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The conquest of Sichuan and Vietnam by the Chinese Empire led to very different outcomes. This volume examines the negotiations between central authority and local autonomy, the physical manifestations of socially constructed identities, and the transformation of sacred spaces which reflect broader social, political, and religious currents. It also offers a method to study spatial-social interactions in historical settings that provides insights into dynamics of power imposition and identity negotiation in local contexts. Experiential Architecture Analysis (EAA) serves to explore the interplay of local traditions, transcultural ideology transfer, and sacred water sites in the peripheries of Chinese culture. It analyzes the spatial ensembles of sacred sites regarding their roles for legitimation, dominance, and social resistance, while highlighting the agency of consumers to redefine spatial media. All scholars of Chinese and Southeast Asian History, of Religious Studies or Cultural Anthropology find in this volume valuable insights for their research, especially where it concerns areas lacking reliable written sources.

This book makes an insightful investigation of historical agrotechnical geography in West China in the Qing Dynasty from the perspective of historical geography and the history of agricultural technology. This study first divides West China into four regions, i.e., the Loess Plateau, Northwest China except the Loess Plateau, the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, and Southwest China. Based on a systematic analysis of the geographical factors, such as heat, moisture, topography, soil, this study discusses the distribution and differentiation of the major technology types in these regions, ranging from the most primitive shifting cultivation and extensive cultivation to the most intensive cultivation, which are manifested in the crop structure and distribution, planting technology, water conservancy, tools, etc., as well as various combinations of these technologies. The diverse types and forms of technology and their specific combinations in different geographical spaces are mainly determined bythe diverse environmental conditions, which embodies the multi-factor correlation between technology mode and geographical environment and the internal unity of regional agricultural technology mode. In addition to the relationship between agricultural technology and geographical factors, it also takes social-economic, religious, and other cultural factors as important parameters, which were unique in West China, and significantly influence the trend of agrotechnological development. Through this study, it constructs the basic theoretical framework of historical agrotechnical geography and enlarges the scope of historical geography studies. And, since the author chose West China in the Qing Dynasty as the research subject, which was characterized by significant diversity and complexity in terms of natural geographical factors and socio-economic circumstances like religion and customs, this study provides a typical case for in-depth understanding of West China, so it is still of great academic value and important practical significance for the development of West China today.

This volume concentrates on all China-related Pulitzer Prize-winning articles and caricatures over the span of eighty years, 1941 - 2021. So main political phases of China's history from the nationalist movement of Chiang Kai-shek to the communist-totalitarian system of Xi Jinping are documented in this book.

'Brilliantly reveals a China that has always been lively and pluralist in its political thought...His analysis has immense relevance for China today.'–Rana Mitter, Foreign AffairsThe definitive history of China's philosophical confrontation with modernity, available for the first time in English.What does it mean for China to be modern, or for modernity to be Chinese? How is the notion of historical rupture—a fundamental distinction between tradition and modernity—compatible or not with the history of Chinese thought?These questions animate The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, a sprawling intellectual history considered one of the most significant achievements of modern Chinese scholarship, available here in English for the first time. Wang Hui traces the seventh-century origins of three key ideas—“principle” (li), “things” (wu), and “propensity” (shi)—and analyzes their continual evolution up to the beginning of the twentieth century. Confucian scholars grappled with the problem of linking transcendental law to the material world, thought to action—a goal that Wang argues became outdated as China's socioeconomic conditions were radically transformed during the Song Dynasty. Wang shows how the epistemic shifts of that time period produced a new intellectual framework that has proven both durable and malleable, influencing generations of philosophers and even China's transformation from empire to nation-state in the early twentieth century. In a new preface, Wang also reflects on responses to his book since its original publication in Chinese.With theoretical rigor and uncommon insight into the roots of contemporary political commitments, Wang delivers a masterpiece of scholarship that is overdue in translation. Through deep readings of key figures and classical texts, The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought provides an account of Chinese philosophy and history that will transform our understanding of the modern not only in China but around the world.

This volume concentrates on all China-related Pulitzer Prize-winning articles and caricatures over the span of eighty years, 1941 - 2021. So main political phases of China's history from the nationalist movement of Chiang Kai-shek to the communist-totalitarian system of Xi Jinping are documented in this book.

This book is an abridged version of Feng Qi's two major works on the history of philosophy, The Logical Development of Ancient Chinese Philosophy and The Revolutionary Course of Modern Chinese Philosophy. It is a comprehensive history of Chinese philosophy taking the reader from ancient times to the year 1949. It illuminates the characteristics of traditional Chinese philosophy from the broader vantage point of epistemology. The book revolves around important debates including those on “Heaven and humankind” (tian ren天人), “names and actualities” (mingshi名實), “principle and vital force” (liqi理氣), “the Way and visible things” (daoqi道器), “mind and matter/things” (xinwu心物), and “knowledge and action” (zhixing知行). Through discussion of these debates, the course of Chinese philosophy unfolds. Modern Chinese philosophy has made landmark achievements in the development of historical and epistemological theory,namely the “dynamic and revolutionary theory of reflection”. However, modern Chinese philosophy is yet to construct a systematic overview of logic and methodology, as well as questions of human freedom and ideals. Amid this discussion, the question of how contemporary China is to “take the baton” from the thinkers of the modern philosophical revolution is addressed.

