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662 books match the query 'China' and 36 start with a
A Century of Travels in China
Critical Essays on Travel Writing from the 1840s to the 1940sEdited by Douglas Kerr and Julia Kuehn
Hong Kong University Press, 2007
A Certain Justice
Toward an Ecology of the Chinese Legal ImaginationHaiyan Lee
University of Chicago Press, 2023
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.
A Chinese Rebel beyond the Great Wall
The Cultural Revolution and Ethnic Pogrom in Inner MongoliaTJ Cheng, Uradyn E. Bulag, and Mark Selden
University of Chicago Press, 2023
During the Great Leap Forward, as hundreds of thousands of Chinese famine refugees headed to Inner Mongolia, Cheng Tiejun arrived in 1959 as a middle school student. In 1966, when the PRC plunged into the Cultural Revolution, he joined the Red Guards just as Inner Mongolia’s longtime leader, Ulanhu, was purged. With the military in control, and with deepening conflict with the Soviet Union and its ally Mongolia on the border, Mongols were accused of being nationalists and traitors. A pogrom followed, taking more than 16,000 Mongol lives, the heaviest toll anywhere in China.
At the heart of this book are Cheng’s first-person recollections of his experiences as a rebel. These are complemented by a close examination of the documentary record of the era from the three coauthors. The final chapter offers a theoretical framework for Inner Mongolia’s repression. The repression’s goal, the authors show, was not to destroy the Mongols as a people or as a culture—it was not a genocide. It was, however, a “politicide,” an attempt to break the will of a nationality to exercise leadership of their autonomous region. This unusual narrative provides urgently needed primary source material to understand the events of the Cultural Revolution, while also offering a novel explanation of contemporary Chinese minority politics involving the Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Mongols.
A Concise Field Guide to Post-Communist Regimes
Actors, Institutions, and DynamicsBálint Madlovics
Central European University Press, 2022
While the literature of hybrid regimes has given up the presumption that post-communist countries must democratize, its language and concepts still mostly relate to Western democracies. Magyar and Madlovics strongly argue for a vocabulary and grammar tailored to the specifics of the region. In 120 theses they unfold a conceptual framework with (1) a typology of post-communist regimes and (2) a detailed presentation of ideal-type actors and the political, economic, and social phenomena in these regimes. The book is a more digestible companion to the 800-page The Anatomy of Post-Communist Regimes (CEU Press, 2020), which was a detailed theoretical study with plenty of empirical illustrations.
Each of the 120 theses contains a statement and its concise discussion supported by illustrative tables, figures, and QR-codes that connect the interested reader to the more detailed analysis in the Anatomy. In a condensed variety, this book has kept the holistic approach of the Anatomy and treats the spheres of political, market, and communal action as parts of a single, coherent whole. The endeavor to synthesize a vast range of ideas does not, however, result in a too complicated text. On the contrary, freed from the implicit presumptions of democracy theory, the new terminology yields a readily usable toolkit of unambiguous means of expression to speak about post-communism.
A County of Culture
Twentieth-Century China Seen from the Village Schools of Zouping, ShandongStig Thogersen
University of Michigan Press, 2002
A County of Culture demonstrates how changes in educational policies have exerted considerable influence on social life in Zouping, from the macro level of nation building and state formation to the micro level of individual careers. It also shows that the rural population has been far from being a passive object of reform, and that it has been extremely difficult for educational reformers to achieve their goals as a result of the social, economic, and mental realities of China's villages. The fate of educational reforms has thus been decided in the tension between two poles: the visions of educational planners and reformers on the one hand, and the expectations of the rural population on the other.
Not only pertinent to specialists of Chinese education, this book will also be useful to anyone interested in state-society relations in modern China and to students of comparative education and rural development.
Stig Thøgersen is Associate Professor of Chinese Language and Society, University of Aarhus.
