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This article argues that Western impressions of the Chinese pre-modern monetary experience might have been excessively colored by Marco Polo’s favorable commentary on the stability of the Mongol polity and its dissemination of paper money. Experiments with unconvertible paper money had ultimately been no more successful in late-imperial China than they were in the early-modern West. By 1430, in fact, the Ming dynasty was forced to abandon the issuance of paper money altogether. The genesis of paper money both in China and it the West had originally emanated from private institutions. However, royally chartered banks of issue were conspicuously absent from the Chinese setting until the late nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper opens a scholarly discourse about Chinese scholars' engagement with TWAIL (Third World Approach to International Law). This paper shows that Chinese international law scholars and TWAIL align in their resistance to Eurocentrism in international law, while they differ in their attitude towards whether to refrain from "national allegories" and criticize international law as a state-centric invention. A state-centric approach means that mainstream Chinese international lawyers tend to adopt a pragmatic attitude towards international law, employing it as a strategic weapon. During the course of this inquiry, this paper also observes a critical strand in Chinese academics – mostly outside of the international law discipline, and within the disciplines of history and philosophy – that is dedicated to redeeming China's subjectivity and history, which may be useful to understand Chinese critical spirit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1946, the British biochemist Joseph Needham returned from a four-year stay in China. Needham scholars have considered this visit as a revelatory period that paved the way for his famous book series Science and Civilization in China (SCC). Surprisingly, however, Needham's actual time in China has remained largely unstudied over the last seventy years. As director of the Sino-British Scientific Cooperation Office, Needham travelled throughout Free China to promote cooperation between British and Chinese scientists to contain the Japanese invasion during the Second World War. By rediscovering Needham's peregrinations, this paper re-examines the origins of his fascination for China. First, it contests the widely held idea that this Chinese episode is quite separate and different from Needham's first half-life as a leftist scientist. Second, it demonstrates how the political and philosophical commitments he inherited from the social relations of science movement, and his biochemical research, shaped his interest in China's past. Finally, this paper recounts these forgotten years to reveal their implications for his later pursuits as historian of science and as director of the natural-science division of UNESCO. It highlights how, while in China, Needham co-constituted the philosophical tenets of his scientific programme at UNESCO and the conceptual foundations of his SCC. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The public abattoir emerged as an institution across the industrialized world in the mid-nineteenth century to centralize and control animal killing and meat processing, activities that had traditionally taken place in private slaughterhouses. The modern idea of the abattoir, however, is more than a place where animals are killed for human consumption. Designed to optimize a disassembling process that efficiently took apart the livestock into small pieces, the modern abattoir is one of the earliest building types where the production line was incorporated into the spatial layout. Modern abattoirs also separated livestock from people, and production from consumption, into special places removed from public view.This paper is concerned with the production of a public abattoir in 1930s colonial Shanghai. The Shanghai Municipal Abattoir, completed in 1933, was deliberately designed as a ‘machine for killing’, which applied production-line principles to the efficient slaughter of animals. The result of this functionalism was an extraordinary series of multi-storey concrete structures, dictated by the bloody business of slaughtering animals and processing their carcasses, set behind an art deco façade. In this paper we seek to tell the story of the production of a building that has previously been little researched, with most of the archival material in Shanghai Municipal Archives (SMA) and the limited published material available only in Mandarin. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines how the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) struggled to defend its ‘without note or comment’ principle in late Qing China, which was a vivid case attesting the tension between the ideals of Protestant missionary societies and the reality of mission fields. The BFBS regarded the ‘without note or comment’ principle as its fundamental principle, since the principle not only embodied its biblical ideology but also helped solicit interdenominational support. However, Protestant missionaries in China urged the BFBS to modify the ‘without note or comment’ principle so as to publish and distribute Chinese Bibles with readers’ helps explaining the biblical world to the Chinese people, who belonged to a non-Christian culture. Having refused the missionaries’ request for several decades, the BFBS eventually published an edition of the Gospel of Matthew in Chinese including explanatory readings called translational helps in 1911, as the BFBS was concerned about the loss of support from missionaries in the face of increasing competition from the National Bible Society of Scotland (NBSS), which began to publish and distribute annotated Chinese Gospels in the 1890s in response to demand. However, this paper argues that the BFBS did not abandon its ‘without note or comment’ principle but instead, by adopting a minimalist approach to compiling its translational helps, the BFBS made use of its Chinese Bibles with translational helps as an expedient means to defend its ‘without note or comment’ principle. