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At the time of his death in 1965, at the age of 79, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro had been writing fiction, plays, essays, poems, and translations almost without interruption for more than fifty-five years. In this series of meditations on seven of Tanizaki's novels and novellas, the renowned translator Anthony Chambers focuses on the thread of fantasy that Tanizaki weaves throughout his work. He examines Tanizaki's subtle use of storytelling devices to evoke his characters'alternate sense of reality and to encourage the reader's participation in their fantasies. Employing his intimate knowledge of Tanizaki's works, Chambers superbly evokes the beauty and truth Tanizaki's characters find in their ideal worlds.

Naito Konan's periodization of Chinese history is responsible for shaping the twentieth-century Western view of China. Naito was a journalist in the vibrant Meiji press for twenty years, during which he became recognized as Japan's leading Sinologist. He then assumed a chair in China Studies at Kyoto University, where he taught for twenty years, remaining all the while a prolific writer on public affairs. Joshua Fogel's biography treats Naito holistically, pointing up the intricate connections between his Sinological and political interests. As a part of an ongoing tradition based in jitsugaku (concern with the practical applications of knowledge), Naito focused on what he took to be Japan's mission, after its own Meiji reforms, to help China implement comparable reforms. His emphasis on Chinese history and culture as the central influence in East Asia strengthened his Pan-Asian political convictions. Fogel's study offers a penetrating look at a scholar-journalist whose influence is still powerful.

This is the first full-length institutional study of the organization and functions of the Imperial Household Department under Ch'ing rule. That department constituted the emperor's'personal bureaucracy.'In tracing the complex structure of this organization, Preston Torbert has avoided an exhaustive listing of nominal offices and their prescribed duties; instead, he has described the distinctive'social groups'that made up the departments total personnel-the bondservants, the eunuchs, and the palace maids.

In Strange Tales from Edo, William Fleming paints a sweeping picture of Japan's engagement with Chinese fiction in the early modern period (1600–1868). Large-scale analyses of the full historical and bibliographical record—the first of their kind—document in detail the wholesale importation of Chinese fiction, the market for imported books and domestic reprint editions, and the critical role of manuscript practices—the ascendance of print culture notwithstanding—in the circulation of Chinese texts among Japanese readers and writers. Bringing this big picture to life, Fleming also traces the journey of a text rarely mentioned in studies of early modern Japanese literature: Pu Songling's Liaozhai zhiyi (Strange Tales from Liaozhai Studio). An immediate favorite of readers on the continent, Liaozhai was long thought to have been virtually unknown in Japan until the modern period. Copies were imported in vanishingly small numbers, and the collection was never reprinted domestically. Yet beneath this surface of apparent neglect lies a rich hidden history of engagement and rewriting—hand-copying, annotation, criticism, translation, and adaptation—that opens up new perspectives on both the Chinese strange tale and its Japanese counterparts.

Histories of remote islands around Japan are usually told through the prism of territorial disputes. In contrast, Takahiro Yamamoto contends that the transformation of the islands from ambiguous border zones to a territorialized space emerged out of multilateral power relations. Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, Tsushima, the Bonin Islands, and the Ryukyu Islands became the subject of inter-imperial negotiations during the formative years of modern Japan as empires nudged each other to secure their status with minimal costs rather than fighting a territorial scramble. Based on multiarchival, multilingual research, Demarcating Japan argues that the transformation of border islands should be understood as an interconnected process, where inter-local referencing played a key role in the outcome: Japan's geographical expansion in the face of domineering Extra-Asian empires.

War, defeat, and the collapse of empire in 1945 touched every aspect of postwar Japanese society, profoundly shaping how the Japanese would reconstruct national identity and reengage with the peoples of Asia. While “America” offered a vision of re-genesis after cataclysmic ruin, “Asia” exposed the traumata of perpetration and the torment of ethnic responsibility. Obscured in the shadows of a resurgent postwar Japan lurked a postimperial specter whose haunting presence both complicated and confounded the spiritual rehabilitation of the nation. Asia and Postwar Japan examines Japanese deimperialization from 1945 until the early twenty-first century. It focuses on the thought and activism of progressive activists and intellectuals as they struggled to overcome rigid preconceptions about “Asia,” as they grappled with the implications of postimperial responsibility, and as they forged new regional solidarities and Asian imaginaries. Simon Avenell reveals the critical importance of Asia in postwar Japanese thought, activism, and politics—Asia as a symbolic geography, Asia as a space for grassroots engagement, and ultimately, Asia as an aporia of identity and the source of a new politics of hope.