A Global Enlightenment
Western Progress and Chinese ScienceAlexander Statman
University of Chicago Press, 2023
The Enlightenment gave rise not only to new ideas of progress but consequential debates about them. Did distant times and places have anything to teach the here and now? Voltaire could believe that they did; Hegel was convinced that they did not. Early philosophes praised Chinese philosophy as an enduring model of reason. Later philosophes rejected it as stuck in the past. Seeking to vindicate ancient knowledge, a group of French statesmen and savants began a conversation with the last great scholar of the Jesuit mission to China. Together, they drew from Chinese learning to challenge the emerging concept of Western advancement.
A Global Enlightenment traces this overlooked exchange between China and the West to make compelling claims about the history of progress, notions of European exceptionalism, and European engagement with Chinese science. To tell this story, Alexander Statman focuses on a group of thinkers he terms “orphans of the Enlightenment,” intellectuals who embraced many of their contemporaries’ ideals but valued ancient wisdom. They studied astronomical records, gas balloons, electrical machines, yin-yang cosmology, animal magnetism, and Daoist medicine. And their inquiries helped establish a new approach to the global history of science.
Rich with new archival research and fascinating anecdotes, A Global Enlightenment deconstructs two common assumptions about the early to late modern period. Though historians have held that the idea of a mysterious and inscrutable East was inherent in Enlightenment progress theory, Statman argues that it was the orphans of the Enlightenment who put it there: by identifying China as a source of ancient wisdom, they turned it into a foil for scientific development. But while historical consensus supposes that non-Western ideas were banished from European thought over the course of the Enlightenment, Statman finds that Europeans became more interested in Chinese science—as a precursor, then as an antithesis, and finally as an alternative to modernity.
A Macao Narrative
Austin Coates
Hong Kong University Press, 2009
A Military History of China
From the First Recorded Battles to the Twenty-First CenturyDavid Richard Petriello
Westholme Publishing, 2018
The twenty-first century has been labeled the “Pacific Century,” both in terms of economics as well as military affairs. While South Korea and Japan have stagnated in these aspects, the growth of China since 1980 is unprecedented in modern history. While its economic achievements are both well known and studied, the rapid development of its military is not. In A Military History of China: From the First Recorded Battle to the Twenty-First Century, historian David Richard Petriello provides the first English language account of China’s martial history. China’s military prowess extends across the centuries, and includes the invention or first use of gunpowder, landmines, rocket launchers, armored cavalry, repeating crossbows, multistage rockets, and chemical weapons—in many cases, long before the West.
Illustrated with more than one hundred maps and figures, the book traces the general military history of China from the Neolithic Age to the present day. Particular attention is paid to specific battles, military thinkers, the impact of geography on warfare in China, and the role played by technology. Likewise, the work examines the underlying philosophy of why China goes to war. Because China’s military weakness over the past two centuries compared to the West has given a false sense of China’s potential, a thorough knowledge of the men, battles, tactics, geography, strategies, philosophy, and experiences of war throughout Chinese history are vital to prepare students, scholars, soldiers, and politicians for the return of China as a major innovative and global military power.
A Monastery in Time
The Making of Mongolian BuddhismCaroline Humphrey and Hurelbaatar Ujeed
University of Chicago Press, 2013
A New Documentary History of Hong Kong, 1945–1997
Edited by Florence Mok and Fung Chi Keung Charles
Hong Kong University Press, 2025
Through analyzing newly released archival records from the National Archives in London and the Public Records Office in Hong Kong, A New Documentary History of Hong Kong, 1945–1997 provides an updated and improved understanding of basic aspects of the city such as governance, economy, society, and culture. It also aims to investigate topics that are under-explored in previous sourcebooks, such as race and diasporas, gender and familial relations, medicine and healthcare, and environment and natural disasters. Overall, this book offers an innovative and comprehensive long-term perspective of Hong Kong’s colonial history.
A Revolution Across Art and Science
Participatory Knowledge Production in China’s Great Leap ForwardEdited by Christine I. Ho and Sigrid Schmalzer
Hong Kong University Press, 2026
This volume examines the role of mass knowledge production—whether artistic, scientific, or technical—in China’s Great Leap Forward.