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is about a rebellion in southern China in the first half of the tenth century and its depiction in historical sources from the tenth to the seventeenth centuries. At the core of this study is Zhang Yuxian, the rebel leader, and his allegiance to a spirit. The latter suggested moving from Guangdong, the territory of the Southern Han empire (917–971), and the original area of the rebellion, to Jiangxi, the territory of the Southern Tang empire (937–976). The approach of the paper is twofold: first, it examines the historical setting and context; and second, through a close reading of some of the major features of the sources, such as the labelling of Zhang as a yaozei, the adoption of red clothes by the rebels, and so forth, the essay makes evident the close relationship and dependency between successive historical texts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Building on recent scholarship that highlights social change caused by the Anti-Japanese War, this paper traces the politicization of women working in the cotton mills of Chongqing, the Nationalist wartime capital. Upon joining the workforce in the late 1930s, most cotton mill hands were young, uneducated women expected to endure hard work and remain physically confined to the factories. By 1945, women workers were at the forefront of a militant labour movement, writing manifestoes and petitioning government officials. This process of politicization stemmed from their decision to work in factories, which breached societal norms, and their experience of disciplined labour regimes and brutal working conditions, which fostered an incipient class-consciousness. Moreover, Nationalist-sponsored factory education campaigns had the unintended effect of leading women to challenge class exploitation and sexual discrimination. Their participation in the labour movement, which was fuelled by their struggle for economic justice and desire for higher social status, used both legal forms— especially petitions and letters to the press couched in the wartime nationalist rhetoric of shared sacrifice—and extralegal means, namely class violence. The paper concludes that the social changes and conflict that accompanied women's wartime work helped prepare the terrain for Communist rule. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Mantetsu Employees' Association, founded in 1926 by a group of elite university-educated employees of the South Manchuria Railway Company, was an organization of unprecedented scope and vision which provided for the development of a limited form of self-government by the Japanese in the Kwantung Leasehold and Rail Zone during Japan's occupation of northeast China. Its founding principles resembled the ideological tenets of the metropole's movement of Taishō Democracy which had since the post-Russo-Japanese War energized supporters of widened popular access to the job of national governance. This paper traces how the Mantetsu Employees' Association reflected the political zeitgeist of post World War I metropolitan society whilst simultaneously developing in response to heightened Chinese nationalism in the northeast throughout the 1920s. It shows how the Association encompassed a wide range of employee ambitions—from increased involvement in imperial decision-making to labour advocacy on behalf of the Company's lowest-ranking Japanese workers to a critique of colonial policy as dictated by Tokyo's political parties. The paper introduces key Association players and their ideas as a means of questioning the nature of democracy in an imperial setting. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the last three decades, a considerable body of English-language academic work has shed much light on Japan's empire-building project in Greater China during the first half of the twentieth century. At the same time, Japanese-language studies of the country's pre-war financial history have also grown in leaps and bounds. Yet, to date, neither body of literature seems to have fully examined what might appear to the naked eye as one of the critical pre-war junctures, where Japanese financial history converged on imperial policy and Chinese nationalist responses thereto.1 This paper will therefore aim to fill part of the gap by examining how the Yokohama Specie Bank, arguably the backbone of Japanese finance in China Proper, was affected by Chinese anti-foreign boycotts throughout the pre-war era (1842–1937). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper makes the case that in China's most severe food crisis of the first quarter of the twentieth century—the great north China famine of 1920–1921—considerable life-saving relief was generated by three largely-neglected segments of Chinese society: Buddhist and other native charity efforts working along parallel social channels to the better-publicized missionary and international relief groups; the Republic's much-maligned military establishment; and officials and residents of the stricken communities themselves who were operating largely ‘below the radar’ of the distant, mostly city-based chroniclers of the famine whose voices have been privileged in the later history-writing process. Despite the recent fall of the Qing and the beginnings of a fractured era of warring between provincial governors, this paper suggests that communities in the increasingly neglected periphery of 1920 north China were significantly more viable and attentive to social welfare needs than has been previously recognized. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Textiles, grain, coins; people living in the Silk Road oasis of Turfan, 160 km south-east of Urumqi in today's Xinjiang, used all three items as money between 273 and 769. The city of Gaochang (some 40 km east of today's Turfan) was one of the most important cities on the northern route around the Taklamakan Desert, and many of its inhabitants were buried in the adjacent Astana and Karakhoja graveyards. The region's dry climate has preserved an extensive group of paper documents dating to before, and after, the Tang conquest of the city in 640. The residents of Turfan buried their dead with shoes, belts, hats and clothing made from recycled paper with writing on it. These records offer an unparalleled glimpse of how people living along the Silk Road used textiles as currency. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In terms of circulation and sales of albums, the most popular pop music found in mainland China today is the Mandopop imported from Taiwan. The pop music that is genuinely locally produced in China by mainland producers and artists, and which is most notable to the outside world is probably the Chinese rock music and the wave of ‘northwest wind’ pop music produced locally in China in the late 1980s. However, after 2005, there emerged a new kind of Chinese pop that is commercially successful and a product of the national Pop Idol-like singing contest. This paper describes and explicates the broad popularity of this new wave of Chinese pop. Putting aside the overly discussed topic of democracy that comes out of such politicised Supergirl contests, this paper focuses on the nature of the melody and lyrics of pop idol winner Chris Li's songs and how their unique formulation evolves into an important ‘short wave’ of Chinese pop. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the reasons why Physician He (Yi--He, sixth century BCE) was regarded as a founder in the classical medical tradition of China. By most accounts, Physician He's importance owes much to his theoretical innovations. In contrast to earlier healers, Physician He purportedly framed the aetiology of illnesses solely in terms of natural causes, as opposed to attributing sickness to gods or demons. In this paper, I reread a famous episode in the Commentary by Zuo, which is often cited as evidence of the physician's naturalism. By paying close attention to the formal elements of the narrative as well as its larger discursive context, I argue that the standard reading of Physician He falls short. The episode provides little evidence of any secular challenge to religious conceptions of illness, and Physician He was, in fact, patterned after occult experts. A careful look moreover at the reception of Physician He in premodern histories of medicine reveals that the physician was extolled for his attunement to the will of the spirits as well as his powers of examination. Physician He's reputation as a naturalist furthermore represents a modern interpretation, one that reflects efforts to defend the indigenous medical tradition against its biomedical detractors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By the nineteenth century, with the advance of British colonial activities, British corporate laws had been transplanted to maritime Asia with varying degrees of vigour. In British Hong Kong, these laws often clashed with native customs. Through a reconstruction of the legal disputes found in urban Hong Kong, this paper discusses how British and Chinese business traditions interacted with each other during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Before assessing the historical implications and consequences of these legal decisions, this paper will also explore whether the Chinese institution of tong is compatible with British law in urban Hong Kong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the effects generated by the import and consumption of madeja silk from China in the commercial and productive level of Mexico and Spain between 1580 and 1620. The paper questions the traditional image of an Asian trade defined by expensive, manufactured goods, oriented to an elite consumption. Considering the Memorial of Horacio Levanto (1620) and in the context of modern globalization, we propose the hypothesis that Asian trade responded to mass consumption, influencing productive structures in New Spain and Spain herself. Madeja silk from China was one of the main semi-processed goods imported via Acapulco which, as raw material, promoted the development of the Novohispanic textile industry. El artículo analiza los efectos que generó la importación y consumo de la seda madeja de China en el plano comercial y productivo de México y España entre 1580 y 1620. Se cuestiona la imagen tradicional de un comercio asiático apoyado en bienes elaborados y caros, destinados al consumo de elite. Considerando el Memorial de Horacio Levanto (1620) y en el contexto de la globalización moderna, se fundamentará la idea de que el comercio asiático respondió a un consumo masivo, llegando a influir en la estructura productiva novohispana y peninsular. La seda madeja de China fue uno los principales bienes semielaborados importados a través de Acapulco que, por ser insumos, promovieron el desarrollo de la industria textil novohispana. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1961 the seventh global cholera pandemic, El Tor cholera, broke out in Indonesia. Between 1962 and 1964, El Tor infected the southeast coastal areas of China. This pandemic occurred at a time of significant reorganization for both the rural medical and health systems and the people's communes following the failures of the Great Leap Forward. This paper explores how local governments led rural medical practitioners, health care workers, and villagers to participate in the campaign against the spread of El Tor cholera despite the readjustment and retrenchment of the people's communes as social, administrative, and political units. I argue that, during this period of flux, the local government strengthened its control over rural medical practitioners by institutionalizing their daily work practices and reducing their freedom of movement, whilst simultaneously providing incentives for health care workers to join the vaccination campaign. The people's communes and the household-registration system after 1961 put further restrictions on population mobility. This cellularization of village society greatly facilitated the vaccination, quarantine, and epidemic-reporting processes, and contributed to the formation of an epidemic-prevention system and eventually a response scheme for managing public health emergencies in rural China. This process reflected the complexity of the mutual interactions between the political and medical systems under socialism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The First Sino-Japanese War during 1894 and 1895 was a dramatic moment in world events. Not only did it catch the attention of the West but, for as long as it lasted, it became a central focus of readers of newspapers in China in both English and Chinese. The Chinese public was extremely eager to read any news that could be gathered about the war, and newspaper proprietors grasped this opportunity to promote their businesses, competing to provide the latest information using wartime reporting practices already established in Britain and the United States. This paper explores the competition between two commercial Chinese language newspapers, Shenbao and Xinwenbao, in order to elucidate the relationships between