In 1916, a group of Korean farmers and their children gathered to watch a film depicting the enthronement of the Japanese emperor. For this screening, a unit of the colonial government's news agency brought a projector and generator by train to their remote rural town. Before the formation of commercial moviegoing culture for colonial audiences in rural Korean towns, many films were sent to such towns and villages as propaganda. The colonial authorities, as well as later South Korean postcolonial state authorities, saw film as the most effective medium for disseminating their political messages. In Cine-Mobility, Han Sang Kim argues that the force of propaganda films in Korea was derived primarily not from their messages but from the new mobility of the viewing position. From the first film shot in Korea in 1901 through early internet screen cultures in late 1990s South Korea, Cine-Mobility explores the association between cinematic media and transportation mobility, not only in diverse and discrete forms such as railroads, motorways, automobiles, automation, and digital technologies, but also in connection with the newly established rules and restrictions and the new culture of mobility, including changes in gender dynamics, that accompanied it.

Law is a moving system of rules that changes according to a nation's political and socioeconomic development. To understand the law of the People's Republic of China today, it is imperative to learn the history and philosophy of the law when it was first shaped. This is a comprehensive introduction to Chinese legal scholarship and the prominent scholars who developed it during the initial decades of the PRC, when the old Chinese legal system was abolished by the newly established Communist government. With responsibilities for full-scale recovery and reconstruction, while cultivating entirely new disciplines and branches of legal studies, the thirty-three leading legal scholars featured herein became the creators, pioneers, and teachers of the new Communist legal system. Through their scholarship, we can see where the field of Chinese legal studies came from, and where it is going. Nongji Zhang reveals the stories of the most prominent PRC legal scholars, including their backgrounds, scholarly contributions, and important works. This essential tool and resource for the study of Chinese law will be of great use to faculty, students, scholars, librarians, and anyone interested in the field.

Ezra F. Vogel (July 11, 1930–December 20, 2020) was one of America's foremost experts on Asia, mastering the Japanese and Chinese languages and contributing important scholarly works on both countries, and on their relationships with each other and with the world. Starting from modest roots in an immigrant family in a small town in Ohio, he came to Harvard in 1953 to train as a sociologist. He then shifted his focus to Asia, spending almost the entirety of his life at Harvard. Vogel had a dramatic impact around the world, not only through his scholarship and the students he trained, but also through his friendship and mentoring of journalists, diplomats, business executives, and foreign leaders as well as through his public policy advice and devotion to institution building, at Harvard as well as nationally and internationally. Active until the end, his sudden death provoked outpourings of gratitude and grief from countless people whose lives he had affected. The present volume, containing fond reminiscences from 155 diverse individuals, conveys what was so extraordinary about the character and life of Ezra Vogel.

In the late 1980s, most of the world still associated Vietnam with resistance and war, hardship, refugees, and a mismanaged planned economy. During the 1990s, by contrast, major countries began to see Vietnam as both a potential partner and a strategically significant actor—particularly in the competition between the United States and an emerging China—and international investors began to see Vietnam as a land of opportunity.

Writers and intellectuals in modern Japan have long forged dialogues across the boundaries separating the spheres of literature and thought. This book explores some of their most intellectually and aesthetically provocative connections in the volatile transwar years of the 1920s to 1950s. Reading philosophical texts alongside literary writings, the study links the intellectual side of literature to the literary dimensions of thought in contexts ranging from middlebrow writing to avant-garde modernism, and from the wartime left to the postwar right. Chapters trace these dynamics through the novelist Tanizaki Jun'ichirō's collaboration with the nativist linguist Yamada Yoshio on a modern translation of The Tale of Genji; the modernist writer Yokomitsu Riichi's dialogue with Kyoto School philosophers around the question of “worldliness”; the Marxist poet Nakano Shigeharu's and the philosopher Tosaka Jun's thinking about prosaic everyday language; and the postwar rumination on liberal society that surrounded the scholar Edwin McClellan while he translated Natsume Sōseki's classic 1914 novel Kokoro as a graduate student in the United States working with the famed economist Friedrich Hayek. Revealing unexpected intersections of literature, ideas, and politics in a global transwar context, the book concludes by turning to Murakami Haruki and the resonances of those intersections in a time closer to our own.

