced reformers and revolutionaries and paved the way for Chinese Marxism and the thought of Mao Tse-tung.

This study evaluates Darwin’s theory of evolution as a stimulus to Chinese political changes and philosophic challenge to traditional Chinese beliefs. James Pusey bases his analysis on a survey of journals issued from 1896 to 1910 and, after a break for revolutionary action, from 1915 to 1926, with emphasis on the era between the Sino–Japanese War and the Republican Revolution. The story of Darwinism in China involves, among others, the most famous figures of modern Chinese intellectual history.

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China and Christianity
The Missionary Movement and the Growth of Chinese Antiforeignism, 1860–1870
Paul A. Cohen
Harvard University Press

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China and Gardens of Europe of the Eighteenth Century
Osvald Siren
Harvard University Press, 1990

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China and Great Britain
The Diplomacy of Commercial Relations, 1860–1864
Britten Dean
Harvard University Press, 1974
Based on unpublished as well as published Chinese and British archival materials, this book focuses on the negotiations for the implementation of the commercial provision of the Treaty of Tientsin. Topics studies in detail include the opening of the Yangtze River to trade, problems in the river trade, revisions of the river trade regulations, and the opening of the bean trade at the northern ports to British shipping. A concluding chapter places Sino-British commercial policies within the context of Britain's overall China policy and within China's overall foreign policy.
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China and Japan
Facing History
Ezra F. Vogel
Harvard University Press, 2019

A Financial Times “Summer Books” Selection

“Will become required reading.”
Times Literary Supplement


“Elegantly written…with a confidence that comes from decades of deep research on the topic, illustrating how influence and power have waxed and waned between the two countries.”
—Rana Mitter, Financial Times


China and Japan have cultural and political connections that stretch back fifteen hundred years, but today their relationship is strained. China’s military buildup deeply worries Japan, while Japan’s brutal occupation of China in World War II remains an open wound. In recent years both countries have insisted that the other side must openly address the flashpoints of the past before relations can improve.

Boldly tackling the most contentious chapters in this long and tangled relationship, Ezra Vogel uses the tools of a master historian to examine key turning points in Sino–Japanese history. Gracefully pivoting from past to present, he argues that for the sake of a stable world order, these two Asian giants must reset their relationship.

“A sweeping, often fascinating, account…Impressively researched and smoothly written.”
Japan Times

“Vogel uses the powerful lens of the past to frame contemporary Chinese–Japanese relations…[He] suggests that over the centuries—across both the imperial and the modern eras—friction has always dominated their relations.”
—Sheila A. Smith, Foreign Affairs

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China and Japan in the Global Setting
Akira Iriye
Harvard University Press

The relationship between China and Japan remains among the most significant of all the world’s bilateral affairs—yet it is also the most tortured and the least understood. Akira Iriye adds brilliant clarity to the past century of Chinese–Japanese interactions in this masterful interpretive survey.

Placing the relationship within its global context, he outlines three distinct periods in the history of these Asian giants. From the 1880s to World War I, the two nations struggled for power. Armaments, war strategies, and security measures played pivotal roles, reflecting the importance 0f military calculations in a world dominated by Western governments.

In the second period, that between the two World Wars, Iriye illuminates the dominant role of culture and the stress on internationalism. China’s continuing literary influence, an exchange of ideas and students reforms such as Japan’s Taisho democracy and China’s May Fourth movement, and both nations’ bid for racial equality in the West profoundly affected these interwar years.

The third period reaches from the end of World War II through the present day, and is characterized by exchanges of an economic nature: trade, shipping, investment, and emigration. The author discusses the results of China’s civil war, the rise and decline 0f the Cold War in the West, and the cultural and ecological problems brought by Japan’s spiraling economic development. But economic ties remain deeply entwined with cultural concerns, and ultimately, Iriye stresses, the future of China and Japan depends on the successful cultural interdependence of what may be the most significant pair of countries in the world today.

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China and Other Matters
Benjamin I. Schwartz
Harvard University Press

These writings, representing over a generation of work by one of our most acute commentators on Chinese history, are collected here for the first time and introduced with a masterly prologue. They cut across the boundaries of different fields of knowledge to better understand modern China and traditional Chinese culture.

Schwartz's writings are deeply concerned with the conceptual frameworks and presumptions which we as twentieth-century Westerners bring to bear in our study of foreign cultures. He brings the entire complexity concerning modernity to his analysis of the millennial political, social, and cultural history of China.

This is also an excavation of the conscious life of the Chinese past, an interpretation of the persistent dominant cultural and sociopolitical orientations of Chinese culture. The constancies of behavior and attitudes are made plain in the contingencies and complexities of short-durational and generational history.

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China and the Barbarians
Resisting the Western World Order
Henk Schulte Nordholt
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
Since times immemorial China regarded its culture, philosophy and statecraft as superior to all other nations, hence the saying Hua Yi Zhi Bian ( 華夷之辨)- China and the barbarians are different. In the so-called ‘Age of Humiliation’ (1839-1949), Western and Japanese imperialists reduced the old empire to a semi-colony. China has now regained its economic and military strength, but what drives its domestic and foreign policy? President Xi Jinping has declared that ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era’ is at hand, but China can better be described as a country in search of a new identity. The philosopher Tu Weiming sees China as a battlefield of Socialism, Liberalism and Confucianism. The outcome of this struggle will have profound repercussions. Continuation of the present policy will only lead to increased tensions with its neighbours, because the Communist Party claims that only she can restore China’s rightful position under heaven. Beijing’s land reclamation in the South China Sea and the ‘One Belt, One Road’ initiative are foremost driven by a yearning to restore the days of China’s imperial grandeur. If China choses the ‘third way’ of blending the Confucian meritocratic tradition with a western style representative government, a clash with its neighbours and the United States can be avoided. China and the barbarians offers a fascinating insight into the thinking of China’s philosophers and powerbrokers of the past and present. Interviews with eight prominent Chinese intellectuals add an authentic ring to this book.
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China and the Cholera Pandemic
Restructuring Society under Mao
Xiaoping Fang
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021
Winner, 2022 Outstanding Academic Title, CHOICE Awards

Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward campaign organized millions of Chinese peasants into communes in a misguided attempt to rapidly collectivize agriculture with disastrous effects. Catastrophic famine lingered as the global cholera pandemic of the early 1960s spread rampantly through the infected waters of southeastern coastal China. Confronted with a political crisis and the seventh global cholera pandemic in recorded history, the communist government committed to social restructuring in order to affirm its legitimacy and prevent transmission of the disease. Focusing on the Wenzhou Prefecture in Zhejiang Province, the area most seriously stricken by cholera at the time, Xiaoping Fang demonstrates how China’s pandemic was far more than a health incident; it became a significant social and political influence during a dramatic transition for the People’s Republic.