patriotism, profit and readership during the First Sino-Japanese War. By comparing and contrasting how news of the war was reported in both publications, and how it was received by the public, we learn something of how these newspapers operated in gathering and publishing reports of tremendous national events, and gain insight into how commercial interests and readers' reactions to news events influenced editorial policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Chinese state's commitment to improve teaching quality in rural regions is a key component of national efforts to close the rural–urban education gap. In this paper, we investigate an understudied but critical dimension of quality teaching: teacher expectations. We employ longitudinal data gathered in Gansu Province in 2000 and 2007 to first examine whether teacher expectations for rural youth are conditioned by students’ social origin and teacher background characteristics. Next, we determine the predictive accuracy of their expectations. Our results highlight the ways in which teacher expectations condition the sorting of rural children among different schooling tracks with distinct life trajectories. Significantly, teachers are more likely to hold lower expectations for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. In addition, non-local teachers hold lower expectations for rural children compared to local teachers. Finally, a low percentage of teachers expect students to enrol in post-compulsory vocational education. We consider the implications of these results for both educational policy and social inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In May 1949 the Chinese Communist Party seized Shanghai. Rather than being elated at the prospect of harnessing the economic power of China's largest city to complete the revolution, the Communists approached it cautiously. How would the Chinese Communist Party set about transforming this free-wheeling port city with a ‘semi-colonial’ past into an orderly and socialist city? How would it balance ideology and pragmatism in reshaping Shanghai? This paper uses the takeover of two British companies as case studies to explore these issues at the ground level. It is argued that the means by which these companies were transformed tell us much about the Party and its state-building policies. When cadres entered foreign companies, their priority was not radical change and anti-imperialism, but rather fostering a sense of stability and unity to avoid disrupting production. Their gradual approach was due in large part to the Party's awareness of its own limited skills, resources and manpower, but also to its leaders and cadres recognizing that before they could remake Shanghai anew they had first to deal with the material and human legacies of the past. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Henan famine of 1942 occurred during the middle of the Sino-Japanese war, in a province that was divided between Japanese, Nationalist and Communist political control. Partly due to this wartime context, existing accounts of the famine rely almost exclusively on eyewitness reports. This paper presents a range of statistical sources on the famine, including weather records, contemporary economic surveys and population censuses. These statistical sources allow similarities to be drawn between the Henan famine and other famines that occurred during the Second World War, such as in Bengal, when the combination of bad weather, war-induced disruptions to food markets, and the relegation of famine relief to the war effort, brought great hardship to civilians living near the war front. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents abstracts of posters presented at the Economic History Association's 2012 annual meeting on topics including the history of fiscal policy in France, the history of education in China, and trade globalization.

Despite the extensive literature on global slavery and servitude, human bondage in Xinjiang (Eastern Turkestan) during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has been largely neglected. Here bondage did not discriminate between ethnic, racial or religious groups and fulfilled a wide range of social, economic, and political functions, reflecting both the region's geographical position at the edge of Central Asia and its political position—first as a dependency and then as a province of Qing China. This paper discusses the nature of the forms of bondage that emerged in this unique geopolitical setting and suggests that the emancipation of Xinjiang's ‘British’ slaves at the end of the nineteenth century and the gradual decline of bondage resulted from a convergence of local, regional, and global forces. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Along with the establishment of the Department of Public Health in 1912, the implementation of public health policies became an integral part of city management in Republican Guangzhou. Yet the cholera outbreak of 1932 fully exposed the weaknesses of the medical and sanitary infrastructure of the city. Due to the Guangzhou government's inaction, the Fangbian Hospital, a local charitable hall founded in response to the bubonic plague of the 1890s, involuntarily took over the major responsibility for providing medical services for cholera patients in the early stage of the epidemic. Only after the death of hundreds of patients and Guangzhou being described as a ‘world of horror’ in the local press did the government-run hospital start to take a more active role. Epidemics have always served as catalysts for change in public health perceptions and practices. This paper attempts to explain how the cholera epidemic of 1932 changed the role of public health in the urban administration of the city. Emphasis is placed on analysing how the people of Guangzhou began to fight for a supply of clean drinking water once they came to realize the link between water and the spread of the fatal cholera epidemic in 1932. Clean water, which used to be seen as a commodity enjoyed by the privileged few, was now increasingly regarded as a citizen's right. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper attempts to estimate the impact of both factional ties and economic performance on the promotion of provincial Party secretaries and governors by analysing a person–year dataset of their career mobility for inclusive years 1989 to 2009. We found that for provincial Party secretaries whose promotion meant rising to a top national position, both factional ties and good economic performance increased their chance for promotion. On the other hand, for provincial governors whose promotion meant rising to a ministry-level position, only economic performance mattered for their promotion. Among provincial Party secretaries, the extent to which performance affected the likelihood of promotion was not different between factional members and non-members. This suggests that even factional members needed to show good performance to enhance the likelihood of their promotion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Thinkers in the Zhànguó period of Chinese history debated intensely whether men were by nature “good” or “bad”. This debate has for many years been an important focus of sinological interest, but usually these properties were not attributed to men, but rather to so-called “human nature” (xìng 性) – thus, in effect, mirroring well-known (and problematic) “European” positions and discussions. The aim of this paper is, on the one hand, to redirect attention to the original Zhànguó positions and to explore the reasons for their variance by offering novel and close historical readings of relevant passages, and on the other, to propose a viable historical reconstruction of the common anthropological assumptions underlying these positions by blending it with the traces of a dominant cognitive image present in the texts. This calls for a systematic rethinking of the role of hearts (in the plural), desires, and behavioural patterns in their interplay and as elements of a concept of the psychological build of human beings current in early China. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper analyses the trajectories of handicraft cloth production in three major sub-regions of Jiangsu Province in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In contrast to traditional focus on the bankruptcy of rural handicrafts in the face of competition from the modern industry, it argues that the fate of handicrafts depended on the specific characteristics of each sub-regional economy. Thus in Song-Tai, handicraft weaving declined as labour was drawn off into modern industry. In Tong-Hai the availability of machine-spun yarn in the market enabled the development of a commercialised handicraft weaving sector. Finally, in Xu-Huai-Hai machine-spun yarn enabled the inhabitants to substitute their own subsistence handicraft production for cloth purchased from elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper a unified account of the syntax of temporal phrases with the locative morpheme hou ... followed by a NPtemp, a measure NP, is presented. Identical to bare noun phrase temporal adverbials, hou-phrases predominantly occur in sentence-initial/topic position and establish the temporal frame for the situation the predicate refers to; by default they refer to a point of time. According to the analysis presented, hou explicitly serves to relate one situation to a previous situation in the narrative; the NPtemp measures the interval, the period of time, elapsed since the previous situation took place, and accordingly the NPtemp is analysed as an appositional measure phrase. This analysis of the NPtemp yields an analysis of hou ... as an adverbially employed noun which syntactically retains its nominal characteristics and thus permits the addition of an apposition. Additionally, the nominal analysis of hou is the only one which accounts for all syntactic variants of the hou-phrase in Han period Chinese. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores in decisions of the Qing Board of Punishments the importance of the identification of the "cause of death" for the allocation of liability in cases of homicide. The Board's preoccupation with the issue of causation is discussed through its use of three formulae which express in different ways the causal link between the elements in the chain of causation culminating in death: yin/you... so zhi ("cause... as a result of which"), zui zuo so you/yin ("offence liable that which causes"), and zhaoxin ("beginning of the trouble"). Some remarks are added on the relationship between the concepts of "causation" and "fault" in the historical development of the traditional Chinese law of homicide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Guangbao, published in Guangzhou between 1886 and 1891, was one of China's earliest native-owned newspapers, with a circulation three times larger than the Xunhuan Ribao. The newspaper, founded by Kuang Qizhao, provides important information on the ideas that were circulating at the time in Guangzhou, a place where a number of reformers were beginning to formulate their thoughts. The newspaper may have sown some of the seeds for the nationalism that would become a powerful force after the Sino-Japanese War. The Guangbao protested against the mistreatment of overseas Chinese and printed stories recommending retaliation against Americans. It opposed Western imperialism, advocated a strong national defence, and even suggested annexing Korea. However, the newspaper was not xenophobic and tried to encourage good relations between Chinese and foreigners in China. Unlike future political newspapers, the Guangbao continued to support the existing political system—not because of fear or ignorance, but because of a sense that democracy may not have been appropriate for China at this time. Although Kuang was not a supporter of many Neo-Confucian traditions or beliefs, because he equated Confucian morality with Christian morality, and morality was needed to combat corruption, the Guangbao emphasized Confucian moral training.The newspaper also served as a platform to promote reform ideas. Kuang carefully picked ideas that he felt were appropriate for China, including: free universal and specialized education, women's rights, economic nationalism/industrialization/business, free trade, entrepreneurship through patent and copyright protection, support for the common people versus corrupt officials, and philanthropy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on a paper by Peng et al. on how history can inform the debate over intellectual property. It discusses the U.S. as a leading intellectual property rights violator, the authors' prediction that China can be expected to voluntarily enhance its intellectual property rights protection, and the cause of the patenting surge in China.