In Close Association is the first English-language study of the local networks of women and men who built modern Japan in the Meiji period (1868–1912). Marnie Anderson uncovers in vivid detail how a colorful group of Okayama-based activists founded institutions, engaged in the Freedom and People's Rights Movement, promoted social reform, and advocated “civilization and enlightenment” while forging pathbreaking conceptions of self and society. Alongside them were Western Protestant missionaries, making this story at once a local history and a transnational one. Placing gender analysis at its core, the book offers fresh perspectives on what women did beyond domestic boundaries, while showing men's lives, too, were embedded in home and kin. Writing “history on the diagonal,” Anderson documents the gradual differentiation of public activity by gender in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Meiji-era associations became increasingly sex-specific, though networks remained heterosocial until the twentieth century. Anderson attends to how the archival record shapes what historians can know about individual lives. She argues for the interdependence of women and men and the importance of highlighting connections between people to explain historical change. Above all, the study sheds new light on how local personalities together transformed Japan.

Building a Nation at War argues that the Chinese Nationalist government's retreat inland during the Sino–Japanese War (1937–1945), its consequent need for inland resources, and its participation in new scientific and technical relationships with the United States led to fundamental changes in how the Nationalists engaged with science and technology as tools to promote development. The war catalyzed an emphasis on applied sciences, comprehensive economic planning, and development of scientific and technical human resources—all of which served the Nationalists'immediate and long-term goals. It created an opportunity for the Nationalists to extend control over inland China and over education and industry. It also provided opportunities for China to mobilize transnational networks of Chinese-Americans, Chinese in America, and the American government and businesses. These groups provided technical advice, ran training programs, and helped the Nationalists acquire manufactured goods and tools. J. Megan Greene shows how the Nationalists worked these programs to their advantage, even in situations where their American counterparts clearly had the upper hand. Finally, this book shows how, although American advisers and diplomats criticized China for harboring resources rather than putting them into winning the war against Japan, U.S. industrial consultants were also strongly motivated by postwar goals.

The Qing dynasty office purchase system (juanna), which allowed individuals to pay for appointments in the government, was regarded in traditional Chinese historiography as an inherently corrupt and anti-meritocratic practice. It enabled participants to become civil and military officials while avoiding the competitive government-run examination systems. Lawrence Zhang's groundbreaking study of a broad selection of new archival and other printed evidence—including a list of over 10,900 purchasers of offices from 1798 and narratives of purchase—contradicts this widely held assessment and investigates how observers and critics of the system, past and present, have informed this questionable negative view. The author argues that, rather than seeing office purchase as a last resort for those who failed to obtain official appointments via other means, it was a preferred method for wealthy and well-connected individuals to leverage their social capital to the fullest extent. Office purchase was thus not only a useful device that raised funds for the state, but also a political tool that, through literal investments in their positions and their potential to secure status and power, tied the interests of official elites ever more closely to those of the state.

Commercial aviation took shape in Hong Kong as the city developed into a powerful economy. Rather than accepting air travel as an inevitability in the era of global mobility, John Wong argues that Hong Kong's development into a regional and global airline hub was not preordained. By underscoring the shifting process through which this hub emerged, Hong Kong Takes Flight aims to describe globalization and global networks in the making. Viewing the globalization of the city through the prism of its airline industry, Wong examines how policymakers and businesses asserted themselves against international partners and competitors in a bid to accrue socioeconomic benefits, negotiated their interests in Hong Kong's economic success, and articulated their expressions of modernity.

Popular representations of the past are everywhere in Japan, from cell phone charms to manga, from television dramas to video games to young people dressed as their favorite historical figures hanging out in the hip Harajuku district. But how does this mass consumption of the past affect the way consumers think about history and what it means to be Japanese? By analyzing representations of the famous sixteenth-century samurai leader Toyotomi Hideyoshi in historical fiction based on Taikōki, the original biography of him, this book explores how and why Hideyoshi has had a continued and ever-changing presence in popular culture in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Japan. The multiple fictionalized histories of Hideyoshi published as serial novels and novellas before, during, and after World War II demonstrate how imaginative re-presentations of Japan's past have been used by various actors throughout the modern era. Using close reading of several novels and short stories as well as the analysis of various other texts and paratextual materials, Susan Furukawa discovers a Hideyoshi who is always changing to meet the needs of the current era, and in the process expands our understanding of the powerful role that historical narratives play in Japan.

In Varieties of State Regulation, Yukyung Yeo explores how, despite China's increasing integration into the global market, the Chinese central party-state continues to oversee the most strategic sectors of its economy. Since the 1990s, as major state firms were spun off from the ministries that managed them under the central planning system, the nature of the state in governing the economy has been remarkably transformed into that of a regulator. Based on over a hundred interviews conducted with Chinese central and local officials, firms, scholars, journalists, and consultants, the book demonstrates that the form of central state control varies considerably across leading industrial sectors, depending on the dominant mode of state ownership, conception of control, and governing structure. By analyzing and comparing institutional dynamics across various sectors, Yeo explains variations in the pattern of China's regulation of its economy. She contrasts the regulation of the automobile industry, a relatively decentralized sector, with the highly-centralized telecommunications industry, and demonstrates how China's central party-state maintains regulatory authority over key local state-owned enterprises. Placing these findings in historical and comparative contexts, the book presents the evolution and current practice of state regulation in China and examines its compatibility with other contemporary government practices.