China and the Cholera Pandemic reveals how disease control and prevention, executed through the government’s large-scale, clandestine anticholera campaign, were integral components of its restructuring initiatives, aimed at restoring social order. The subsequent rise of an emergency disciplinary health state furthered these aims through quarantine and isolation, which profoundly impacted the social epidemiology of the region, dividing Chinese society and reinforcing hierarchies according to place, gender, and socioeconomic status.
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China and the International Order
Michael J. Mazarr
RAND Corporation, 2018
As economic power diffuses across more countries and China becomes more dependent on the world economy, Chinese leaders are being forced to abandon their largely passive approach to global governance. This report analyzes China’s interests and behavior to evaluate both the recent history of its interactions with the postwar international order and possible future trajectories. It also draws implications from that analysis for future U.S. policy.
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China and the Internet
Using New Media for Development and Social Change
Song Shi
Rutgers University Press, 2024
Two oversimplified narratives have long dominated news reports and academic studies of China’s Internet: one lauding its potentials to boost commerce, the other bemoaning state control and measures against the forces of political transformations. This bifurcation obscures the complexity of the dynamic forces operating on the Chinese Internet and the diversity of Internet-related phenomena. China and the Internet analyzes how Chinese activists, NGOs, and government offices have used the Internet to fight rural malnutrition, the digital divide, the COVID-19 pandemic, and other urgent problems affecting millions of people. It presents five theoretically informed case studies of how new media have been used in interventions for development and social change, including how activists battled against COVID-19. In addition, this book applies a Communication for Development approach to examine the use and impact of China’s Internet. Although it is widely used internationally in Internet studies, Communication for Development has not been rigorously applied in studies of China’s Internet. This approach offers a new perspective to examine the Internet and related phenomena in Chinese society.
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China and the Twenty-first-Century Crisis
Minqi Li
Pluto Press, 2015
Most discussions of the global financial crisis take the United States as their focus, both for analyzing what went wrong and for making plans to avoid similar mistakes in the future. But that may not be the case next time: as Minq Li argues convincingly in China and the Twenty-first-Century Crisis, by the time of inevitable next crisis, China will likely be at the epicenter.
 
Li roots his argument in an analysis of the political and economic imbalances in China that would exacerbate a crisis, and possibly even precipitate a full collapse—and he shows in detail the reasons why that collapse could happen much more quickly than anyone imagines. Writing from a Marxist and ecologically oriented perspective, Li shows unequivocally that the limits to capitalism are fast approaching, and that events in China—essentially the last great frontier for capitalist expansion—are likely to be pivotal.
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China and the West, 1858-1861
The Origins of the Tsungli Yamen
Masataka Banno
Harvard University Press

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China and the West
Music, Representation, and Reception
Hon-Lun Yang and Michael Saffle, editors
University of Michigan Press, 2017
Western music reached China nearly four centuries ago, with the arrival of Christian missionaries, yet only within the last century has Chinese music absorbed its influence. As China and the West demonstrates, the emergence of “Westernized” music from China—concurrent with the technological advances that have made global culture widely accessible—has not established a prominent presence in the West.

China and the West brings together essays on centuries of Sino-Western musical exchange by musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and music theorists from around the world. It opens with a look at theoretical approaches of prior studies of musical encounters and a comprehensive survey of the intercultural and cross-cultural theoretical frameworks—exoticism, orientalism, globalization, transculturation, and hybridization—that inform these essays. Part I focuses on the actual encounters between Chinese and European musicians, their instruments and institutions, and the compositions inspired by these encounters, while Part II examines theatricalized and mediated East-West cultural exchanges, which often drew on stereotypical tropes, resulting in performances more inventive than accurate. Part III looks at the musical language, sonority, and subject matters of “intercultural” compositions by Eastern and Western composers. Essays in Part IV address reception studies and consider the ways in which differences are articulated in musical discourse by actors serving different purposes, whether self-promotion, commercial marketing, or modes of nationalistic—even propagandistic—expression. The volume’s extensive bibliography of secondary sources will be invaluable to scholars of music, contemporary Chinese culture, and the globalization of culture.
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China as a Sea Power, 1127–1368
A Preliminary Survey of the Maritime Expansion and Naval Exploits of the Chinese People During the Southern Song and Yuan Periods
Lo Jung-pang
National University of Singapore Press, 2012
Lo Jung-pang argues that during each of the three periods when imperial China embarked on maritime enterprises (the Qin and Han dynasties, the Sui and early Tang dynasties, and Song, Yuan, and early Ming dynasties), coastal states took the initiative at a time when China was divided, maritime trade and exploration subsequently peaked when China was strong and unified, and declined as Chinese power weakened. At such times, China's people became absorbed by internal affairs, and state policy focused on threats from the north and the west. These cycles of maritime activity, each lasting roughly five hundred years, corresponded with cycles of cohesion and division, strength and weakness, prosperity and impoverishment, expansion and contraction.


In the early 21st century, a strong and outward looking China is again building up its navy and seeking maritime dominance, with important implications for trade, diplomacy and naval affairs. Events will not necessarily follow the same course as in the past, but Lo Jung-pang's analysis suggests useful questions for the study of events as they unfold and decades to come.
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China as Number One?
The Emerging Values of a Rising Power
Yang Zhong and Ronald F. Inglehart
University of Michigan Press, 2024

One of the most significant global events in the last forty years has been the rise of China— economically, technologically, politically, and militarily. The question on people's minds for decades has been whether China will replace the United States as a superpower in the near future. But for China, this power must be comprehensive — having strong economic and militant forces are only two pieces of the puzzle. China must also possess soft power, such as attractive ideologies, values, and culture.

China as Number One? explores China’s soft powers through the eyes of Chinese citizens. Utilizing data from the World Values Survey, the contributors to this collection analyze the potential soft power of a rising China by examining its residents' social values. A comprehensive study of changes and continuities in the political and social values of Chinese citizens, the book examines findings in the context of evolutionary modernization theory and cross-national comparison.
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China at War
Triumph and Tragedy in the Emergence of the New China
Hans van de Ven
Harvard University Press, 2018

China’s mid-twentieth-century wars pose extraordinary interpretive challenges. The issue is not just that the Chinese fought for such a long time—from the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of July 1937 until the close of the Korean War in 1953—across such vast territory. As Hans van de Ven explains, the greatest puzzles lie in understanding China’s simultaneous external and internal wars. Much is at stake, politically, in how this story is told.

Today in its official history and public commemorations, the People’s Republic asserts Chinese unity against Japan during World War II. But this overwrites the era’s stark divisions between Communists and Nationalists, increasingly erasing the civil war from memory. Van de Ven argues that the war with Japan, the civil war, and its aftermath were in fact of a piece—a singular process of conflict and political change. Reintegrating the Communist uprising with the Sino-Japanese War, he shows how the Communists took advantage of wartime to increase their appeal, how fissures between the Nationalists and Communists affected anti-Japanese resistance, and how the fractious coalition fostered conditions for revolution.

In the process, the Chinese invented an influential paradigm of war, wherein the Clausewitzian model of total war between well-defined interstate enemies gave way to murky campaigns of national liberation involving diverse domestic and outside belligerents. This history disappears when the realities of China’s mid-century conflicts are stripped from public view. China at War recovers them.