Recent studies in Sinology have shown that Qing dynasty editors acted as philologists. This paper argues that the identification of their philological methods and editorial choices suggests that their choices were not totally neutral and may have significantly shaped the way modern historians interpreted specific works edited by mathematicians of that dynasty. A case study of the re-edition in 1798 of a Song dynasty treatise, the Yigu yanduan (1259), by a Qing dynasty mathematician will illustrate this point. At the end of the eighteenth century, Li Rui (1773–1817) was asked to prepare an edition of the mathematical works written by Li Ye (1192–1279) for a private collection. Li Rui was a talented mathematician, but he was also a meticulous editor and trained philologist. He adopted his editorial model from the preparation of the imperial encyclopaedia, the Siku quanshu, but Li Rui also made some corrections to the text in an effort to restore an older version of Li Ye's treatises that had been lost. Convinced of the Chinese origin of algebra, Li Rui used philological techniques to recover the lost materials and to restore the roots of “Chinese mathematics.” The Yigu yanduan contains two algebraic procedures to set up quadratic equations, one from the procedure of Celestial Source (tian yuan shu) and the other from the Section of Pieces [of Areas] (tiao duan). Curiously, the second procedure has not yet attracted the attention of scholars so far, although Li Rui's edition is the one typically used by twentieth-century historians of mathematics. Today, the Celestial Source characterizes “Chinese algebra.” However, the specific concerns of Li Rui about the procedure of Celestial Source, combined with his editorial methods, contributed to this perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines recent trends in inequality and poverty and the effects of distributional policies in China. After a discussion of data and measurement issues, we present evidence on national, as well as rural and urban, inequality and poverty. We critically examine a selection of policies pursued during the Hu–Wen decade that had explicit distributional objectives: the individual income tax, the elimination of agricultural taxes and fees, minimum wage policies, the relaxation of restrictions on rural–urban migration, the minimum living standard guarantee programme, the “open up the west” development strategy, and the development-oriented rural poverty reduction programme. Despite these policies, income inequality in China increased substantially from the mid-1990s through to 2008. Although inequality stabilized after 2008, the level of inequality remained moderately high by international standards. The ongoing urban–rural income gap and rapid growth in income from private assets and wealth have contributed to these trends in inequality. Policies relaxing restrictions on rural–urban migration have moderated inequality. Our review of selected distributional policies suggests that not all policy measures have been equally effective in ameliorating inequality and poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scholarly attention has not kept pace with the rapid changes in the professional role of Chinese journalists. Instead, two older views prevail. The first, which sees Chinese journalists as “mouthpieces” of the Communist Party unchanged from the Maoist era, downplays the tremendous changes in the media since 1978. The second view, holding that they are increasingly becoming “American-style professionals,” overstates the influence of international media norms on Chinese news workers' day-to-day reality. While such communist and American-style professionals do exist in contemporary China, both are far less influential and numerous than stereotypes would suggest. Exclusive scholarly focus on these groups ignores two other more numerous and influential orientations: “advocate professionals,” those who write to influence opinion and policy, and “workaday journalists,” who work mainly for money and lack a commitment to public service. This article delineates all four types of Chinese journalist and explains why an understanding of the latter two professional orientations is critical to understanding China's media, politics and society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Discusses the early perception of communism and its importance in Hong Kong from 1921 to 1934. Dual society of the colony with the British as the ruler and the Chinese as the ruled; Feelings of the main segments of the Hong Kong Chinese population in their first encounter with communism; Significant political events which were related to communism and Hong Kong.

This article looks at how globalization in the nineteenth century was inextricably entangled with localization in the Canton–Hong Kong–Macau nexus on the southern fringe of China by tracing the growth of its unique medical culture. It explains the 'glocalizing' process by tracing the development of this medical culture, which consists of knowledge construction and institution building, in the context of highly volatile epidemiological conditions aggravated by increasingly heavy inter-regional trade and migration. It traces the dynamic circulation of people, materials, ideas, and practices in this southern edge of China, which was traditionally connected to southeast Asia and shared ecological backdrops that produced similar epidemiological experiences. The Canton nexus in the nineteenth century saw the growth of native medical knowledge that focused less on theoretical innovation than on the efficacy of therapeutic strategies. These ideas were likely to have been informed or reinforced by new anatomical knowledge disseminated by Western medical missionaries on the ground early in the century. The medical culture in the region was also marked by the formation of a series of local institutions that were fusions of Western-style hospitals and native merchant-run charity halls where diseases were studied and treated, and new public health management negotiated and implemented by experts from different traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The semi-colonial character of China during the treaty-port era brings into question the dichotomy between the colonizer and the colonized. China's foreign trade had an overall negative balance, and Great Britain, Japan, and the United States of America benefited from it. However, dozens of minor powers suffered a negative balance with China, despite the favourable conditions set in the treaty ports. This article examines the presence of Spain in China during the first decades of the twentieth century, focusing on trade, population, and issues of self-representation. Through a comparative analysis of the Sino-Spanish trade with that of other smaller powers in China, this article shows both the diversity of colonial formations in China and the existence of colonial relations that, although peripheral and complementary, pose a doubt on the adequacy, not only of the colonizer/colonized dichotomy, but also of the representation of colonialism in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A