Between 500,000 to 2 million people died in the Cultural Revolution. Yet a silence remains as to why. Over eleven years in Mao's China, an all-out assault on ‘class enemies'took place. Teenagers smashed their teachers'skulls. Doctors were tortured in jail as foreign spies. Ordinary people condemned ‘counter-revolutionaries'to execution – and then went home and ate their dinner. This was less than fifty years ago. But the victims are being forgotten already. Wang Youqin unmasks the true brutality of the Cultural Revolution. Documenting the deaths of over six hundred individuals, Victims of the Cultural Revolution calls on us to remember the evil ideological fanaticism wreaks and pays tribute to all those who suffered.

This volume investigates the artistic development during the Qing Dynasty, the last of imperial Chinese dynasties, and shows the importance of opera and playwriting during this time period. Further analysis is dedicated to the development of scroll painting and the revival of calligraphy and seal carving. A General History of Chinese Art comprises six volumes with a total of nine parts spanning from the Prehistoric Era until the 3rd year of Xuantong during the Qing Dynasty (1911). The work provides a comprehensive compilation of in-depth studies of the development of art throughout the subsequent reign of Chinese dynasties and explores the emergence of a wide range of artistic categories such as but not limited to music, dance, acrobatics, singing, story telling, painting, calligraphy, sculpture, architecture, and crafts. Unlike previous reference books, A General History of Chinese Art offers a broader overview of the notion of Chinese art by asserting a more diverse and less material understanding of arts, as has often been the case in Western scholarship.

This nuanced study traces how Chinese came to view death as an opportunity to fashion and convey social identities and memories during the medieval period (200–1000) and the Tang dynasty (618–907), specifically. As Chinese society became increasingly multicultural and multireligious, to achieve these aims people selectively adopted, portrayed, and interpreted various acts of remembrance. Included in these were new and evolving burial, mourning, and commemorative practices: joint-burials of spouses, extended family members, and coreligionists; relocation and reburial of bodies; posthumous marriage and divorce; interment of a summoned soul in the absence of a body; and many changes to the classical mourning and commemorative rites that became the norm during the period. Individuals independently constructed the socio-religious meanings of a particular death and the handling of corpses by engaging in and reviewing acts of remembrance. Drawing on a variety of sources, including hundreds of newly excavated entombed epitaph inscriptions, Inscribing Death illuminates the process through which the living—and the dead—negotiated this multiplicity of meanings and how they shaped their memories and identities both as individuals and as part of collectives. In particular, it details the growing emphasis on remembrance as an expression of filial piety and the grave as a focal point of ancestral sacrifice. The work also identifies different modes of construction and representation of the self in life and death, deepening our understanding of ancestral worship and its changing modus operandi and continuous shaping influence on the most intimate human relationships—thus challenging the current monolithic representation of ancestral worship as an extension of families rather than individuals in medieval China.

A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the YearA BBC History Magazine Best Book of the Year“Excellent…A fascinating, authoritative account of the paths for China's future explored during a decade long buried by official, state-sponsored history.”—Julia Lovell, Foreign Policy“A vivid and readable account…Exceptionally well-researched.” —Andrew Nathan, Foreign Affairs'The definitive book on China in the 1980s in terms of the depth of research and originality of the argument.'―Minxin Pei, author of The Sentinel State'A gift to our understanding of today's China.'―Evan Osnos, author of Age of AmbitionOn a hike in Guangdong Province in January 1984, Deng Xiaoping was warned that his path was a steep and treacherous one. “Never turn back,” the Chinese leader replied. That became a mantra as the government forged ahead with reforms in the face of heated contestation over the nation's future.Recovering the debates of China in the 1980s, Julian Gewirtz traces the Communist Party's diverse attitudes toward markets, state control, and sweeping technological change, as well as freewheeling public argument over political liberalization. Deng Xiaoping's administration considered bold proposals from within the party and without, but after Tiananmen, Beijing systematically erased these discussions of alternative directions. Using newly available Chinese sources, Gewirtz details how the leadership purged the key reformist politician Zhao Ziyang, quashed the student movement, recast the transformations of the 1980s as the inevitable products of consensus, and indoctrinated China and the international community in the new official narrative.Never Turn Back offers a revelatory look at how different China's rise might have been and at the foundations of strongman rule under Xi Jinping, who has intensified the policing of history to bolster his own authority.

This book uses the monographic study of litigation subjects, prosecution, trial, and enforcement to reveal the formation, operation, and development of criminal proceeding conventions in the Tang Dynasty. It also outlines the combination, coordination, and interaction of rules, conventions, and ideas in the traditional Chinese legal system, and presents an overview of the evolution and development of traditional litigation in China. This book is intended mainly for scholars and graduate and undergraduate students in the fields of law and Chinese history.