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China between Empires
The Northern and Southern Dynasties
Mark Edward Lewis
Harvard University Press, 2011

After the collapse of the Han dynasty in the third century CE, China divided along a north-south line. Mark Lewis traces the changes that both underlay and resulted from this split in a period that saw the geographic redefinition of China, more engagement with the outside world, significant changes to family life, developments in the literary and social arenas, and the introduction of new religions.

The Yangzi River valley arose as the rice-producing center of the country. Literature moved beyond the court and capital to depict local culture, and newly emerging social spaces included the garden, temple, salon, and country villa. The growth of self-defined genteel families expanded the notion of the elite, moving it away from the traditional great Han families identified mostly by material wealth. Trailing the rebel movements that toppled the Han, the new faiths of Daoism and Buddhism altered every aspect of life, including the state, kinship structures, and the economy.

By the time China was reunited by the Sui dynasty in 589 ce, the elite had been drawn into the state order, and imperial power had assumed a more transcendent nature. The Chinese were incorporated into a new world system in which they exchanged goods and ideas with states that shared a common Buddhist religion. The centuries between the Han and the Tang thus had a profound and permanent impact on the Chinese world.

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China Diplomacy, 1914-1918
Madeleine Chi
Harvard University Press, 1970
This study of World War I diplomacy concerning China covers in detail the outbreak of the war in the Far East; China's attempt to join the allies in 1915; the secret agreements during 1917 between Japan and Great Britain, France, Italy, and Russia; and later negotiations relative to China's entry into the war.
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China Dreams
Growing Up Jewish in Tientsin
Isabelle Maynard
University of Iowa Press, 1996
What does it mean to be “thrice alien”? Isabelle Zimmer Maynard is one who knows. Born in 1929 in Tientsin, China, Maynard was the only child of Russian Jewish parents who had fled the Communists and sought refuge in this teeming city on the North China Sea. They subsequently survived the Japanese invasion of China and ultimately escaped to San Francisco when the Chinese Communists seized power. China Dreams, like a string of beguiling pearls, is a collection of autobiographical stories of an amazing childhood. Maynard's ability to reconstruct her world in the moment will delight and enchant readers. She says, “I have carried China all my life. I do not claim accuracy of history—only accuracy of the heart.” Her keen eye and fetching wit provide an arresting, poignant, highly personal portrait of a now-vanished world once shared by thousands of European Jews.
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China during the Great Depression
Market, State, and the World Economy, 1929–1937
Tomoko Shiroyama
Harvard University Press, 2008

The Great Depression was a global phenomenon: every economy linked to international financial and commodity markets suffered. The aim of this book is not merely to show that China could not escape the consequences of drastic declines in financial flows and trade but also to offer a new perspective for understanding modern Chinese history. The Great Depression was a watershed in modern China. China was the only country on the silver standard in an international monetary system dominated by the gold standard.

Fluctuations in international silver prices undermined China’s monetary system and destabilized its economy. In response to severe deflation, the state shifted its position toward the market from laissez faire to committed intervention. Establishing a new monetary system, with a different foreign-exchange standard, required deliberate government management; ultimately the process of economic recovery and monetary change politicized the entire Chinese economy. By analyzing the impact of the slump and the process of recovery, this book examines the transformation of state-market relations in light of the linkages between the Chinese and the world economy.

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China from Empire to Nation-State
Wang Hui
Harvard University Press, 2014

This translation of the Introduction to Wang Hui’s Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (2004) makes part of his four-volume masterwork available to English readers for the first time. A leading public intellectual in China, Wang charts the historical currents that have shaped Chinese modernity from the Song Dynasty to the present day, and along the way challenges the West to rethink some of its most basic assumptions about what it means to be modern.

China from Empire to Nation-State exposes oversimplifications and distortions implicit in Western critiques of Chinese history, which long held that China was culturally resistant to modernization, only able to join the community of modern nations when the Qing Empire finally collapsed in 1912. Noting that Western ideas have failed to take into account the diversity of Chinese experience, Wang recovers important strains of premodern thought. Chinese thinkers theorized politics in ways that do not line up neatly with political thought in the West—for example, the notion of a “Heavenly Principle” that governed everything from the ordering of the cosmos to the structure of society and rationality itself. Often dismissed as evidence of imperial China’s irredeemably backward culture, many Neo-Confucian concepts reemerged in twentieth-century Chinese political discourse, as thinkers and activists from across the ideological spectrum appealed to ancient precedents and principles in support of their political and cultural agendas. Wang thus enables us to see how many aspects of premodern thought contributed to a distinctly Chinese vision of modernity.

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China in Crisis, Volume 2
China's Policies in Asia and America's Alternatives
Edited by Tang Tsou and Ping-ti Ho
University of Chicago Press, 1968
The continuing debate in the United States over policies toward China and Vietnam provides the compelling occasion for reexamining the objectives and capability of Communist China and her relations with major countries in Asia.
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China in Seven Banquets
A Flavourful History
Thomas David DuBois
Reaktion Books
A captivating journey spanning five thousand years of Chinese culinary heritage, exploring the essence of each era through seven extraordinary meals.
 
China in Seven Banquets takes readers on a gastronomic adventure into the history of China’s constantly evolving and astonishingly diverse cuisine. From the opulent Eight Treasures feast of ancient times to the Tang dynasty’s legendary “Tail-Burning” banquet, and the extravagant “complete Manchu-Han feast” of the Qing court, these iconic repasts offer glimpses into China’s rich food history. Delving further, the book invites us to partake of lavish banquets immortalized in literature and film, a New Year’s buffet from 1920s Shanghai, a modern delivery menu reflecting the hyperglobal present, and it even offers a peek at the tables of the not-so-distant future. Drawing upon his extensive gastronomic adventures across China, acclaimed historian Thomas David DuBois unravels its ever-changing landscape of culinary trends, revealing why flavors and customs evolved over time. DuBois also recreates dozens of traditional recipes using modern kitchen techniques. Whether indulging in fermented elk or savoring absinthe cocktails, readers embark on an unparalleled odyssey that redefines their perception of Chinese cuisine.
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China in the Era of Xi Jinping
Domestic and Foreign Policy Challenges
Robert S. Ross and Jo Inge Bekkevold, Editors
Georgetown University Press

Since becoming president of China and general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping has emerged as China's most powerful and popular leader since Deng Xiaoping. The breathtaking economic expansion and military modernization that Xi inherited has convinced him that China can transform into a twenty-first-century superpower.

In this collection, leading scholars from the United States, Asia, and Europe examine both the prospects for China's continuing rise and the emergent and unintended consequences posed by China's internal instability and international assertiveness. Contributors examine domestic challenges surrounding slowed economic growth, Xi's anti-corruption campaign, and government efforts to maintain social stability. Essays on foreign policy range from the impact of nationalist pressures on international relations to China’s heavy-handed actions in the South China Sea that challenge regional stability and US-China cooperation. The result is a comprehensive analysis of current policy trends in Xi's China and the implications of these developments for his nation, the United States, and Asia-Pacific.