Powers of the Real analyzes the cultural politics of cinema's persuasive sensory realism in interwar Japan. Examining cultural criticism, art, news media, literature, and film, Diane Wei Lewis shows how representations of women and signifiers of femininity were used to characterize new forms of pleasure and fantasy enabled by consumer culture and technological media. Drawing on a rich variety of sources, she analyzes the role that images of women played in articulating the new expressions of identity, behavior, and affiliation produced by cinema and consumer capitalism. In the process, Lewis traces new discourses on the technological mediation of emotion to the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake and postquake mass media boom. The earthquake transformed the Japanese film industry and lent urgency to debates surrounding cinema's ability to reach a mass audience and shape public sentiment, while the rise of consumer culture contributed to alarm over rampant materialism and “feminization.” Demonstrating how ideas about emotion and sexual difference played a crucial role in popular discourse on cinema's reach and its sensory-affective powers, Powers of the Real offers new perspectives on media history, the commodification of intimacy and emotion, film realism, and gender politics in the “age of the mass society” in Japan.

Telling stories: that sounds innocuous enough. But for the first chronicle in the Japanese vernacular, A Tale of Flowering Fortunes (Eiga monogatari), there was more to worry about than a good yarn. The health of the community was at stake. Flowering Tales is the first extensive literary study of this historical tale, which covers about 150 years of births, deaths, and happenings in late Heian society, a golden age of court literature in women's hands. Takeshi Watanabe contends that the blossoming of tales, marked by The Tale of Genji, inspired Eiga's new affective history: an exorcism of embittered spirits whose stories needed to be retold to ensure peace. Tracing the narrative arcs of politically marginalized figures, Watanabe shows how Eiga's female authors adapted the discourse and strategies of The Tale of Genji to rechannel wayward ghosts into the community through genealogies that relied not on blood but on literary resonances. These reverberations, highlighted through comparisons to contemporaneous accounts in courtiers'journals, echo through shared details of funerary practices, political life, and characterization. Flowering Tales reanimates these eleventh-century voices to trouble conceptions of history: how it ought to be recounted, who got to record it, and why remembering mattered.

Since the early 1980s, Korea's financial development has been a tale of liberalization and opening. After the 1997 financial crisis, great strides were made in building a market-oriented financial system through sweeping reforms for deregulation and the opening of financial markets. However, the new system failed to steer the country away from a credit card boom and bust in 2003, a liquidity crisis in 2008, and a run on its savings banks in 2011, and has been severely tested again by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic crisis. Financial liberalization, clearly, has been no panacea. This study analyzes the deepening of and structural changes in Korea's financial system since the early 1980s and presents the empirical results of the effects of financial development on economic growth, stability, and the distribution of income. It finds that, contrary to conventional wisdom, financial liberalization has contributed little to fostering the growth and stability of the Korean economy and has exacerbated income distribution problems. Are there any merits in financial liberalization? The authors answer this query through empirical examinations of the theories of finance and growth. They point to a clear need to further improve the efficiency, soundness, and stability of Korean financial institutions and markets.

Opportunity in Crisis explores the history of late Qing Cantonese migration along the West River basin during war and reconstruction and the impact of those developments on the relationship between state and local elites on the Guangxi frontier. By situating Cantonese upriver and overseas migration within the same framework, Steven Miles reconceives the late Qing as an age of Cantonese diasporic expansion rather than one of state decline. The book opens with crisis: rising levels of violence targeting Cantonese riverine commerce, much of it fomented by a geographically mobile Cantonese underclass. Miles then narrates the ensuing history of a Cantonese rebel regime established in Guangxi in the wake of the Taiping uprising. Subsequent chapters discuss opportunities created by this crisis and its aftermath and demonstrate important continuities and changes across the mid-century divide. With the reassertion of Qing control, Cantonese commercial networks in Guangxi expanded dramatically and became an increasingly important source of state revenue. Through its reliance on Hunanese and Cantonese to reconquer Guangxi, the Qing state allowed these diasporic cohorts more flexibility in colonizing the provincial administration and examination apparatus, helping to recreate a single polity on the eve of China's transition from empire to nation-state.