Making sense of nature in one of the world's most contested borderlands. According to Chinese government reports, hundreds of plague-infected rodents fell from the skies over Gannan county on an April night in 1952. Chinese scientists determined that these flying voles were not native to the region, but were vectors of germ warfare, dispatched over the border by agents of imperialism. Mastery of biology had become a way to claim political mastery over a remote frontier. Beginning with this bizarre incident from the Korean War, Knowing Manchuria places the creation of knowledge about nature at the center of our understanding of a little-known but historically important Asian landscape. At the intersection of China, Russia, Korea, and Mongolia, Manchuria is known as a site of war and environmental extremes, where projects of political control intersected with projects designed to make sense of Manchuria's multiple environments. Covering more than 500,000 square miles, Manchuria's landscapes include temperate rainforests, deserts, prairies, cultivated plains, wetlands, and Siberian taiga. With analysis spanning the seventeenth century to the present day, Ruth Rogaski reveals how an array of historical actors—Chinese poets, Manchu shamans, Russian botanists, Korean mathematicians, Japanese bacteriologists, American paleontologists, and indigenous hunters—made sense of the Manchurian frontier. She uncovers how natural knowledge, and thus the nature of Manchuria itself, changed over time, from a sacred “land where the dragon arose” to a global epicenter of contagious disease; from a tragic “wasteland” to an abundant granary that nurtured the hope of a nation.

In Innovate to Dominate, Tai Ming Cheung offers insight into why, how, and whether China will overtake the United States to become the world's preeminent technological and security power. This examination of the means and ends of China's quest for techno-security supremacy is required reading for anyone looking for clues as to the long-term direction of the global order. The techno-security domain, Cheung argues, is where national security, innovation, and economic development converge, and it has become the center of power and prosperity in the twenty-first century. China's paramount leader Xi Jinping recognizes that effectively harnessing the complex interactions among security, innovation, and development is essential in enabling China to compete for global dominance. Cheung offers a richly detailed account of how China is building a potent techno-security state. In Innovate to Dominate he takes readers from the strategic vision guiding this transformation to the nuts-and-bolts of policy implementation. The state-led top-down mobilizational model that China is pursuing has been a winning formula so far, but the sternest test is ahead as China begins to compete head-to-head with the United States and aims to surpass its archrival by mid-century if not sooner. Innovate to Dominate is a timely and analytically rigorous examination of the key strategies guiding China's transformation of its capabilities in the national, technological, military, and security spheres and how this is taking place. Cheung authoritatively addresses the burning questions being asked in capitals around the world: Can China become the dominant global techno-security power? And if so, when?

This book addresses the issues raised by Chinese and North Korean maritime ‘gray zone'activities in the Indo-Asia-Pacific region.For years, China has been harassing its neighbors in South China Sea and East China Sea, employing both coast guard and maritime militia forces, in the name of safeguarding Chinese sovereignty. This behavior is frequently characterized as constituting ‘gray zone'activity. As the term suggests, this refers to a state of conflict that falls between peace and war. Interestingly, the Yellow Sea, which is geographically much closer to China than South China Sea or East China Sea, has been comparatively quiet. However, there is a danger that the PRC has the capability to replicate its gray zone activities in this area. Worse, North Korea has also been engaging in carefully-calibrated provocations there. This book addresses pressing questions about these activities and offers: (1) a conceptual framework to understand maritime gray zone operations and Beijing and Pyongyang's approach, with an unprecedented focus on the Yellow Sea; (2) a comprehensive, fully updated fleet force structure for the PRC's Coast Guard, together with projections regarding how the Coast Guard is likely to develop in the future; (3) an extensive organizational analysis of the PRC's Maritime Militia that surveys the many units relevant to Yellow Sea operations, some revealed publicly for the first time; and (4) a detailed assessment of North Korean maritime ‘gray zone'activities. This book will be of great interest to students of naval strategy, maritime security, Asian politics, and international security.

This book presents a panoramic and extensive exploration of Chinese political philosophy, examining key political problems of the past, and the thinkers who addressed them. As the reader will discover, China's traditional political philosophy is one with distinctive national characteristics and ideals. Therefore, the book helps to clarify the evolution of Chinese political thought, while also investigating fundamental political issues throughout the country's history. The book offers a unique resource for researchers and graduate students in the fields of political science, philosophy, and history, as well as ordinary readers who are interested in China's traditional and political culture.

This open access book is intended for common readers who are interested in the life story of Qian Xuesen (also know as Tsien Hsue-Shen). Based on a large number of original archives and historical materials, this book focuses on Qian Xuesen's years of seeking knowledge from his birth in 1911 to his return to China in 1955 and describes how he grows into a world-known scientist from the aspect of humanity. This book can be used as reference material for Qian Xuesen's earlier years.

This book offers a new insight into one of the most interesting and long-lived institutions known to historians of science, the Chinese imperial Astronomical Bureau, which for two millennia observed, recorded, interpreted and predicted the movements of the celestial bodies.Utilising archival material, such as the résumés written for imperial audiences and personnel administration records, the book traces the rise and fall of more than thirty hereditary families serving at the Astronomical Bureau from the late Ming period to the end of the Qing dynasty. The book also presents an in-depth view into the organisation and function of the Bureau and succinctly charts the impacts of historical developments during the Ming and Qing periods, including the Regency of Prince Dorgon, the influence of the Jesuits, the relationship between the Kangxi and Yongzheng emperors and the He family and the failure of the bureau to predict correctly the solar eclipse of 1730.Presenting a social history of the Qing Astronomical Bureau from the perspective of hereditary astronomer families, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of Chinese Imperial history, the history of science and Asian history.