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China in the Middle East
The Wary Dragon
Andrew Scobell
RAND Corporation, 2016
This study examines China’s interests in the Middle East and assesses China’s economic, political, and security activities there to determine whether China has a strategy toward the region and what such a strategy means for the United States. The study focuses on China’s relations with two of its key partners in the Middle East: Saudi Arabia and Iran.
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China in the Tokugawa World
Marius B. Jansen
Harvard University Press, 1992
This engaging book challenges the traditional notion that Japan was an isolated nation cut off from the outside world in the modern era. This familiar story of seclusion, argues master historian Marius B. Jansen, results from viewing the period soley in terms of Japan's ties with the West, at the expense of its relationship with closer Asian neighbors. Taking as his focus the port of Nagasaki and its thriving trade with China in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, Jansen not only corrects this misperception but offers an important analysis of the impact of the China trade on Japan's cultural, economic, and political life.
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China in the World
Culture, Politics, and World Vision
Ban Wang
Duke University Press, 2022
In China in the World, Ban Wang traces the evolution of modern China from the late nineteenth century to the present. With a focus on tensions and connections between national formation and international outlooks, Wang shows how ancient visions persist even as China has adopted and revised the Western nation-state form. The concept of tianxia, meaning “all under heaven,” has constantly been updated into modern outlooks that value unity, equality, and reciprocity as key to overcoming interstate conflict, social fragmentation, and ethnic divides. Instead of geopolitical dominance, China’s worldviews stem as much from the age-old desire for world unity as from absorbing the Western ideas of the Enlightenment, humanism, and socialism. Examining political writings, literature, and film, Wang presents a narrative of the country’s pursuits of decolonization, national independence, notions of national form, socialist internationalism, alternative development, and solidarity with Third World nations. Rather than national exceptionalism, Chinese worldviews aspire to a shared, integrated, and equal world.
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China in Transformation
Tu Wei-ming
Harvard University Press, 1994

What will China look like in 2000? Tectonic forces are at work and its seeming stability has been largely lost after Tiananmen Square. Changing political, social, economic, intellectual, and cultural conditions are transforming China and its neighbors with a majority Chinese population. The authors in this book, taking full advantage of the new freedom of inquiry, shed light on the Chinese experience, elaborating not only on the vast changes sweeping all sectors of Chinese society, but also on the tradition that has persisted. As communism did not erase the past, so new experiences build on the past and tease out newness with great resemblances. Modernity takes many forms, memory repressed for a time may reassert itself; myth, the invention of individuals and collectivities, may be more powerful than prosaic fact. Cultural factors as agents of change appear more important than ever.

This book demonstrates that today Confucian societies have salient features on a restless landscape. The authors confine themselves to enduring questions about today’s Sinic societies so that educated readers and scholars of modern China and the Chinese will better understand the more populous half of the world. Contributing authors include William P. Alford, David E. Apter, Myron L. Cohen, Edward Friedman, Tongqi Lin, Perry Link, Andrew J. Nathan, Benjamin I. Schwartz, Tianjian Shi, Helen F. Siu, Wang Gungwu, and Ying-shih Yü.

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China Made
Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation
Karl Gerth
Harvard University Press, 2003

“Chinese people should consume Chinese products!” This slogan was the catchphrase of a movement in early twentieth-century China that sought to link consumption and nationalism by instilling a concept of China as a modern “nation” with its own “national products.” From fashions in clothing to food additives, from museums to department stores, from product fairs to advertising, this movement influenced all aspects of China’s burgeoning consumer culture. Anti-imperialist boycotts, commemorations of national humiliations, exhibitions of Chinese products, the vilification of treasonous consumers, and the promotion of Chinese captains of industry helped enforce nationalistic consumption and spread the message—patriotic Chinese bought goods made of Chinese materials by Chinese workers in factories owned and run by Chinese.

In China Made, Karl Gerth argues that two key forces shaping the modern world—nationalism and consumerism—developed in tandem in China. Early in the twentieth century, nationalism branded every commodity as either “Chinese” or “foreign,” and consumer culture became the place where the notion of nationality was articulated, institutionalized, and practiced. Based on Chinese, Japanese, and English-language archives, magazines, newspapers, and books, this first exploration of the historical ties between nationalism and consumerism reinterprets fundamental aspects of modern Chinese history and suggests ways of discerning such ties in all modern nations.

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China Marches West
The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia
Peter C. Perdue
Harvard University Press, 2005

From about 1600 to 1800, the Qing empire of China expanded to unprecedented size. Through astute diplomacy, economic investment, and a series of ambitious military campaigns into the heart of Central Eurasia, the Manchu rulers defeated the Zunghar Mongols, and brought all of modern Xinjiang and Mongolia under their control, while gaining dominant influence in Tibet. The China we know is a product of these vast conquests.

Peter C. Perdue chronicles this little-known story of China’s expansion into the northwestern frontier. Unlike previous Chinese dynasties, the Qing achieved lasting domination over the eastern half of the Eurasian continent. Rulers used forcible repression when faced with resistance, but also aimed to win over subject peoples by peaceful means. They invested heavily in the economic and administrative development of the frontier, promoted trade networks, and adapted ceremonies to the distinct regional cultures.

Perdue thus illuminates how China came to rule Central Eurasia and how it justifies that control, what holds the Chinese nation together, and how its relations with the Islamic world and Mongolia developed. He offers valuable comparisons to other colonial empires and discusses the legacy left by China’s frontier expansion. The Beijing government today faces unrest on its frontiers from peoples who reject its autocratic rule. At the same time, China has launched an ambitious development program in its interior that in many ways echoes the old Qing policies.

China Marches West is a tour de force that will fundamentally alter the way we understand Central Eurasia.

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China Marine
E. B. Sledge
University of Alabama Press, 2002
From the respected author of one of the best books on World War II combat, comes an equally captivating saga of battle recovery, healing, and homecoming.

China Marine is the long-awaited sequel to E. B. Sledge’s critically acclaimed memoir, With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa. Picking up where his previous memoir leaves off, Sledge, a young marine in the First Division, traces his company’s movements and charts his own difficult passage to peace following his horrific experiences in the Pacific. He reflects on his duty in the ancient city of Peiping (now Beijing) and recounts the difficulty of returning to his hometown of Mobile, Alabama, and resuming civilian life haunted by the shadows of close combat.

Distinguished historians have praised Sledge’s first book as the definitive rifleman’s account of World War II, ranking it with the Civil War’s Red Badge of Courage and World War I’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Although With the Old Breed ends with the surrender of Japan, marines in the Pacific were still faced with the mission of disarming the immense Japanese forces on the Asian mainland and reestablishing order. For infantrymen so long engaged in the savage and surreal world of close combat, there remained the personal tasks of regaining normalcy and dealing with suppressed memories, fears, and guilt.

In China Marine, E. B. Sledge completes his story and provides emotional closure to the searing events detailed in his first memoir. He speaks frankly about the real costs of war, emotional and psychological as well as physical, and explains the lifetime loyalties that develop between men who face fear, loss, and horror together. That bond becomes one of the newfound treasures of life after battle.

