Results by title

Educational pursuits run like a rich thread through the fabric of China's turbulent twentieth century. From the founding of China's first modern school system in the late Qing dynasty through the republican era to the latest educational developments in the People's Republic of China, this book seeks to understand how developments in education contributed to, and were in turn influenced by, cultural patterns and the ongoing search for identity by individuals, collectivities, and states. Its sixteen contributors explore three themes that have enlivened China studies in recent years: sino-foreign interactions, state-society relations, and gender representation and identification.
Unlike most studies of modern Chinese education that focus exclusively on the post-1949 era, Education, Culture, and Identity in Twentieth-Century China represents a deliberate attempt to break through the 1949 barrier and embrace the entire century. Culture emerges in this study as a deeper level factor that underlay the development of education in each period and shaped certain recurrent patterns, while identity involves a search for individual and collective meaning that went on under different regimes.
The product of a genuinely multidisciplinary effort to promote cross-fertilization among an international team of scholars in a wide range of disciplines, Education, Culture, and Identity in Twentieth-Century China will interest students and scholars of modern China, comparative and international education, educational policy, and international relations. It will also appeal to policy makers and professionals associated with international organizations.
Glen Peterson is Associate Professor of History, University of British Columbia. Ruth Hayhoe is Director, Hong Kong Institute of Education. Yongling Lu is a graduate student in the History Department, Stanford University.

The first part of this volume is devoted is devoted to synoptical and analytical examinations by historians of attempts to root modern science in China during the Republican period. The second contains reports by scientists who have been involved in China’s recent efforts to modernize. Topics include genetic research, taxonomy, contraception, food policy, and schistosomiasis. With an introduction by Nathan Sivin.

In The Magic of Concepts Rebecca E. Karl interrogates "the economic" as concept and practice as it was construed historically in China in the 1930s and again in the 1980s and 1990s. Separated by the Chinese Revolution and Mao's socialist experiments, each era witnessed urgent discussions about how to think about economic concepts derived from capitalism in modern China. Both eras were highly cosmopolitan and each faced its own global crisis in economic and historical philosophy: in the 1930s, capitalism's failures suggested that socialism offered a plausible solution, while the abandonment of socialism five decades later provoked a rethinking of the relationship between history and the economic as social practice. Interweaving a critical historiography of modern China with the work of the Marxist-trained economist Wang Yanan, Karl shows how "magical concepts" based on dehistoricized Eurocentric and capitalist conceptions of historical activity that purport to exist outside lived experiences have erased much of the critical import of China's twentieth-century history. In this volume, Karl retrieves the economic to argue for a more nuanced and critical account of twentieth-century Chinese and global historical practice.