A Revolution Across Art and Science examines how laborers reimagined knowledge during a high point of radicalism in modern Chinese history. Encouraged to become curators, historians, writers, artists, technicians, scientists, and other kinds of experts, Chinese workers and peasants were mobilized to produce new knowledge in the humanities and sciences. Moving beyond the economic questions that have dominated most previous scholarship on the Great Leap Forward, this volume explores the cultural dimensions of the movement to establish the significance of mass knowledge production. Through ten case studies authored by emerging scholars, this volume offers a simultaneously empathetic and critical inquiry into PRC history and its impact on ongoing efforts to democratize knowledge around the world.
A Short History of Beijing
Jonathan Clements
Haus Publishing, 2022
Before China’s capital became a sprawling megacity and international center of business and culture, its fortunes fluctuated under a dozen dynasties. It has been a capital for several states, including those headed by Mongolian chiefs and the glorious Ming emperors, whose tombs can still be found on its outskirts. And before all that, it was a campsite for primitive hominids, known as the Peking Man. A Short History of Beijing tells the story of this remarkable city, from its more famous residents—Khubilai Khan, Marco Polo, and Chairman Mao—right up to the twenty-first century, as modern construction wiped out so much of the old city to make way for its twenty-million-strong population. Through his timely and intimate portrait of the world’s most populous capital city, Jonathan Clements reveals the history of China itself.
A Song for One or Two
Music and the Concept of Art in Early ChinaKenneth J. DeWoskin
University of Michigan Press, 1982
A Star in the East
The Rise of Christianity in ChinaRodney Stark
Templeton Press, 2015
What is the state of Christianity in China? Some scholars say that China is invulnerable to religion. In contrast, others say that past efforts of missionaries have failed, writing off those converted as nothing more than “rice Christians” or cynical souls who had frequented the missions for the benefits they provided. Some wonder if the Cultural Revolution extinguished any chances of Christianity in China.
Rodney Stark and Xiuhua Wang offer a different perspective, arguing that Christianity is alive, well, and on the rise. Stark approaches the topic from an extensive research background in Christianity and Chinese history, and Wang provides an inside look at Christianity and its place in her home country of China. Both authors cover the history of religion in China, disproving older theories concerning the number of Christians and the kinds of Christians that have emerged in the past 155 years. Stark and Wang claim that when just considering the visible Christians—those not part of underground churches—thousands of Chinese are still converted to Christianity daily, and forty new churches are opening each week.
A Star in the East draws on two major national surveys to sketch a close-up of religion in China. A reliable estimate is that by 2007 there were approximately 60 million Christians in China. If the current growth rate were to hold until 2030, there would be more Christians in China—about 295 million—than in any other nation. This trend has significant implications, not just for China but for the greater world order. It is probable that Chinese Christianity will splinter into denominations, likely leading to the same political, social, and economic ramifications seen in the West today.
Whether you’re new to studying Christianity in China or whether this has been your area of interest for years, A Star in the East provides a reliable, thought-provoking, and engaging account of the resilience of the Christian faith in China and the implications it has for the future.
A Village with My Name
A Family History of China's Opening to the WorldScott Tong
University of Chicago Press, 2017
A Village with My Name offers a unique perspective on the transitions in China through the eyes of regular people who have witnessed such epochal events as the toppling of the Qing monarchy, Japan’s occupation during World War II, exile of political prisoners to forced labor camps, mass death and famine during the Great Leap Forward, market reforms under Deng Xiaoping, and the dawn of the One Child Policy. Tong’s story focuses on five members of his family, who each offer a specific window on a changing country: a rare American-educated girl born in the closing days of the Qing Dynasty, a pioneer exchange student, an abandoned toddler from World War II who later rides the wave of China’s global export boom, a young professional climbing the ladder at a multinational company, and an orphan (the author’s daughter) adopted in the middle of a baby-selling scandal fueled by foreign money. Through their stories, Tong shows us China anew, visiting former prison labor camps on the Tibetan plateau and rural outposts along the Yangtze, exploring the Shanghai of the 1930s, and touring factories across the mainland.
With curiosity and sensitivity, Tong explores the moments that have shaped China and its people, offering a compelling and deeply personal take on how China became what it is today.