With his hallmark style of simplicity, directness, and lack of sentimentality, "Sledgehammer" has given us yet another great document of war literature.
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The China Questions 2
Critical Insights into US-China Relations
Maria Adele Carrai
Harvard University Press, 2022

Following the success of The China Questions, a new volume of insights from top China specialists explains key issues shaping today’s US-China relationship.

For decades Americans have described China as a rising power. That description no longer fits: China has already risen. What does this mean for the US-China relationship? For the global economy and international security? Seeking to clarify central issues, provide historical perspective, and demystify stereotypes, Maria Adele Carrai, Jennifer Rudolph, and Michael Szonyi and an exceptional group of China experts offer essential insights into the many dimensions of the world’s most important bilateral relationship.

Ranging across questions of security, economics, military development, climate change, public health, science and technology, education, and the worrying flashpoints of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Xinjiang, these concise essays provide an authoritative look at key sites of friction and potential collaboration, with an eye on where the US-China relationship may go in the future. Readers hear from leading thinkers such as James Millward on Xinjiang, Elizabeth Economy on diplomacy, Shelley Rigger on Taiwan, and Winnie Yip and William Hsiao on public health.

The voices included in The China Questions 2 recognize that the US-China relationship has changed, and that the policy of engagement needs to change too. But they argue that zero-sum thinking is not the answer. Much that is good for one society is good for both—we are facing not another Cold War but rather a complex and contextually rooted mixture of conflict, competition, and cooperation that needs to be understood on its own terms.

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The China Questions
Critical Insights into a Rising Power
Jennifer Rudolph
Harvard University Press, 2018

“Cuts through the cacophony of information, misinformation, and nonsense on China that circulates in our modern world to give us reliable answers to crucial questions… Should be on the shelf of anyone seeking to understand this fast-rising superpower.”
—Ian Johnson, author of The Souls of China


After years of isolation, China is now center stage as an economic and global power, but its rise has triggered wildly divergent views. Is it a model of business efficiency or a threat to American prosperity and security? Thirty-six of the world’s leading China experts from Harvard University’s renowned Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies answer key questions about this new superpower, distilling a lifetime of scholarship into short and accessible essays about Chinese politics, culture, history, economy, approach to the environment, and foreign policy. Their contributions provide essential insight into the challenges China faces, the aspirations of its people and leaders, its business climate, and the consequences of its meteoric ascent. Many books offer information about China, but few make sense of what is truly at stake.

“Impressive… A highly informative, readable collection for scholars and nonscholars alike.”
Publishers Weekly

“Provides a more nuanced and accessible perspective on the issues China is facing.”
South China Morning Post

“Erudite yet accessible… The topical reach is impressive.”
—Jeffrey Wasserstrom, author of China in the 21st Century

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The China Sketchbook
I. Allan Sealy
Seagull Books, 2016
A camera makes enemies; a sketchbook, friends. Firm in this belief, Irwin Allan Sealy carried to China just his pen and a book of blank pages. When the literary conference that took him there ended and his fellow writers returned to India, Sealy stayed on to travel the railroads of the north in search of a town reminiscent of his Himalayan hometown and a man who might resemble himself. Sign language, good will, and plain luck see him through, but in a northern mining town known for its ancient Buddhist cave sculptures, Sealy finally comes to the conclusion that his other was unreachable, his hometown was one of a kind, and his only hope was a pen, allowing him to record his memories, sketches, and adventures along the way.

Sealy is known for both his fiction and his travelogue From Yukon to Yukatan: A Western Journey. This facsimile edition of The China Sketchbook, however, adds a special dimension to a travel narrative—the sketches and scribbles give readers a more immediate and unrestrained insight into the mind of a very fine writer and chart an unusual and quirky travel diary.
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China
The People’s Middle Kingdom and the U.S.A.
John King Fairbank
Harvard University Press

Public discussion of our China policy in recent months has emphasized the need for a historical view of the ancient "Middle Kingdom" (the Chinese name for China) and its modern revolution. Fairbank has been a leading witness before Congressional groups such as Senator Fulbright's Committee on Foreign Relations, where his testimony received worldwide attention. This volume presents the major themes of his testimony more fully by bringing together essays first published in various national journals, mainly in 1966.

The three parts of this book--"China's Revolution in the Light of Her Past," "The Taiwan Problem," and "Communist China and American Policy"--all bring a knowledge of China's long tradition to bear upon her present crisis. China's past still provides the main repertory of themes and styles, assumptions and methods, upon which her leaders draw in trying to meet their problems. Mao and his party are both circumscribed and inspired by the history of their Middle Kingdom. Although this history is by no means the sole determinant of their actions, it is the specific factor least well known, and therefore most illuminating, to Americans.

The importance and timeliness of these essays, the urgency of their subject matter, are plain enough. As Fairbank says, "We have to face the fact that the Chinese quarter of mankind live on the other side of a cultural gap, and our effort to bridge this gap in the next decade may make us or break us."

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China to Chinatown
Chinese Food in the West
J.A.G. Roberts
Reaktion Books, 2004
China to Chinatown tells the story of one of the most notable examples of the globalization of food: the spread of Chinese recipes, ingredients and cooking styles to the Western world. Beginning with the accounts of Marco Polo and Franciscan missionaries, J.A.G. Roberts describes how Westerners’ first impressions of Chinese food were decidedly mixed, with many regarding Chinese eating habits as repugnant. Chinese food was brought back to the West merely as a curiosity.

The Western encounter with a wider variety of Chinese cuisine dates from the first half of the 20th century, when Chinese food spread to the West with emigrant communities. The author shows how Chinese cooking has come to be regarded by some as among the world’s most sophisticated cuisines, and yet is harshly criticized by others, for example on the grounds that its preparation involves cruelty to animals.

Roberts discusses the extent to which Chinese food, as a facet of Chinese culture overseas, has remained differentiated, and questions whether its ethnic identity is dissolving.

Written in a lively style, the book will appeal to food historians and specialists in Chinese culture, as well as to readers interested in Chinese cuisine.
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China Turning Inward
Intellectual-Political Changes in the Early Twelfth Century
James T. C. Liu
Harvard University Press
During the traumatic opening decades of the Southern Sung, Emperor Kao-tsung's unspoken determination to win imperial safety at any cost shaped not only court policy but Confucian intellectual developments. The intellectual climate of the Northern Sung had been confident, buoyant, outreaching, and exploratory; in the Southern Sung, it turned inward. The turn was not, however, a simple turn to conservative moral and political Confucianism; and in this book, James T. C. Liu explores how Kao-tsung used ideological window-dressing to consolidate extraordinary state power in the emperor's hands. Ups and downs in the political fortunes of moralistic conservatives are also specially examined for their effects on the nature of the Neo-Confucianism that eventually became state orthodoxy.
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China Under Mao
A Revolution Derailed
Andrew G. Walder
Harvard University Press, 2015

China’s Communist Party seized power in 1949 after a long period of guerrilla insurgency followed by full-scale war, but the Chinese revolution was just beginning. China Under Mao narrates the rise and fall of the Maoist revolutionary state from 1949 to 1976—an epoch of startling accomplishments and disastrous failures, steered by many forces but dominated above all by Mao Zedong.