network of seaside and hill resorts created by foreigners gradually took shape in China during the late Qing and Republican periods. Such places were both a touristic novelty in China and the focal point of a type of tourist experience that was modern in a variety of ways. This article examines tourist accounts, tourist guidance material, and other sources, in an attempt to understand the major habits, norms, perceptions, and meanings of tourism to the seaside and hill resorts as a new type of tourism in China, from its inception to the downfall of the Nationalist government in 1949. For this purpose, it explores three aspects that were central to resort tourism: its strong association with an idea of refuge, its identification as an ideal experience, and its important physical component. While the article aims at an overall analysis of this new element of tourist culture in China, it also seeks to locate it within the wider contexts of tourist culture and of the broad motivations and anxieties of this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to foreign demands for concessions and territories, China’s last imperial court in the early twentieth century executed reforms to strengthen fiscal, personnel, military, and cultural control over its frontier regions. However, in so doing, it provoked an awakening of the national consciousness of the elites of non-Han ethnic minorities there. Much has changed over the past 100 years regarding the governance of China’s frontier territories of Inner Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang, with the diffusion of nationalist claims among increasing numbers of the ethnic minority populace, heightened focus of foreign actors on the humanitarian and rights situations of the ethnic minorities, and greatly extended reach and firmer grip of the central government. What remained unaltered is the “state integration” purpose of Chinese regimes, as manifested in the practices of “internal colonialism” or “ethnic assimilation,” which has led to grievances and resistance by China’s ethnic minorities against the Chinese state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

If we were asked to recall a coastal city of early modern China, most of us would choose Shanghai, Canton, Xiamen, or Macau. These port cities became famous for facilitating trans-regional sea trade that linked the Qing Empire to the rest of the world. Attentive observers know that all of these cities are located on the Southeast China coast, by which we mean the coastal areas south of Shanghai. Taking Shanghai as the dividing line between the northeastern and southeastern coastlines, the port cities of the south are far more likely to be familiar to us than are those of the north. I consider this phenomenon (i.e. the focus on the coast of early modern China) to be a "Southeast China centrism." And although we might all concede that some southeastern seaports were vital to transoceanic interactions, it is shortsighted to ignore the northern port cities and the role they played in connecting China with the maritime world. In this article I investigate the importance of Northeast China's port cities by focusing particular attention on the less familiar coastal seaport of Dengzhou. By detailing and examining the political and economic importance of this port city in the early modern period, I will show that Qing China's northeastern coast was no less important than the southeast. Even if China's northern port cities might not have been as economically vibrant as those in the south, we should not overlook their functions and histories. Indeed, they also attained unique patterns of political and economic development throughout the long eighteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article responds to recent calls for organizational research to address larger, more globally relevant questions and to pay attention to history, by analyzing the crucial debate over intellectual property rights (IPR) between the United States and China. Despite the recent US position, the United States has not always been a leading IPR advocate. Rather, it was a leading IPR violator during the nineteenth century. An institution-based view of IPR history suggests that both the US refusal to protect foreign IPR in the nineteenth century and the current Chinese lack of enthusiasm to meet US IPR demands represent rational choices. However, as cost-benefit considerations change institutional transitions are possible. We predict that to the same extent the United States voluntarily agreed to strengthen IPR protection when its economy became sufficiently innovation-driven, China will similarly improve its IPR protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between Chinese officials and Western European industrialists, revealing that in the second half of the 1950s, there already was a specific Western European interest in China's market potential, and that this was met with favour on the Chinese side. In order to become a strong and independent country, the People's Republic of China was especially interested in evaluating a wide range of offers in the chemical and energy sectors. By looking at the early achievements of the Italian company, National Hydrocarbon Holding (Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi, ENI), this article will show how its offer in terms of technology and engineering met with the favour of the Chinese at the beginning of the 1960s. This was just when the local petroleum industry was moving towards self-reliance, which China ultimately achieved, albeit for a short time. Sources show that, despite economic and political constraints, PRC decision-makers were perfectly aware of prices and commercial strategies, as well as of the state-of-the-art technology of the time. Furthermore, China's commercial cooperation with Western European companies in the 1950s–1960s meant that early on Chinese leaders had an opportunity to evaluate market alternatives to their tightly constraining alliance with the Socialist bloc. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The memory of classical empires has been prominent in both Chinese and European history but it has had a different imprint in each culture. The Han territories were periodically reunified in part and were more consistently ruled as unified empires from the 13th century onwards. In medieval Western Europe the Carolingian and the Holy Roman empires boasted of being renewals of the glorious ancient models but they developed in a different environment, were no longer built on the Roman scale, and only borrowed selectively from the Roman repertoire. In this essay we examine how differences in power relationships, fiscal regimes, and territoriality help explain both the peripheral impact of the classical model in the European context and the enhanced prospects for it in Chinese history from the 12th century onwards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines scientific developments in China and India by comparing and contrasting the enterprises of natural history during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From this perspective, the