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A study of faith, cultural exchange, and the Alabama missionaries who helped shape the story of Christianity in modern China.

Beginning early in the 19th century, the American missionary movement made slow headway in China. Alabamians became part of that small beachhead. After 1900 both the money and personnel rapidly expanded, peaking in the early 1920s. By the 1930s many American denominations became confused and divided over the appropriateness of the missionary endeavor. Secular American intellectuals began to criticize missionaries as meddling do-gooders trying to impose American Evangelicalism on a proud, ancient culture.

By examining the lives of 47 Alabama missionaries who served in China between 1850 and 1950, Flynt and Berkley reach a different conclusion. Although Alabama missionaries initially fit the negative description of Americans trying to superimpose their own values and beliefs on "heathen," they quickly learned to respect Chinese civilization. The result was a new synthesis, neither entirely southern nor entirely Chinese. Although previous works focus on the failure of Christianity to change China, this book focuses on the degree to which their service in China changed Alabama missionaries. And the change was profound.

In their consideration of 47 missionaries from a single state--their call to missions, preparation for service in China, living, working, contacts back home, cultural clashes, political views, internal conflicts, and gender relations--the authors suggest that the efforts by Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian missionaries from Alabama were not the failure judged by many historians. In fact, the seeds sown in the hundred years before the Communist revolution in 1950 seem to be reaping a rich harvest in the declining years of the 20th century, when the number of Chinese Christians is estimated by some to be as high as one hundred million.
 

A critical account of the Japanese occupation in Inner Mongolia.
 
Early in the twentieth century, the steppe borderlands between China and Mongolia erupted in violence. As imperial Japan expanded into the area, this crisis between nomadic and settler communities posed fundamental problems in governance. In response, Japanese and Mongol leaders together proposed a radical solution: demarcating an autonomous region in Manchukuo for minority peoples, a new kind of political space that would later define the territorial structure of Communist China. 
 
In Territorial Natures, Sakura Christmas explores how the fraught partition of this autonomous region warped the ethnic and environmental boundaries of Manchukuo. She challenges its origin story as a socialist invention by the Chinese state, instead seeing it as also a fascist extension of the Japanese occupation. By reading Chinese and Mongolian sources against Japanese archives, Christmas reveals how this contested history seeded the volatile landscape of autonomous regions in the People’s Republic of China today.
 

Mao and his policies have long been demonised in the West, with the Cultural Revolution considered a fundamental violation of human rights.

As China embraces capitalism, the Mao era is being surgically denigrated by the Chinese political and intellectual elite. This book tackles the extremely negative depiction of China under Mao in recent publications and argues most people in China, including the rural poor and the urban working class, actually benefited from Mao's policy of a comprehensive welfare system for the urban and basic health and education provision for the rural, which is being reversed in the current rush towards capitalism.

By a critical analysis of the mainstream account of the Mao era and the Cultural Revolution and by revealing what is offered in the unofficial e-media debates this book sets the record straight, making a convincing argument for the positive effects of Mao's policies on the well-being of the Chinese people.

The first English language history of China's Most Important Battle in World War II

In April 1944, Imperial Japan launched Operation Ichigo to secure a transport route linking Japanese forces in northern China and Southeast Asia, while eliminating American airfields in the region. The Japanese army quickly overran Chinese resistance and pushed fast toward the city of Hengyang, a key railway junction in south-central China. The Battle of Hengyang began on June 23, 1944. With just 17,000 troops and besieged in an area of less than ten square miles, the Chinese 10th Army held off a Japanese force totaling more than 110,000 men, supported by aircraft, tanks, chemical weapons, and artillery, for forty-seven days. The fighting was among the most savage of the entire Second World War. Hengyang finally fell on August 8, but the Chinese defenders and undaunted American pilots had stopped Ichigo’s momentum. The Japanese military’s failure to quickly conquer such a small city led to the fall of Japanese Prime Minister Tojo’s cabinet in July 1944, ultimately weakening Japan’s resolve to prosecute the war. News accounts compared the battle to the German defeat at Stalingrad in its ferocity and to the Battle of Suiyang, the most famous siege in ancient Chinese history. 

In the aftermath of World War II, the battle was erased from Chinese history books since Communist propaganda insisted that only they, not the Nationalists, had successfully resisted the Japanese. But the survivors, both soldiers and civilians, kept the battle alive in their memories, and during the early part of the twenty-first century, the truth of Hengyang was finally presented to the Chinese people. The Battle of Hengyang: Japan’s Fateful Siege of World War II by Shifen Fox is the first English language history of one of the most important battles of the Second World War. The author returned to China where she interviewed survivors and children of survivors, read private letters, and had access to normally closed archives; in addition, she read memoirs written by Japanese survivors and referenced Japanese historical records. Learning late in life that her father perished in the battle, she also explains how the role of her father and this heroic defense was censored by China, but more than eighty years later has now been restored to its place in Chinese and world history. 
 

An ethnographic history of one of the dozens of indigenous domains that occupied China’s border regions during the Qing dynasty and before.

Erik Mueggler’s The Book of Cunning and Treachery is an ethnographic history of a chiefly household that ruled one of the many indigenous domains scattered through upland southwest China during the late Ming and Qing dynasties. The imperial colonization of this region proceeded by way of defeating indigenous polities and absorbing them into a system of indirect governance. In this system, indigenous chieftains inherited power over multiethnic domains, subject to ratification by the imperial court. Mueggler tracks the history of two crucial yet unexamined archives pertaining to this household—a trove of Chinese-language legal, military, and administrative documents, and hundreds of ritual manuals, histories, and morality books written in the indigenous Né script—to show how the chiefly house reproduced itself through these languages, each with its own forms of ritual, recitation, and inscription.