“Walder convincingly shows that the effect of Maoist inequalities still distorts China today…[It] will be a mind-opening book for many (and is a depressing reminder for others).”
—Jonathan Mirsky, The Spectator

“Andrew Walder’s account of Mao’s time in power is detailed, sophisticated and powerful…Walder takes on many pieces of conventional wisdom about Mao’s China and pulls them apart…What was it that led so much of China’s population to follow Mao’s orders, in effect to launch a civil war against his own party? There is still much more to understand about the bond between Mao and the wider population. As we try to understand that bond, there will be few better guides than Andrew Walder’s book. Sober, measured, meticulous in every deadly detail, it is an essential assessment of one of the world’s most important revolutions.”
—Rana Mitter, Times Literary Supplement

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China Upside Down
Currency, Society, and Ideologies, 1808–1856
Man-houng Lin
Harvard University Press, 2006
Many scholars have noted the role of China's demand for silver in the emergence of the modern world. This book discusses the interaction of this demand and the early-nineteenth-century Latin American independence movements, changes in the world economy, the resulting disruptions in the Qing dynasty, and the transformation from the High Qing to modern China. Man-houng Lin shows how the disruption in the world's silver supply caused by the turmoil in Latin America and subsequent changes in global markets led to the massive outflow of silver from China and the crisis of the Qing empire. During the first stage of this dynastic crisis, traditional ideas favoring plural centers of power became more popular than they ever had been. As the crisis developed, however, statist ideas came to the fore. Even though the Qing survived with the resumption of the influx of Latin American silver, its status relative to Japan in the East Asian order slipped. The statist inclination, although moderated to a degree in the modern period, is still ascendant in China today. These changes—Qing China's near-collapse, the beginning of its eclipse by Japan in the East Asian order, and shifting notions of the proper relationship between state and market and between state and society—led to "China upside down."
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China Urban
Ethnographies of Contemporary Culture
Nancy N. Chen, Constance D. Clark, Suzanne Z. Gottschang, and Lyn Jeffery, eds.
Duke University Press, 2001
China Urban is an ethnographic account of China’s cities and the place that urban space holds in China’s imagination. In addition to investigating this nation’s rapidly changing urban landscape, its contributors emphasize the need to rethink the very meaning of the “urban” and the utility of urban-focused anthropological critiques during a period of unprecedented change on local, regional, national, and global levels.

Through close attention to everyday lives and narratives and with a particular focus on gender, market, and spatial practices, this collection stresses that, in the case of China, rural life and the impact of socialism must be considered in order to fully comprehend the urban. Individual essays note the impact of legal barriers to geographic mobility in China, the proliferation of different urban centers, the different distribution of resources among various regions, and the pervasive appeal of the urban, both in terms of living in cities and in acquiring products and conventions signaling urbanity. Others focus on the direct sales industry, the Chinese rock music market, the discursive production of femininity and motherhood in urban hospitals, and the transformations in access to healthcare.

China Urban will interest anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, and those studying urban planning, China, East Asia, and globalization.

Contributors. Tad Ballew, Susan Brownell, Nancy N. Chen, Constance D. Clark, Robert Efird, Suzanne Z. Gottschang, Ellen Hertz, Lisa Hoffman, Sandra Hyde, Lyn Jeffery, Lida Junghans, Louisa Schein, Li Zhang

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China
Visions through the Ages
Edited by Lisa C. Niziolek, Deborah A. Bekken and Gary M. Feinman
University of Chicago Press, 2018
At the entrance of The Field Museum’s Cyrus Tang Hall of China, two Chinese stone guardian lions stand tall, gazing down intently at approaching visitors. One lion’s paw rests upon a decorated ball symbolizing power, while the other lion cradles a cub. Traditionally believed to possess attributes of strength and protection, statues such as these once stood guard outside imperial buildings, temples, and wealthy homes in China. Now, centuries later, they guard this incredible permanent exhibition.
 
China’s long history is one of the richest and most complex in the known world, and the Cyrus Tang Hall of China offers visitors a wonderful, comprehensive survey of it through some 350 artifacts on display, spanning from the Paleolithic period to present day. Now, with China: Visions through the Ages, anyone can experience the marvels of this exhibition through the book’s beautifully designed and detailed pages. Readers will gain deeper insight into The Field Museum’s important East Asian collections, the exhibition development process, and research on key aspects of China’s fascinating history. This companion book, edited by the exhibition’s own curatorial team, takes readers even deeper into the wonders of the Cyrus Tang Hall of China and enables them to study more closely the objects and themes featured in the show. Mirroring the exhibition’s layout of five galleries, the volume is divided into five sections. The first section focuses on the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods; the second, the Bronze Age, the first dynasties, and early writing; the third, the imperial system and power; the fourth, religion and performance; and the fifth, interregional trade and the Silk Routes. Each section also includes highlights containing brief stories on objects or themes in the hall, such as the famous Lanting Xu rubbing.
 
With chapters from a diverse set of international authors providing greater context and historical background, China: Visions through the Ages is a richly illustrated volume that allows visitors, curious readers, and China scholars alike a chance to have an enduring exchange with the objects featured in the exhibition and with their multifaceted histories.
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China Watch
John King Fairbank
Harvard University Press, 1987

America’s top China–watcher, the renowned pandit of modern Chinese history, here provides an unrivaled overview of revolutionary China and Chinese–American relations. His reviews and critical commentary scrutinize our always fascinated, often puzzled attitude toward this newly emergent superpower.

John Fairbank distinguishes two major motifs in recent Chinese–American connections: the American expectation of highly profitable trade and investment, which so far have not materialized, and the deep–rooted missionary impulse to give the Chinese the best of our culture, which includes our efforts to promote human rights. The possibility of grafting our ideas of individual endeavor and God–given prerogatives onto two thousand years of Confucianism with its emphasis on duty and collective harmony seems remote. In contrast, the outlook for mutually enriching economic dealings is much brighter. Yet Fairbank cautions that we are dealing with a huge and disoriented nation struggling to enter the modern world with its own cultural identity intact, and (at least in the current period) with its Communist Party in power. Confucian tenets still prevail: theory and practice are a unity policies are a form of conduct manifesting one’s character, and attacks on policy equal attacks on the ruling party.

These writings concern China in the mind’s eye of America—as it is interpreted though the works of American merchants, diplomats, missionaries, and reporters observing China’s travail of revolution. For generalist, scholar, and sage alike, China Watch offers many insights.