A World of Turmoil
The United States, China, and Taiwan in the Long Cold Warstephen hartnett
Michigan State University Press, 2021
Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque
The Living, Dead, and Undead in Japan's Imperialism, 1895-1945Mark Driscoll
Duke University Press, 2010
Aesthetics and Marxism
Chinese Aesthetic Marxists and Their Western ContemporariesKang Liu
Duke University Press, 2000
Far from being secondary considerations in Chinese Marxism, aesthetics and culture are in fact principal concerns. In this respect, such Marxists are similar to their Western counterparts, although Europeans have had little understanding of the Chinese experience. Liu traces the genealogy of aesthetic discourse in both modern China and the West since the era of classical German thought, showing where conceptual modifications and divergences have occurred in the two traditions. He examines the work of Mao Zedong, Lu Xun, Li Zehou, Qu Qiubai, and others in China, and from the West he discusses Kant, Schiller, Schopenhauer, and Marxist theorists including Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, and Marcuse. While stressing the diversity of Marxist positions within China as well as in the West, Liu explains how ideas of culture and aesthetics have offered a constructive vision for a postrevolutionary society and have affected a wide field of issues involving the problems of modernity.
Forcefully argued and theoretically sophisticated, this book will appeal to students and scholars of contemporary Marxism, cultural studies, aesthetics, and modern Chinese culture, politics, and ideology.
After the Post–Cold War
The Future of Chinese HistoryDai Jinhua
Duke University Press, 2018
Against Exclusion
Disrupting Anti-Chinese Violence in the Nineteenth CenturyAudrey Wu Clark
The Ohio State University Press, 2024
In Against Exclusion, Audrey Wu Clark dramatically reframes Asian American resistance via the lives of five early Chinese American public figures. In contrast to later activists who sought to defy stereotypes, Ah Toy, Mary Tape, Wong Chin Foo, Yan Phou Lee, and Yung Wing deployed the model minority and yellow peril tropes to make themselves visible during a period of rampant anti-Chinese violence and legal exclusion. In making themselves visible, they sought to expose and dismantle the contradictory exceptionalism of nineteenth-century US liberalism that both required and “disavowed” the deaths of Chinese Americans. In examining these figures and the ways in which they fought their exclusion as Chinese Americans—via court cases, autobiographical writings, journalism, and other forms of activism—Clark contributes to prevailing scholarly conversations about stereotypes of Asian Americans but contextualizes them in the nineteenth century. She traces the twinned emergences of the model minority and the yellow peril, excavating the exceptionalism with which Chinese Americans were racialized and subject to death—whether by lynching, other forms of driving out, or loss of citizenship or rights—and mapping its reverberations into the present day.
Almost a Revolution
The Story of a Chinese Student's Journey from Boyhood to Leadership in Tiananmen SquareShen Tong
University of Michigan Press, 1998
Now nearly ten years later as our fascination with post-Deng China continues to develop, Shen's story and the updated material he provides are weighted with increasing significance. Coupled with much of the recent analysis, Shen's firsthand account vividly contextualizes the Chinese government's opposition to democracy and offers meaningful insight into a country that promises to occupy an increasingly prominent position in the world.
"A cause for celebration . . . an important contribution to China's newly discovered historical memory." --New York Times Book Review
Shen Tong is a doctoral student in political sociology at Boston University and the founder of the Democracy for China Fund, which aims to support and publicize dissent networks in China. Marianne Yen is a former New York correspondent for the Washington Post.
Ambivalent Desires
Affect and Boys Love in ChinaLiang Ge
University of Michigan Press, 2027
Ambivalent Desires carefully investigates Chinese danmei creators’ and fans’ everyday affective experiences in the dynamic yet ambivalent boys love cultural ecology of China. Emerging in mainland China in the late 1990s and flourishing in the 2010s, danmei, also known as boys love fiction, is a genre that features male-male romances or erotica. This book offers a rich, empirically grounded account of danmei, examining the complex and embodied lived experiences of those producing and consuming male homoeroticism and framing ambivalence as an ongoing queer feminist project.