As Mueggler demonstrates, through different forms of access to writing in Chinese and Né, male and female chieftains, domestic slaves, enslaved bondsmen, bonded tenants, chiefly concubines, and more existed in a complex ecology of relations. House and domain were governed through a dynamic process in which residents continuously worked out the status hierarchies that animated their relations with one another as well as the relations between the chiefly house and the local administrative system. This groundbreaking book provides a compelling account of the intertwined problems of writing, slavery, and sovereignty, as well as a vivid portrait of the unique form that indigenous jurisdiction took in this era.

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

Introducing radical counter-visions of race and slavery, and probing the legal and philosophical questions raised by indenture, The Coolie Speaks offers the first critical reading of a massive testimony case from Cuba in 1874. From this case, Yun traces the emergence of a "coolie narrative" that forms a counterpart to the "slave narrative." The written and oral testimonies of nearly 3,000 Chinese laborers in Cuba, who toiled alongside African slaves, offer a rare glimpse into the nature of bondage and the tortuous transition to freedom. Trapped in one of the last standing systems of slavery in the Americas, the Chinese described their hopes and struggles, and their unrelenting quest for freedom.

Yun argues that the testimonies from this case suggest radical critiques of the "contract" institution, the basis for free modern society. The example of Cuba, she suggests, constitutes the early experiment and forerunner of new contract slavery, in which the contract itself, taken to its extreme, was wielded as a most potent form of enslavement and complicity. Yun further considers the communal biography of a next-generation Afro-Chinese Cuban author and raises timely theoretical questions regarding race, diaspora, transnationalism, and globalization.

An innovative account of listening and empire-building in 17th- and 18th-century China.

The Emperor’s New Epistemology explores how listening shaped knowledge and empire-building in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China. As the Manchu dynasty expanded deep into Inner Asian territories deemed foreign by the majority-Han population, the Qing Empire’s musical culture encompassed the sounds of Mongols, Uyghurs, and Tibetans, as well as Western music brought by Jesuit and other Christian missionaries. Lester Hu reveals that this diversity transformed not only Qing court culture but the very grounds on which knowledge and power could be established.

In one revealing episode from 1692, the Kangxi Emperor (1654–1722) misinterpreted a key term of Classical Chinese music after studying European music with the Jesuits. Hu situates this anecdote within the political, social, and epistemic shifts that transformed late-imperial China. As Hu shows, listening was an instrument of Qing imperial authority: Knowledge about music, language, and even the universe could only be verified through the emperor’s ears. Furthermore, listening facilitated new theories of empirical knowledge, which both lent themselves to Qing-imperial ideology and generated new epistemic tensions. By exploring their echoes in similar shifts in early modern Europe, Hu’s book brings a global perspective to the study of music in the early modern world and reconsiders the transcendental ground on which such comparative and intercultural knowledge is possible.

How China’s expansive new era of urbanization threatens to undermine the foundations of rural life 

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, China has vastly expanded its urbanization processes in an effort to reduce the inequalities between urban and rural areas. Centered on the mountainous region of Chongqing, which serves as an experimental site for the country’s new urban development policies, The End of the Village analyzes the radical expansion of urbanization and its consequences for China’s villagers. It reveals a fundamental rewriting of the nation’s social contract, as villages that once organized rural life and guaranteed rural livelihoods are replaced by an increasingly urbanized landscape dominated by state institutions. 

Throughout this comprehensive study of China’s “urban–rural coordination” policy, Nick R. Smith traces the diminishing autonomy of the country’s rural populations and their subordination to larger urban networks and shared administrative structures. Outside Chongqing’s urban centers, competing forces are at work in reshaping the social, political, and spatial organization of its villages. While municipal planners and policy makers seek to extend state power structures beyond the boundaries of the city, village leaders and inhabitants try to maintain control over their communities’ uncertain futures through strategies such as collectivization, shareholding, real estate development, and migration.

As China seeks to rectify the development crises of previous decades through rapid urban growth, such drastic transformations threaten to displace existing ways of life for more than 600 million residents. Offering an unprecedented look at the country’s contentious shift in urban planning and policy, The End of the Village exposes the precarious future of rural life in China and suggests a critical reappraisal of how we think about urbanization.

An in-depth examination of the regulatory, entrepreneurial, and organizational factors contributing to the expansion and transformation of China’s supplemental education industry.

Like many parents in the United States, parents in China, increasingly concerned with their children’s academic performance, are turning to for-profit tutoring businesses to help their children get ahead in school. China’s supplemental education industry is now the world’s largest and most vibrant for-profit education market, and we can see its influence on the US higher education system: more than 70% of Chinese students studying in American universities have taken test preparation classes for overseas standardized tests. The Fruits of Opportunism offers a much-needed thorough investigation into this industry. This book examines how opportunistic organizations thrived in an ambiguous policy environment and how they catalyzed organizational and institutional changes in this industry.

A former insider in China’s Education Industry, sociologist Le Lin shows how and why this industry evolved to become a for-profit one dominated by private, formal, nationally operating, and globally financed corporations, despite restrictions the Chinese state placed on the industry. Looking closely at the opportunistic organizations that were founded by marginal entrepreneurs and quickly came to dominate the market, Lin finds that as their non-compliant practices spread across the industry, these opportunistic organizations pushed privatization and marketization from below. The case of China’s Education Industry laid out in The Fruits of Opportunism illustrates that while opportunism leaves destruction in its wake, it can also drive the formation and evolution of a market.