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China with a Cut
Globalisation, Urban Youth and Popular Music
Jeroen de Kloet
Amsterdam University Press, 2010
In the wake of intense globalisation and commercialisation in the 1990s, China saw the emergence of a vibrant popular culture. Drawing on sixteen years of research, Jeroen de Kloet explores the popular music industry in Beijing, Hong Kong and Shanghai, providing a fascinating history of its emergence and extensive audience analysis, while also exploring the effect of censorship on the music scene in China.China with a Cut pays particular attention to the dakou culture: so named after a cut nicked into the edge to render them unsellable, these illegally imported Western CDs still play most of the tracks. They also played a crucial role in the emergence of the new music and youth culture. De Kloet’s impressive study demonstrates how the young Chinese cope with the rapid economic and social changes in a period of intense globalisation, and offers a unique insight into the socio-cultural and political transformations of a rising global power.
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The China-India Rivalry in the Globalization Era
T.V. Paul, Editor
Georgetown University Press, 2018

As the aspirations of the two rising Asian powers collide, the China-India rivalry is likely to shape twenty-first-century international politics in the region and far beyond.

This volume by T.V. Paul and an international group of leading scholars examines whether the rivalry between the two countries that began in the 1950s will intensify or dissipate in the twenty-first century. The China-India relationship is important to analyze because past experience has shown that when two rising great powers share a border, the relationship is volatile and potentially dangerous. India and China’s relationship faces a number of challenges, including multiple border disputes that periodically flare up, division over the status of Tibet and the Dalai Lama, the strategic challenge to India posed by China's close relationship with Pakistan, the Chinese navy's greater presence in the Indian Ocean, and the two states’ competition for natural resources. Despite these irritants, however, both countries agree on issues such as global financial reforms and climate change and have much to gain from increasing trade and investment, so there are reasons for optimism as well as pessimism.

The contributors to this volume answer the following questions: What explains the peculiar contours of this rivalry? What influence does accelerated globalization, especially increased trade and investment, have on this rivalry? What impact do US-China competition and China’s expanding navy have on this rivalry? Under what conditions will it escalate or end? The China-India Rivalry in the Globalization Era will be of great interest to students, scholars, and policymakers concerned with Indian and Chinese foreign policy and Asian security.

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China’s Allocation of Fixed Capital Investment, 1952–1957
Cheng Chu-yuan
University of Michigan Press, 1974
China’s efforts to stimulate industrial development and economic growth through the allocation of investments are analyzed. Cheng concludes with an overall assessment of the distinctive features of the allocation pattern. Includes 41 statistical tables.
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China’s Challenges and International Order Transition
Beyond “Thucydides's Trap”
Edited by Huiyun Feng and Kai He
University of Michigan Press, 2020

China’s Challenges and International Order Transition introduces an integrated conceptual framework of “international order” categorized by three levels (power, rules, and norms) and three issue-areas (security, political, and economic). Each contributor engages one or more of these analytical dimensions to examine two questions: (1) Has China already challenged this dimension of international order? (2) How will China challenge this dimension of international order in the future?

The contested views and perspectives in this volume suggest it is too simple to assume an inevitable conflict between China and the outside world. With different strategies to challenge or reform the many dimensions of international order, China’s role is not a one-way street. It is an interactive process in which the world may change China as much as China may change the world.

The aim of the book is to broaden the debate beyond the “Thucydides Trap” perspective currently popular in the West. Rather than offering a single argument, this volume offers a platform for scholars, especially Chinese scholars vs. Western scholars, to exchange and debate their different views and perspectives on China and the potential transition of international order.

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China’s Cosmopolitan Empire
The Tang Dynasty
Mark Edward Lewis
Harvard University Press, 2012

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.

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China’s Crisis, China’s Hope
Binyan Liu
Harvard University Press, 1990
The principal force in awakening the people and setting them on the road to struggle, Liu Binyan argues, has been the repeated mistakes of the Chinese Communist Party and the outrageous bureaucratic corruption it has allowed to flourish. Even as he describes the runaway inflation that inflicts unfathomable hardship on all but the elite party officials, the increasing isolation and hypocrisy of the Communist leadership, or the political persecution of intellectuals and the press, Liu’s message is one of hope. This book—written in one man’s eloquent voice—is testimony to his belief that the need for democratic reform has taken root among the Chinese people and that they will ultimately take steps to transform their nation.
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China’s Crony Capitalism
The Dynamics of Regime Decay
Minxin Pei
Harvard University Press, 2016

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.

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China’s Development Experience in Comparative Perspective
Robert F. Dernberger
Harvard University Press, 1980
While comparing China’s economic development policies to those of other developing countries, this book clearly identifies the features that makes China unique. A group of international experts presents essays that summarize the general characteristics of the Chinese economy, beginning with an overview of the development process in the Third World as a whole. They then examine three areas of China’s development program that are most frequently cited as success stories—income distribution, industrial technology, and public health—carefully documenting the degree to which these successes depend on the political and social environment. Finally, they discuss several themes of China’s contemporary development strategy and their historical antecedents, speculating on the transferability of China’s experience to other Third World countries. Synthesizing economic theory and empirical documentation, this book offers an analysis of China’s fundamental organization that will not soon be outdated.
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China’s Engine of Environmental Collapse
Richard Smith
Pluto Press, 2020

As the world hurtles towards environmental oblivion, China is leading the charge. The nation's CO2 emissions are more than twice those of the US with a GDP just two-thirds as large. China leads the world in renewable energy yet it is building new coal-fired power plants faster than renewables. The country's lakes, rivers, and farmlands are severely polluted yet China's police state can't suppress pollution, even from its own industries.

This is the first book to explain these contradictions. Richard Smith explains how the country's bureaucratic rulers are driven by nationalist-industrialist tendencies that are even more powerful than the drive for profit under 'normal' capitalism. In their race to overtake the US they must prioritise hyper-growth over the environment, even if this ends in climate collapse and eco-suicide.

Smith contends that nothing short of drastic shutdowns and the scaling back of polluting industries, especially in China and the US, will suffice to slash greenhouse gas emissions enough to prevent climate catastrophe.