Proposing a novel theoretical framework of “the grammar of ambivalences,” Liang Ge seeks to understand how desires, affects, and queer feminist politics operate within and against the everyday heteropatriarchal and party-state conditions of postsocialist China. Ambivalent Desires attends simultaneously to the backward-looking normativities infused within danmei culture and the forward-facing transformative potential it generates, refusing the reductive binary of resistance versus escapism that has structured much existing scholarship.
America's First Adventure in China
Trade, Treaties, Opium, and SalvationJohn R Haddad
Temple University Press, 2014
In America's First Adventure in China, John Haddad provides a colorful history of the evolving cultural exchange and interactions between these countries. He recounts how American expatriates adopted a pragmatic attitude-as well as an entrepreneurial spirit and improvisational approach-to their dealings with the Chinese. Haddad shows how opium played a potent role in the dreams of Americans who either smuggled it or opposed its importation, and he considers the missionary movement that compelled individuals to accept a hard life in an alien culture.
As a result of their efforts, Americans achieved a favorable outcome—they established a unique presence in China—and cultivated a relationship whose complexities continue to grow.
American Goddess at the Rape of Nanking
The Courage of Minnie VautrinHua-ling Hu
Southern Illinois University Press, 2001
The Japanese army’s brutal four-month occupation of the city of Nanking during the 1937 Sino-Japanese War is known, for good reason, as “the rape of Nanking.” As they slaughtered an estimated three hundred thousand people, the invading soldiers raped more than twenty thousand women—some estimates run as high as eighty thousand. Hua-ling Hu presents here the amazing untold story of the American missionary Minnie Vautrin, whose unswerving defiance of the Japanese protected ten thousand Chinese women and children and made her a legend among the Chinese people she served.
Vautrin, who came to be known in China as the “Living Goddess” or the “Goddess of Mercy,” joined the Foreign Christian Missionary Society and went to China during the Chinese Nationalist Revolution in 1912. As dean of studies at Ginling College in Nanking, she devoted her life to promoting Chinese women’s education and to helping the poor.
At the outbreak of the war in July 1937, Vautrin defied the American embassy’s order to evacuate the city. After the fall of Nanking in December, Japanese soldiers went on a rampage of killing, burning, looting, rape, and torture, rapidly reducing the city to a hell on earth. On the fourth day of the occupation, Minnie Vautrin wrote in her diary: “There probably is no crime that has not been committed in this city today. . . . Oh, God, control the cruel beastliness of the soldiers in Nanking.”
When the Japanese soldiers ordered Vautrin to leave the campus, she replied: “This is my home. I cannot leave.” Facing down the blood-stained bayonets constantly waved in her face, Vautrin shielded the desperate Chinese who sought asylum behind the gates of the college. Vautrin exhausted herself defying the Japanese army and caring for the refugees after the siege ended in March 1938. She even helped the women locate husbands and sons who had been taken away by the Japanese soldiers. She taught destitute widows the skills required to make a meager living and provided the best education her limited sources would allow to the children in desecrated Nanking.
Finally suffering a nervous breakdown in 1940, Vautrin returned to the United States for medical treatment. One year later, she ended her own life. She considered herself a failure.
Hu bases her biography on Vautrin’s correspondence between 1919 and 1941 and on her diary, maintained during the entire siege, as well as on Chinese, Japanese, and American eyewitness accounts, government documents, and interviews with Vautrin’s family.
American-Designed Shopping Malls in China
Charlie Qiuli Xue and Arwen Yingting Chen
Hong Kong University Press, 2026
How shopping malls transformed China’s urban landscapes and the consumer patterns of their residents.
China’s remarkable journey from poverty to becoming the world’s second-largest economic power is marked by extraordinary urban growth and the booming consumption capacity of urban populations. Central to this development are multifunctional commercial complexes and shopping malls, which are now key features of modern urban districts. Shopping malls, originally introduced to China by American architects in the 1980s, have since flourished on an even larger scale than their American counterparts.