This volume is the first in a series of full-length English translations from one of the foremost classics in Daoist religious literature, the Zhen gao or Declarations of the Perfected. The Declarations is a collection of poems, accounts of the dead, instructions, and meditation methods received by the Daoist Yang Xi (330–ca. 386 BCE) from celestial beings and shared by him with his patrons and students. These fragments of revealed material were collected and annotated by the eminent scholar and Daoist Tao Hongjing (456–536), allowing us access to these distant worlds and unfamiliar strategies of self-perfection. Bokenkamp's full translation highlights the literary nature of Daoist revelation and the place of the Declarations in the development of Chinese letters. It further details interactions with the Chinese throne and the aristocracy and demonstrates ways that Buddhist borrowings helped shape Daoism much earlier than has been assumed. This first volume also contains heretofore unrecognized reconfigurations of Buddhist myth and practice that Yang Xi introduced to his Daoist audience.

Now fully revised and updated, The United States and China offers a comprehensive synthesis of US-Chinese relations from initial contact to the present. Balancing the modern (1784–1949) and contemporary (1949–present) periods, Dong Wang retraces centuries of interaction between two of the world's great powers from the perspective of both sides. She examines state-to-state diplomacy, as well as economic, social, military, religious, and cultural interplay within varying national and international contexts. As China itself continues to grow in global importance, so too does the US-Chinese relationship, and this book provides an essential grounding for understanding its past, present, and possible futures.

This book studies the judicial evolution of the Qing Dynasty. It sums up the changes from six major aspects: 1. Banfang（班房）emerged in the late Qianlong period; 2. The opening of capital appeals（京控）early in Jiaqing's reign; 3. The consular jurisdiction was established during Daoguang's reign; 4. The execution on the spot （就地正法）was started in Daoguang and Xianfeng periods; 5. The introduction of fashenju (发审局，a interrogatory court) happened during Tongzhi's reign; 6. Late in Guangxu's reign, banishment was abolished, and reforms were made for prisons. In the past, people did not have a comprehensive understanding of these big changes. From the perspective of legal culture, scholars often criticize traditional Chinese law focuses on criminal law while ignores civil law in terms of legal culture, but this situation can be explained in part by the inadequate allocation of resources and authoritarian resources in traditional societies. Using a large number of archives and precious materials such as private notes that were not noticed by academics in the past, this book adopts the research path of new historical jurisprudence to explore the inner logic of judicial evolution in the Qing Dynasty, focusing on the triangular connection between legal rules, resources, and temporal and spatial constructions, which is an important contribution to the study of traditional Chinese law.

Este libro es una obra fundamental para los lectores interesados en temas de ese país. Es un estudio colectivo que analiza los momentos claves de la historia de China. Su lectura conduce al lector hacia lo que acontece en la actualidad, comenzando desde las evidencias arquelógicas más antiguas hasta los movimientos políticos y económicos que han transformado a China a través de las últimas décadas. Si bien hablar de una “Historia mínima” de China parece una contradicción, de acuerdo con el historiador Ho Ping-ti, esta labor puede ser posible debido a la continuidad de esta extraordinaria civilización, basada en un sistema agrícola autosustentable y exitoso, en el culto a los ancestros y en una escritura única en cuanto a su forma y concepto.

While cultural literacy in early China was grounded in learning the Classics, basic competence in official life was generally predicated on acquiring several forms of technical knowledge. Recent archaeological finds have brought renewed attention to the use of technical manuals and mantic techniques within a huge range of discrete contexts, pushing historians to move beyond the generalities offered by past scholarship. To explore these uses, Technical Arts in the Han Histories delves deeply into the rarely studied'Treatises'and'Tables'compiled for the first two standard histories, the Shiji (Historical Records) and Hanshu (History of Han), important supplements to the better-known biographical chapters, and models for the inclusion of technical subjects in the twenty-three later'Standard Histories'of imperial China. Indeed, for a great many aspects of life in early imperial society, they constitute our best primary sources for understanding complex realities and perceptions. The essays in this volume seek to explain how different social groups thought of, disseminated, and withheld technical knowledge relating to the body, body politic, and cosmos, in the process of detailing the preoccupations of successive courts from Qin through Eastern Han in administering the localities, the frontier zones, and their numerous subjects (at the time, roughly one-quarter of the world's population).

A History of Taiwan Literature by Ye Shitao, an important public intellectual in Taiwan, was published in the crucial watershed year of 1987 when the end of martial law on the island was signaled. Ye's work was clearly a product of that period and would have been less timid, considering the fact that the rule book on public expression had yet to be written, if it had been written later. The book is a rigorous, comprehensive treatment; it goes to great lengths to devote attention to all major writers in the history of Taiwan as well as many who were not as prominent. Ye has been fair and evenhanded in the writing of his literary history of Taiwan; there is little, if any, tendentiousness in the book. This is arguably one of the most important intellectual works of literary history, made even more impressive by Ye's inclusion of copious notes, including Japanese-language ones. In this translation, Christopher Lupke has painstakingly translated both Ye's main text and notes, making this valuable resource available to English readers for the first time. Lupke also provides an introduction that contextualizes Ye's work as well as an epilogue that outlines some of the major historical and literary developments after 1987, along with a brief mention of some of the most important literary figures of Taiwan. In addition to a glossary and index, Lupke offers a select bibliography that lists works that Ye referenced in his own notes as well as some books that Lupke consulted in completing this translation. A History of Taiwan Literature is a most important resource for those interested in the intellectual history of East Asia, world literature, and Taiwan studies. This book is part of the Literature From Taiwan Series, a collaboration by Cambria Press with the National Museum of Taiwan Literature and National Taiwan Normal University.