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China's Environment and China's Environment Journalists
A Study
Hugo de Burgh and Zeng Rong
Intellect Books, 2012
Environmental issues are of growing concern in China, with numerous initiatives aimed at encouraging dialogue and increasing awareness. And key to these initiatives is the environmental journalist. The first English-language study of this burgeoning field, this book investigates Chinese environmental journalists—their methodologies, their attitudes toward the environment, and their views on the significance of their work—and concludes that most respond enthusiastically to government promptings to report on the environment and climate change. Additional chapters demonstrate journalists’ impact in helping to shape governmental decision making.
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China’s Evolving Approach to “Integrated Strategic Deterrence”
Michael S. Chase
RAND Corporation, 2016
Drawing on Chinese military writings, this report finds that China’s strategic-deterrence concepts are evolving in response to Beijing’s changing assessment of its external security environment and a growing emphasis on protecting its emerging interests in space and cyberspace. China also is rapidly closing what was once a substantial gap between the People’s Liberation Army’s strategic weapons capabilities and its strategic-deterrence concepts.
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China’s Evolving Nuclear Deterrent
Major Drivers and Issues for the United States
Eric Heginbotham
RAND Corporation, 2017
China’s approach to nuclear deterrence has been broadly consistent since its first test in 1964, but it has recently accelerated nuclear force modernization. China’s strategic environment is likely to grow more complex, and nuclear constituencies are gaining a larger bureaucratic voice. Beijing is unlikely to change official nuclear policies but will probably increase emphasis on nuclear deterrence and may adjust the definition of key concepts.
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China’s Expanding African Relations
Implications for U.S. National Security
Lloyd Thrall
RAND Corporation, 2015
Across economic, political, and security domains, the growth of China’s presence in Africa has been swift and staggering, which has fed both simplistic caricatures of China’s role on the continent and fears of renewed geopolitical competition. A closer look reveals a more balanced picture. This report examines how China’s growing engagement affects the United States’ role in Africa and offers policy recommendations for U.S. military leaders.
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China's Footprints in Southeast Asia
Edited by Maria Serena I. Diokno, Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao, and Alan H. Yang
National University of Singapore Press, 2018
The countries that make up Southeast Asia are seeing an incredible resurgence in their economic power. Over the past fifty years, their combined wealth has reached the same level as the United Kingdom and, taken together, they are on track to become the fifth-largest world economy. But that stability and success has drawn the attention of the second largest world economy—China. The emerging superpower is increasingly involved in Southeast Asia as part of the ongoing global realignment. As China deepens its influence across the region, the countries of Southeast Asia are negotiating spaces for themselves in order to respond to—or even challenge—China’s power.
                This is the first book to survey China’s growing role in Southeast Asia along multiple dimensions. It looks closely and skeptically at the multitude of ways that China has built connections in the region, including through trade, foreign aid, and cultural diplomacy. It incorporates examples such as the operation of Confucius Institutes in Indonesia or the promotion of the concept of guangxi.China’s Footprints in Southeast Asia raises the question of whether the Chinese efforts are helpful or disruptive and explores who it is that really stands to benefit from these relationships. The answers differ from country to country, but, as this volume suggests, the footprint of hard and soft power always leaves a lasting mark on other countries’ institutions.
 
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China's Foreign Trade Statistics, 1864-1949
Liang-lin Hsiao
Harvard University Press, 1974

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.

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China's Forty Millions
Minority Nationalities and National Integration in the People's Republic of China
June Teufel Dreyer
Harvard University Press, 1976

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.

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China's Gentry
Essays on Rural-Urban Relations
Hsiao-tung Fei
University of Chicago Press, 1980
These seven essays on the structure of Chinese society are based on articles contributed by Fei to Chinese newspapers in 1947 and 1948. Six case histories from a study of the gentry by Yung-teh Chow are appended.

"The chief interest and charm of this book lie in the fact that it is not directed to the Western reader; these were studies written in Chinese, by an erudite Chinese, for a Chinese public. . . . Mrs. Redfield is to be complimented for her own careful research in preparing this translation for a non-Chinese public."—Robert F. Spencer, American Anthropologist
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China's Global Identity
Considering the Responsibilities of Great Power
Hoo Tiang Boon
Georgetown University Press, 2018

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.

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China's Global Strategy
Towards a Multipolar World
Jenny Clegg
Pluto Press, 2009

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.

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China’s Good War
How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism
Rana Mitter
Harvard University Press, 2020

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

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China’s Grand Strategy
Trends, Trajectories, and Long-Term Competition
Andrew Scobell
RAND Corporation, 2020
To explore what extended competition between the United States and China might entail out to 2050, the authors of this report identified and characterized China’s grand strategy, analyzed its component national strategies (diplomacy, economics, science and technology, and military affairs), and assessed how successful China might be at implementing these over the next three decades.
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China's Growing Role in World Trade
Edited by Robert C. Feenstra and Shang-Jin Wei
University of Chicago Press, 2010
In less than three decades, China has grown from playing a negligible role in international trade to being one of the world's largest exporters, a substantial importer of raw materials, intermediate outputs, and other goods, and both a recipient and source of foreign investment. Not surprisingly, China's economic dynamism has generated considerable attention and concern in the United States and beyond. While some analysts have warned of the potential pitfalls of China's rise—the loss of jobs, for example—others have highlighted the benefits of new market and investment opportunities for US firms.

Bringing together an expert group of contributors, China's Growing Role in World Trade undertakes an empirical investigation of the effects of China's new status. The essays collected here provide detailed analyses of the microstructure of trade, the macroeconomic implications, sector-level issues, and foreign direct investment. This volume's careful examination of micro data in light of established economic theories clarifies a number of misconceptions, disproves some conventional wisdom, and documents data patterns that enhance our understanding of China's trade and what it may mean to the rest of the world.
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China's Hidden Children
Abandonment, Adoption, and the Human Costs of the One-Child Policy
Kay Ann Johnson
University of Chicago Press, 2016
In the thirty-five years since China instituted its One-Child Policy, 120,000 children—mostly girls—have left China through international adoption, including 85,000 to the United States.  It’s generally assumed that this diaspora is the result of China’s approach to population control, but there is also the underlying belief that the majority of adoptees are daughters because the One-Child Policy often collides with the traditional preference for a son. While there is some truth to this, it does not tell the full story—a story with deep personal resonance to Kay Ann Johnson, a China scholar and mother to an adopted Chinese daughter.
           
Johnson spent years talking with the Chinese parents driven to relinquish their daughters during the brutal birth-planning campaigns of the 1990s and early 2000s, and, with China’s Hidden Children, she paints a startlingly different picture. The decision to give up a daughter, she shows, is not a facile one, but one almost always fraught with grief and dictated by fear. Were it not for the constant threat of punishment for breaching the country’s stringent birth-planning policies, most Chinese parents would have raised their daughters despite the cultural preference for sons. With clear understanding and compassion for the families, Johnson describes their desperate efforts to conceal the birth of second or third daughters from the authorities. As the Chinese government cracked down on those caught concealing an out-of-plan child, strategies for surrendering children changed—from arranging adoptions or sending them to live with rural family to secret placement at carefully chosen doorsteps and, finally, abandonment in public places. In the twenty-first century, China’s so-called abandoned children have increasingly become “stolen” children, as declining fertility rates have left the dwindling number of children available for adoption more vulnerable to child trafficking. In addition, government seizures of locally—but illegally—adopted children and children hidden within their birth families mean that even legal adopters have unknowingly adopted children taken from parents and sent to orphanages.
           
The image of the “unwanted daughter” remains commonplace in Western conceptions of China. With China’s Hidden Children, Johnson reveals the complex web of love, secrecy, and pain woven in the coerced decision to give one’s child up for adoption and the profound negative impact China’s birth-planning campaigns have on Chinese families.
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China’s Incomplete Military Transformation
Assessing the Weaknesses of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)
Michael S. Chase
RAND Corporation, 2015
Through extensive primary source analysis and independent analysis, this report seeks to answer a number of important questions regarding the state of China’s armed forces. The authors found that the PLA is keenly aware of its many weaknesses and is vigorously striving to correct them. Although it is only natural to focus on the PLA’s growing capabilities, understanding the PLA’s weaknesses—and its self-assessments—is no less important.
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China’s Intellectuals and the State
In Search of a New Relationship
Merle Goldman
Harvard University Press, 1987

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.

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China's Last Empire
The Great Qing
William T. Rowe
Harvard University Press, 2011

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.

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