This book delves into the origins of shopping mall development in the United States after World War II, tracing how American architects exported this building type into China’s rapidly evolving urban landscapes, particularly in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Kunming, and Guangzhou. Using primary sources, statistical analyses, and illustrated case studies, American-Designed Shopping Malls in China explores the evolution of shopping malls as a consequence of China’s profound economic, social, and cultural change over the past four decades. The book also highlights the impact of American consumerism on the everyday lives of Chinese people, altering not only consumer patterns but also local architectural practices. This tale of transformation is essential reading for anyone interested in China’s rapid urban development.
An American Dream
The Life of an African American Soldier and POW Who Spent Twelve Years in Communist ChinaClarence Adams
University of Massachusetts Press, 2007
Throughout his life, Clarence Adams exhibited self-reliance, ambition, ingenuity, courage, and a commitment to learning—character traits often equated with the successful pursuit of the American Dream. Unfortunately, for an African American coming of age in the 1930s and 1940s, such attributes counted for little, especially in the South.
Adams was a seventeen-year-old high school dropout in 1947 when he fled Memphis and the local police to join the U.S. Army. Three years later, after fighting in the Korean War in an all-black artillery unit that he believed to have been sacrificed to save white troops, he was captured by the Chinese. After spending almost three years as a POW, during which he continued to suffer racism at the hands of his fellow Americans, he refused repatriation in 1953, choosing instead the People's Republic of China, where he hoped to find educational and career opportunities not readily available in his own country.
While living in China, Adams earned a university degree, married a Chinese professor of Russian, and worked in Beijing as a translator for the Foreign Languages Press. During the Vietnam War he made a controversial anti-war broadcast over Radio Hanoi, urging black troops not to fight for someone else's political and economic freedoms until they enjoyed these same rights at home.
In 1966, having come under suspicion during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, he returned with his wife and two children to the United States, where he was subpoenaed to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities to face charges of “disrupting the morale of American fighting forces in Vietnam and inciting revolution in the United States.” After these charges were dropped, he and his family struggled to survive economically. Eventually, through sheer perseverance, they were able to fulfill at least part of the American Dream. By the time he died, the family owned and operated eight successful Chinese restaurants in his native Memphis.
An Amorous History of the Silver Screen
Shanghai Cinema, 1896-1937Zhang Zhen
University of Chicago Press, 2005
The first sustained historical study of the emergence of cinema in China, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen is a fascinating narrative that illustrates the immense cultural significance of film and its power as a vehicle for social change. Named after a major feature film on the making of Chinese cinema, only part of which survives, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen reveals the intricacies of this cultural movement and explores its connections to other art forms such as photography, architecture, drama, and literature. In light of original archival research, Zhang Zhen examines previously unstudied films and expands the important discussion of how they modeled modern social structures and gender roles in early twentieth-century China.
The first volume in the new and groundbreaking series Cinema and Modernity, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen is an innovative—and well illustrated—look at the cultural history of Chinese modernity through the lens of this seminal moment in Shanghai cinema.
An Armchair Traveller's History of Beijing
Jonathan Clements
Haus Publishing, 2016
Home to capitals of several states over time, the site of modern Beijing has been ruled by Mongolian chiefs and the glorious Ming emperors, whose tombs can still be found on its outskirts. Through Beijing, we can experience Chinese history itself, including its more famous residents—including Khubilai Khan, Mulan, and Marco Polo. Special emphasis is placed on Beijing’s precarious heritage in the twenty-first century, as modern construction wipes out much of the old city to make way for homes for twenty million people.
This book also offers detailed information on sites of tourist interest, including the pros and cons of different sections of the Great Wall and the best ways to see the Forbidden City and the fast-disappearing relics of the city’s Manchu and Maoist eras. A chapter on food and drink examines not only local delicacies, but the many other Chinese dishes that form part of Beijing’s rich dining traditions. With its blend of rich history and expert tips, An Armchair Traveller’s History of Beijing is an essential introduction to one of the world’s most remarkable cities.