This issue of the Berliner Chinahefte/Chinese History and Society deals with cultural exchanges between China and the outside world and with their impact, mostly in terms of questions regarding tradition and modernity. China is understood more as an area composed of certain cultural elements which may include the Chinese (and Taiwanese) diaspora, where a sense of belonging still exists, and which exerts influence on everyday culture and habits.

A Foreign Affairs Book of the YearA Spectator Book of the Year“Insightful…a deft, textured work of intellectual history.”—Foreign Affairs“A timely insight into how memories and ideas about the second world war play a hugely important role in conceptualizations about the past and the present in contemporary China.”—Peter Frankopan, The SpectatorFor most of its history, China frowned on public discussion of the war against Japan. But as the country has grown more powerful, a wide-ranging reassessment of the war years has been central to new confidence abroad and mounting nationalism at home.Encouraged by reforms under Deng Xiaoping, Chinese scholars began to examine the long-taboo Guomindang war effort, and to investigate collaboration with the Japanese and China's role in the post-war global order. Today museums, television shows, magazines, and social media present the war as a founding myth for an ascendant China that emerges as victor rather than victim. One narrative positions Beijing as creator and protector of the international order—a virtuous system that many in China now believe to be under threat from the United States. China's radical reassessment of its own past is a new founding myth for a nation that sees itself as destined to shape the world.“A detailed and fascinating account of how the Chinese leadership's strategy has evolved across eras…At its most interesting when probing Beijing's motives for undertaking such an ambitious retooling of its past.”—Wall Street Journal“The range of evidence that Mitter marshals is impressive. The argument he makes about war, memory, and the international order is…original.”—The Economist

This book explores the long history of how Chinese people have been observed, transformed and treated as'patients'in modern times since the late Qing Dynasty. The title of'sick man in East Asia'is not only a metaphor of Chinese being bullied, but also a driving force for their own nationalistic social change. In this sense,'treatment'is not only a simple medical process, but also the focus of political and social system reform. Individual treatment behavior has become an integral part of the group political movement. By examining the history of the conflict between Chinese and Western medicine, this book reproduces the images of missionaries, midwives, sitting doctors, doctors and practitioners, barefoot doctors, politicians and social reformers of Western medicine, reflects another historical aspect of China's social change, and shows the complex interactive game relationship between modern political evolution and traditional medical factors.

This one-volume handbook explores the history of Taiwan, from its prehistory to its Japanese colonization to its tumultuous relationship with China in the 21st century.This addition to the Greenwood Histories of the Modern Nations series focuses on significant events in the history of Taiwan, from ancient history to the present. Following the general series format, the book opens with the series foreword and a chronology of key events in Taiwan's history. Eleven chapters follow, with half of the book focusing on the modern historic events that occurred post–World War II. Chapters examine topics and eras including Pre-history and Early Civilization to 1100; Formosa: The Dutch Colony, 1622–1662; Cold War Island: Conflicts and Control, 1950–1972; and Democratization and Independence Movement, 1996–2004. A glossary of terms and annotated bibliography rounds out the work, making it an ideal resource for high school and undergraduate students as well as general readers who are looking for an introduction to Taiwan's history.

This book was compiled by the Handbook of the Knowledge of Chinese History Editing Group from the Institute of History of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) and is intended to be used in conjunction with History of China: A Concise Reader writtenby the Institute of History, CASS. It compiled basic Chinese historical information in a concise handbook of Chinese History for readers. This book is comprised of four parts: glossary of Chinese history, a timeline of Chinese history, lists of monarchs of the Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties and the dates of their Reign and a table of era names of the imperial dynasties, and it covers historical, theoretical concepts and the whole of Chinese history from the origin of human beings to the end of the Qing dynasty.This book presents brief and concise historical concepts. It described the basic knowledge of Chinese history with simple language which is easy to understand. The arrangement of the terms is based on the following sequence: The name of the dynasty, the name of the state, political events, political system, economic system, legal system, military system, ethnicity and foreign relations, historical geography, science and technology, thought and culture, book names, peoples'names. Names of dynasties, names of states and political events are all arranged according to dates.

This is a book of historical research and analysis written according to detailed and credible historical documents and archaeological finds and data, and on the basis of the historical achievements accumulated by the academic community over the years. It is a lucid and concise narration of Chinese history from the ancient humans and the origin of civilization within China's borders until the break out of the Revolution of 1911, when the Qing dynasty which is China's last imperial dynasty collapsed. This major work offers an insight into China's rich and complex history, researched and written by leading historians in China. It is a unique perspective on China's history from a Chinese perspective. Much is written about China's history in the West. This book provides an understanding of China's history, written in China and available now in the English language.