cases of China and India shared some similarities, but also exhibited important differences with respect to the conditions, ideologies, personnel, processes and strategies in scientific development. Two very large countries, with much left unexplored, attracted broad scientific interest in their flora and fauna from the early modern period; the interest intensified in the nineteenth century because of increasing accessibility to their interiors. However, the different historical situations that involved empire, nation, professionalization, geography and domestic and international politics helped shape the respective trajectories of scientific development in the two countries. Yet, despite their differences, China and India shared important similarities in the co-production of science and state, the global hierarchy of knowledge production, and the coloniality of power relations. This historical complexity also represented an important aspect of the global history of science, one that still bears poignancy and resonance in the contemporary world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the tarmac road network in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in northwest China has been greatly expanded. The total length of roads increased from about 30,000 kilometres in 1999 to more than 146,000 kilometres in 2008. Though roads are considered by the state to be instruments of economic development, in multi-ethnic border regions like Xinjiang, the role of an efficient road network in the construction of the Chinese state's imaginary ‘bounded space’ is arguably just as crucial. With the help of Lefebvre's (1991) and Soja's (1999) conceptualization of space, this article explores the multiple spatial figurations of which roads are a part in Xinjiang. The article starts from ‘the mappable’ dimension of the expanding road network, and moves on to discuss perceptions and representations related to this expansion, before finally discussing how individuals creatively explore its fissures and hidden pockets. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Chinese Communist Party was confronted with the pressing challenge of ‘reconstructing’ China's industrial economy when it came to power in 1949. Drawing on recently declassified Chinese Foreign Ministry archives, this article argues that the Party met this challenge by drawing on the expertise of Japanese technicians left behind in Northeast China at the end of the Second World War. Between 1949 and 1953, when they were eventually repatriated, thousands of Japanese technicians were used by the Chinese Communist Party to develop new technology and industrial techniques, train less skilled Chinese workers, and rebuild factories, mines, railways, and other industrial sites in the Northeast. These first four years of the People's Republic of China represent an important moment of both continuity and change in China's history. Like the Chinese Nationalist government before them, the Chinese Communist Party continued to draw on the technological and industrial legacy of the Japanese empire in Asia to rebuild China's war-torn economy. But this four-year period was also a moment of profound change. As the Cold War erupted in Asia, the Chinese Communist Party began a long-term reconceptualization of how national power was intimately connected to technology and industrial capability, and viewed Japanese technicians as a vital element in the transformation of China into a modern and powerful nation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study focuses on ‘manufactured mentally ill’ (bei jingshenbing, 被精神病) individuals in post-socialist China. In Chinese society, bei jingshenbing is a neologistic catchphrase that refers to someone who has been misidentified as exhibiting symptoms of mental illness and has been admitted to a mental hospital. Specifically, it refers to those individuals who were subjected to unnecessary psychiatric treatment during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Based on archival analysis and ethnographic fieldwork, this study addresses the ways in which the voices of bei jingshenbing victims and those who support them reveal China’s experiences with psychiatric modernity. It also discusses the active role of these individuals in knowledge production, medical policymaking, and the implications for reforming the psychiatric and mental health systems in post-socialist China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By the late 1800s the colonial state's increasing capacity to regulate, finance, and tax had begun to open up new opportunities for locally based French enterprises in Indochina. Chinese syndicates that had previously dominated the economy found themselves deprived of existing revenue streams and denied access to new ones. The result was an ‘Indochinese moment’ when a handful of colonial conglomerates used profits from state contracts, monopolies, and subsidies as a base for growth and diversification after 1900. Yet scaling the commanding heights of the economy was not easy, and was only achieved thanks to sustained and powerful state intervention. Moreover, one of the effects of the economic crisis after 1928 was the end of this Indochinese moment and a shift in initiative to a new partnership that linked an increasingly technocratic state with the financiers and experts of the Bank of Indochina. This article investigates this complex interaction of state power, technology, and capital flows with local Chinese, French, and indigenous Indochinese actors, using one particular conglomerate, the Fontaine group, as a case study to shed light on the mechanisms that linked an interventionist state to capitalist enterprise and ultimately to the remaking of the Indochinese economy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the ‘greening’ of Hong Kong in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with an emphasis on the afforestation of the colony's ‘barren’ mountainsides from the 1880s. To date, histories of Hong Kong have tended to focus on the colonial state's urban interventions, particularly on the draconian measures it took to ‘sanitize’ Chinese districts. In contrast, this article connects Hong Kong's urban development with the history of green space and the cultivation of ‘nature’. While the state sought to transform the ‘barren rock’ into a visible correlate of the colony's aspiring status as an imperial hub in Asia, the promotion of hygiene and health provided a further rationale for tree-planting. The article argues that colonial Hong Kong provides insights into the ‘tropicalization of modernity’ and the constitutive processes by which colonial power was naturalized and legitimated through planning practices that extended from the urban to the natural. A study of Hong Kong's afforestation underscores the importance of the natural environment as a ‘contact zone’ between colonial and ‘native’ cultures; it also reveals the extent to which the equation of a ‘green’ landscape with economic (re)production and colonial order, functioned as a critical trope for framing race and labour. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]