An Innocent Abroad
Lectures in ChinaJ. Hillis Miller
Northwestern University Press, 2015
Since 1988, J. Hillis Miller has traveled to China to lecture on literary theory, especially the role of globalization in literary theory. Over time, he has assisted in the development of distinctively Chinese forms of literary theory, Comparative Literature, and World Literature. The fifteen lectures gathered in An Innocent Abroad span both time and geographic location, reflecting his work at universities across China for more than twenty-five years. More important, they reflect the evolution of Miller’s thinking and of the lectures’ contexts in China as these have markedly changed over the years, especially on either side of Tiananmen Square and in light of China’s economic growth and technological change. A foreword by the leading theorist Fredric Jameson provides additional context.
Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500-1800
Peter N. Miller and François Louis, editors
University of Michigan Press, 2012
This book is a project in comparative history, but along two distinct axes, one historical and the other historiographical. Its purpose is to constructively juxtapose the early modern European and Chinese approaches to historical study that have been called "antiquarian." As an exercise in historical recovery, the essays in this volume amass new information about the range of antiquarian-type scholarship on the past, on nature, and on peoples undertaken at either end of the Eurasian landmass between 1500 and 1800. As a historiographical project, the book challenges the received---and often very much under conceptualized---use of the term "antiquarian" in both European and Chinese contexts. Readers will not only learn more about the range of European and Chinese scholarship on the past---and especially the material past---but they will also be able to integrate some of the historiographical observations and corrections into new ways of conceiving of the history of historical scholarship in Europe since the Renaissance, and to reflect on the impact of these European terms on Chinese approaches to the Chinese past. This comparison is a two-way street, with the European tradition clarified by knowledge of Chinese practices, and Chinese approaches better understood when placed alongside the European ones.
Appetites
Food and Sex in Post-Socialist ChinaJudith Farquhar
Duke University Press, 2002
From eating well in improving economic times to memories of the late 1950s famine, from the flavors of traditional Chinese medicine to modernity’s private sexual passions, this book argues that embodiment in all its forms must be invented and sustained in public reflections about personal and national life. As much at home in science studies and social theory as in the details of life in Beijing, this account uses anthropology, cultural studies, and literary criticism to read contemporary Chinese life in a materialist and reflexive mode. For both Maoist and market reform periods, this is a story of high culture in appetites, desire in collective life, and politics in the body and its dispositions.
Arrested Histories
Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten WarCarole McGranahan
Duke University Press, 2010
Drawing on rich ethnographic and historical research, McGranahan tells the story of the Tibetan resistance and the social processes through which this history is made and unmade, and lived and forgotten in the present. Fulfillment of veterans’ desire for recognition hinges on the Dalai Lama and “historical arrest,” a practice in which the telling of certain pasts is suspended until an undetermined time in the future. In this analysis, struggles over history emerge as a profound pain of belonging. Tibetan cultural politics, regional identities, and religious commitments cannot be disentangled from imperial histories, contemporary geopolitics, and romanticized representations of Tibet. Moving deftly from armed struggle to nonviolent hunger strikes, and from diplomatic offices to refugee camps, Arrested Histories provides powerful insights into the stakes of political engagement and the cultural contradictions of everyday life.
Art, Politics, and Commerce in Chinese Cinema
Edited by Ying Zhu and Stanley Rosen
Hong Kong University Press, 2010
Asia First
China and the Making of Modern American ConservatismJoyce Mao
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Mao explores the deep resonance American conservatives felt with the defeat of Chiang Kai-Shek and his exile to Taiwan, which they lamented as the loss of China to communism and the corrosion of traditional values. In response, they fomented aggressive anti-communist positions that urged greater action in the Pacific, a policy known as “Asia First.” While this policy would do nothing to oust the communists from China, it was powerfully effective at home. Asia First provided American conservatives a set of ideals—American sovereignty, selective military intervention, strident anti-communism, and the promotion of a technological defense state—that would bring them into the global era with the positions that are now their hallmark.
At Full Speed
Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless WorldEsther Yau
University of Minnesota Press, 2001
Avian Reservoirs
Virus Hunters and Birdwatchers in Chinese Sentinel PostsFrédéric Keck
Duke University Press, 2020