After the fall of the Qing empire, amid nationalist and socialist upheaval, Buddhist monks in the Mongolian frontiers of the Soviet Union and Republican China faced a chaotic and increasingly uncertain world. In this book, Matthew W. King tells the story of one Mongolian monk's efforts to defend Buddhist monasticism in revolutionary times, revealing an unexplored landscape of countermodern Buddhisms beyond old imperial formations and the newly invented national subject.Ocean of Milk, Ocean of Blood takes up the perspective of the polymath Zava Damdin (1867–1937): a historian, mystic, logician, and pilgrim whose life and works straddled the Qing and its socialist aftermath, between the monastery and the party scientific academy. Drawing on contacts with figures as diverse as the Dalai Lama, mystic monks in China, European scholars inventing the field of Buddhist studies, and a member of the Bakhtin Circle, Zava Damdin labored for thirty years to protect Buddhist tradition against what he called the “bloody tides” of science, social mobility, and socialist party antagonism. Through a rich reading of his works, King reveals that modernity in Asia was not always shaped by epochal contact with Europe and that new models of Buddhist life, neither imperial nor national, unfolded in the post-Qing ruins. The first book to explore countermodern Buddhist monastic thought and practice along the Inner Asian frontiers during these tumultuous years, Ocean of Milk, Ocean of Blood illuminates previously unknown religious and intellectual legacies of the Qing and offers an unparalleled view of Buddhist life in the revolutionary period.

This book presents a comprehensive overview of the Nanjing Massacre, together with an in-depth analysis of various aspects of the event and related issues. Drawing on original source materials collected from various national archives, national libraries, church historical society archives, and university libraries in China, Japan, Germany, United Kingdom and the United States, it represents the first English-language academic attempt to analyze the Nanjing Massacre in such detail and scope.The book examines massacres and other killings, in addition to other war crimes, such as rape, looting, and burning. These atrocities are then explored further via a historical analysis of Chinese survivors'testimony, Japanese soldiers'diaries, Westerners'eyewitness accounts, the news coverage from American and British correspondents, and American, British and German diplomatic dispatches. Further, the book explores issues such as the role and function of the International Committee for Nanking Safety Zone, burial records of massacre victims, post-war military tribunals, controversies over the Nanjing Massacre, and the 100-Man Killing Contest.This book is intended for all researchers, scholars, graduate and undergraduate students, and members of the general public who are interested in Second World War issues, Sino-Japanese conflicts, Sino-Japan relations, war crimes, atrocity and holocaust studies, military tribunals for war crimes, Japanese atrocities in China, and the Nanjing Massacre.

This book studies three female Chinese intellectuals in the first half of the 20th century, namely Feng Yuanjun, Lu Yin, and Cheng Junying, the first graduates of Beijing Female Higher Normal College, which was the first-ever national higher educational institution for women in modern China. Combining narrative inquiry, life history, oral history, and psychohistory methods, it comprehensively explores the specific developmental paths and mental processes of the post-May Fourth female intellectuals, and examines the complex interrelationships between various factors including social, academic, gender, and educational evolution in the first half of the 20th century, and the emergence of modern Chinese female intellectuals.The book is highly recommended for all scholars, undergraduate and graduate students of modern Chinese history, gender and women's studies, history of education, history of higher education, etc., and for all those who are interested in femaleChinese intellectuals.

In ancient China, as the lowermost class in the social hierarchy, merchants were viewed as greedy and immoral, commanding little respect. But since the sixteenth century, when China entered modern times with the sprout of capitalism, merchants have become a strong force to transform the ancient society. By absorbing methods of anthropology, psychology, geography, and economics, as well as cultural and genealogical studies, this book explores the development and rise of the merchant in modern China. To start with, it examines the golden times of the merchant and the dilemmas facing them in the two-millennia-long traditional society where the'pro-agriculture and anti-commerce'policy was implemented. With the economic development, merchant groups gradually came into being and formed a vibrant social class in the modern era. Major merchant groups, their psychological integration, and the interaction between merchants and capitalism in China are specifically studied. Also, merchants'role in the communal life is analyzed, including their contribution to the making and expansion of modern communities, which led to China's social transformation.With a multi-faceted description of Chinese merchants whose development interweaves with the transformation of the ancient country, this book will appeal to scholars and students in economics, history, sociology, and cultural studies. Readers interested in Chinese culture and social history will also be attracted by it.

Staging Chinese Revolution surveys fifty years of theatrical propaganda performances in China, revealing a dynamic, commercial capacity in works often dismissed as artifacts of censorship. Spanning the 1960s through the 2010s, Xiaomei Chen reads films, plays, operas, and television shows from an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective, demonstrating how, in a socialist state with'capitalist characteristics,'propaganda performance turns biographies, memoirs, and war stories into mainstream ideological commodities, legitimizing the state and its right to rule. Analyzing propaganda performance also brings contradictions and inconsistencies to light that throw common understandings about propaganda's purpose into question.Chen focuses on revisionist histories that stage the lives of the'founding fathers'of the Communist Party, such as Chen Duxiu, Mao Zedong, and Deng Xiaoping, and the engaging mix of elite and ordinary characters that animate official propaganda in the private and public sphere. Taking the form of'personal'memories and representing star and youth culture and cyberspace, contemporary Chinese propaganda appeals through multiple perspectives, complicating relations among self, subject, agent, state building, and national identity. Chen treats Chinese performance as an extended form of political theater confronting critical issues of commemoration, nostalgia, state rituals, and contested history. It is through these reenactments that three generations of revolutionary leaders loom in extraordinary ways over Chinese politics and culture.

Compiled during the Song dynasty (960–1279) at the behest of Emperor Taizong, the Taiping Guangji anthologized thousands of pages of unofficial histories, accounts, and minor stories from the Tang dynasty (618–907). The twenty-two tales translated in this volume, many appearing for the first time in English, reveal the dynamism and diversity of society in Tang China. A lengthy Introduction as well as introductions to each selection further illuminate the social and historical contexts within which these narratives unfold. This collection offers a wealth of information for anyone interested in medieval Chinese history, religion, or everyday life.

The Yearbook of China's Cultural Industries is a large comprehensive, authoritative and informative annual which accurately records and reflects the annual development of cultural industries in China. It is also a large reference book with abundant information on cultural industries in China and a complex index, which could be kept for a long time and read for many years. A must for libraries. It deals with Radio and TV, the film industry, Press and Publishing Industries, the Entertainment Industry, Online Game Industry, Audio Visual New Media Industry, Advertisement Industry, and the Cultural Tourism Industry. It examines the figures nationally and by region.

This volume completes Keith McMahon's acclaimed history of imperial wives and royal polygamy in China. Avoiding the stereotype of the emperor's plural wives as mere victims or playthings, the book considers empresses and concubines as full-fledged participants in palace life, whether as mothers, wives, or go-betweens in the emperor's relations with others in the palace. Although restrictions on women's participation in politics increased dramatically after Empress Wu in the Tang, the author follows the strong and active women, of both high and low rank, who continued to appear. They counseled emperors, ghostwrote for them, oversaw succession when they died, and dominated them when they were weak. They influenced the emperor's relationships with other women and enhanced their aura and that of the royal house with their acts of artistic and religious patronage. Dynastic history ended in China when the prohibition that women should not rule was defied for the final time by Dowager Cixi, the last great monarch before China's transformation into a republic.

This book tells the story of how and why millions of Chinese works of art got exported to collectors and institutions in the West, in particular to the United States. As China's last dynasty was weakening and collapsing from 1860 into the early years of the twentieth century, China's internal chaos allowed imperial and private Chinese collections to be scattered, looted and sold. A remarkable and varied group of Westerners entered the country, had their eyes opened to centuries of Chinese creativity and gathered up paintings, bronzes and ceramics, as well as sculptures, jades and bronzes. The migration to America and Europe of China's art is one of the greatest outflows of a culture's artistic heritage in human history. A good deal of the art procured by collectors and dealers, some famous and others little known but all remarkable in individual ways, eventually wound up in American and European museums. Today some of the art still in private hands is returning to China via international auctions and aggressive purchases by Chinese millionaires.

Este volumen da cuenta de los diferentes periodos, temas, debates y momentos de un país cuyos cambios están destinados a alterar la vida del resto del mundo, a partir de una atinada selección de ensayos de connotados estudiosos de la historia y la cultura chinas que logra condensar las continuidades y rupturas que han configurado la milenaria historia de ese país, desde su nacimiento como civilización, hasta la proclamación de la República Popular en 1949.

This volume supplements Tang Tales, A Guided Reader (Volume 1; 2010) and presents twelve more Tang tales, going beyond the standard corpus of these narratives to include six stories translated into English for the first time. The rich annotation and translator's notes for these twelve tales provide insights into many aspects of Tang material culture and medieval thought, including Buddhism and Daoism.In addition to meticulously annotated translations, the book offers original texts (with some textual notes), and commentaries in the form of translator's notes, thereby joining the first volume of Tang tales as the only collections that introduce students to Tang tales while also challenging specialists interested in the field.

Warfare has shaped the modern history of China more than any other single factor. This book brings together the best recent English language scholarship on warfare in China over the last four centuries and situates warfare within the broader sweep of China's modern historical development.

This book is the first book on the history of Chinese traveling culture. It reviewed the history of Chinese traveling culture, and revealed the cultural significance of China's traveling phenomena and the underlying principles of its changing traveling culture.It has the following features: First, it divided the history of Chinese traveling culture into six periods to create a system to explain the phenomena and changes of traveling culture. Second, it emphasized the significance of travelers in traveling culture, and revealed the influence of zeitgeist on traveling culture. Third, it explained phenomena through investigations of the artifacts, institutions, behaviors and attitudes of traveling culture, and the dynamic interactions between the subjects, objects and media in traveling. Fourth, it expanded the theory of traveling by building upon extant ideas.Published by SCPG Publishing Corporation and distributed by World Scientific for all markets except China

In 1894–1895, after suffering defeat against Japan in a war primarily fought over the control of Korea, the Qing government initiated fundamental military reforms and established “New Armies“ modeled after the German and Japanese military. Besides reorganizing the structure of the army and improving military training, the goal was to overcome the alleged physical weakness and lack of martial spirit attributed to Chinese soldiers in particular and to Chinese men in general. Intellectuals, government officials, and military circles criticized the pacifist and civil orientation of Chinese culture, which had resulted in a negative attitude towards its armed forces and martial values throughout society and a lack of interest in martial deeds, glory on the battlefield, and military achievements among men. The book examines the cultivation of new soldiers, officers, and civilians through new techniques intended to discipline their bodies and reconfigure their identities as military men and citizens. The book shows how the establishment of German-style “New Armies” in China between 1895 and 1916 led to the re‐creation of a militarized version of masculinity that stressed physical strength, discipline, professionalism, martial spirit, and “Western” military appearance and conduct. Although the military reforms did not prevent the downfall of the Qing Dynasty or provide stable military clout to subsequent regimes, they left a lasting legacy by reconfiguring Chinese military culture and re‐creating military masculinity and the image of men in China.

The crucial period of Chinese history, 168-979, falls naturally into contrasting phases. The first phase, also known as that of'early medieval China,'is an age of political decentralization. Following the breakup of the Han empire, China was plunged into civil war and fragmentation and stayed divided for nearly four centuries. The second phase started in 589, during the Sui dynasty, when China was once again brought under a single government. Under the Sui, the bureaucracy was revitalized, the military strengthened, and the taxation system reformed. The fall of the Sui in 618 gave way to the even stronger Tang dynasty, which represents an apogee of traditional Chinese civilization. Inheriting all the great institutions developed under the Sui, the Tang made great achievements in poetry, painting, music, and architecture. The An Lushan rebellion, which also took place during Tang rule, brought about far-reaching changes in the socioeconomic, political, and military arenas. What transpired in the second half of the Tang and the ensuing Five Dynasties provided the foundation for the next age of late imperial China.This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Medieval China contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1000 cross-referenced entries on historical figure. It expands on existing thematic entries, and adds a number of new ones with substantial content, including those on nobility, art, architecture, archaeology, economy, agriculture, money, population, cities, literature, historiography, military, religion, Persia, India, Japan, Korea, Arabs, and Byzantium, among others. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about medieval China.

Scholar-officials of late medieval China were not only enthusiastic in amateur storytelling, but also showed unprecedented interest in recording stories on different aspects of literati life. These stories appeared in diverse forms, including narrative poems, “tales of the marvelous,” “records of the strange,” historical miscellanies, and transformation texts. Through storytelling, literati explored their own changing place in a society that was making its final transition from hereditary aristocracy to a meritocracy ostensibly open to all. Literati Storytelling shows how these writings offer crucial insights into the reconfiguration of the Chinese elite, which monopolized literacy, social prestige, and political participation in imperial China.

'At a time when China-Southeast Asia relationships are undergoing profound changes, it is pleasing to have a volume which examines the interactions between China and the polities and societies to the south through time.With multiple aims of exploring the relations between northern Chinese cultures and those of the south, examining the cultural plurality of areas which are today parts of Southern China, and illuminating the relations between Sinitic and non-Sinitic societies, the volume is broad in concept and content.Within these extensive rubrics, this edited collection further interrogates the nature of Asian polities and their historiography, the constitution of Chineseness, imperial China's southern expansions, cultural hybridity, economic relations, regional systems and ethnic interactions across East Asia.The editors Victor H. Mair and Liam C. Kelley are to be congratulated for bringing together such a wealth of contributions offering nascent interpretations and broad overviews, set within the overarching historical and contemporary contexts provided through Wang Gungwu's introduction.'

The figure of Dai Zhen (1724–1777) looms large in modern Chinese intellectual history. Dai was a mathematical astronomer and influential polymath who, along with like-minded scholars, sought to balance understandings of science, technology, and history within the framework of classical Chinese writings. Exploring ideas in fields as broad-ranging as astronomy, geography, governance, phonology, and etymology, Dai grappled with Western ideas and philosophies, including Jesuit conceptions of cosmology, which were so important to the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) court's need for calendrical precision.Minghui Hu tells the story of China's transition into modernity from the perspective of 18th-century Chinese scholars dedicated to examining the present and past with the tools of evidential analysis. Using Dai as the centering point, Hu shows how the tongru (“broadly learned scholars”) of this era navigated Confucian, Jesuit, and other worldviews during a dynamic period, connecting ancient theories to new knowledge in the process.Scholars and students of early modern Chinese history, and those examining science, religious, and intellectual history more broadly, will find China's Transition to Modernity inspiring and helpful for their research and teaching.

In Making the New World Their Own, Qiong Zhang offers a systematic study of how Chinese scholars in the late Ming and early Qing came to understand that the earth is shaped as a globe. This notion arose from their encounters with Matteo Ricci, Giulio Aleni and other Jesuits. These encounters formed a fascinating chapter in the early modern global integration of space. It unfolded as a series of mutually constitutive and competing scholarly discourses that reverberated in fields from cosmology, cartography and world geography to classical studies. Zhang demonstrates how scholars such as Xiong Mingyu, Fang Yizhi, Jie Xuan, Gu Yanwu, and Hu Wei appropriated Jesuit ideas to rediscover China's place in the world and reconstitute their classical tradition. Winner of the Chinese Historians in the United States (CHUS)'2015 Academic Excellence Award'

In response to the recent surge of interest in studying epistemic transfers and changes, this volume assembles an interdisciplinary range of articles that look at the production, consumption and dissemination of knowledge in East Asia, centering on Korea, under the paradigm of knowledge circulation. Applying this heuristic tool offers new perspectives on pre-modern Korea and beyond. It allows for flexibility of scale and thus facilitates the identification of shared processes of appropriation, digestion and re-distribution of ideas, regardless of whether the exchanges take place between states and nations, between social groups, or even between individuals. The articles in this volume stress the spatial and social aspects of the process of knowledge circulation in particular: the role of location and of social networks in the production, evaluation and dissemination of new knowledge.