Once a powerful figure who reversed the disintegration of China and steered the country to Allied victory in World War II, Chiang Kai-shek fled into exile following his 1949 defeat in the Chinese civil war. As attention pivoted to Mao Zedong's communist experiment, Chiang was relegated to the dustbin of history. In Chiang Kai-shek's Politics of Shame, Grace C. Huang reconsiders Chiang's leadership and legacy by drawing on an extraordinary and uncensored collection of his diaries, telegrams, and speeches stitched together by his secretaries. She paints a new, intriguing portrait of this twentieth-century leader who advanced a Confucian politics of shame to confront Japanese incursion into China and urge unity among his people. In also comparing Chiang's response to imperialism to those of Mao, Yuan Shikai, and Mahatma Gandhi, Huang widens the implications of her findings to explore alternatives to Western expressions of nationalism and modernity and reveal how leaders of vulnerable states can use potent cultural tools to inspire their country and contribute to an enduring national identity.

The People's Republic of China has experienced numerous challenges and undergone tremendous structural changes over the past four decades. The party-state now faces a fundamental tension in its pursuit of social stability and regime durability. Repressive state strategies enable the Chinese Communist Party to maintain its monopoly on political power, yet the quality of governance and regime legitimacy are enhanced when the state adopts more inclusive modes of engagement with society. Based on a dynamic typology of state–society relations, this volume adopts an evolutionary framework to examine how the Chinese state relates with non-state actors across several fields of governance. Drawing on original fieldwork, the authors identify areas in which state–society interactions have shifted over time, ranging from more constructive engagement to protracted conflict. This evolutionary approach provides nuanced insight into the circumstances wherein the party-state exerts its coercive power versus engaging in more flexible responses or policy adaptations.

Despite being one of the most avowedly secular nations in the world, Japan may have more prison chaplains per inmate than any other country, the majority of whom are Buddhist priests. In this groundbreaking study of prison religion in East Asia, Adam Lyons introduces a form of chaplaincy rooted in the Buddhist concept of doctrinal admonition rather than Euro-American notions of spiritual care. Based on archival research, fieldwork inside prisons, and interviews with chaplains, Karma and Punishment reveals another dimension of Buddhist modernism that developed as Japan's religious organizations carved out a niche as defenders of society by fighting crime. Between 1868 and 2020, generations of clergy have been appointed to bring religious instruction to bear on a range of offenders, from illegal Christian heretics to Marxist political dissidents, war criminals, and death row inmates. The case of the prison chaplaincy shows that despite constitutional commitments to freedom of religion and separation of religion from state, statism remains an enduring feature of mainstream Japanese religious life in the contemporary era.

In 2013, Chinese leader Xi Jinping announced a campaign for national rejuvenation. The One Belt One Road initiative, or OBOR, has become the largest infrastructure program in history. Nearly every Chinese province, city, major business, bank, and university have been mobilized to serve it, spending hundreds of billions of dollars overseas building ports and railroads, laying fiber cables, and launching satellites. Using a trove of Chinese sources, author Eyck Freymann argues these infrastructure projects are a sideshow. OBOR is primarily a campaign to restore an ancient model in which foreign emissaries paid tribute to the Chinese emperor, offering gifts in exchange for political patronage. Xi sees himself as a sort of modern-day emperor, determined to restore China's past greatness. Many experts assume that Xi's nakedly neo-imperial scheme couldn't possibly work. Freymann shows how wrong they are. China isn't preying on victims, Freymann argues. It's attracting willing partners—including Western allies—from Latin America to Southeast Asia to the Persian Gulf. Even in countries where OBOR megaprojects fail, Freymann finds that political leaders still want closer ties with China. Freymann tells the monumental story of Xi's project on the global stage. Drawing on primary documents in five languages, interviews with senior officials, and on-the-ground case studies from Malaysia to Greece, Russia to Iran, Freymann pulls back the veil of propaganda about OBOR, giving readers a page-turning world tour of the burgeoning Chinese empire, a guide for understanding China's motives and tactics, and clear recommendations for how the West can compete.

The study assesses the impact of Chinese Communist rule on one of China's national minority peoples, the Kazakhs, living in the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture northwest of Mongolia. The author illuminates Sino-Soviet relations as well as the national minority policy of the Chinese Communist Party, for by the winter of 1963-1964, when the basic research for the present monograph was undertaken, events in the Kazakh area of Sinkiang had made it an issue in the relations between the two states.

The most disastrous famine in recent Chinese history took place between 1876 and 1879, afflicting all five provinces of North China [Shantung, Chihli, Honan, Shensi, and Shansi] and claiming no fewer than nine and a half million human lives. The hunger, pestilence, and violence brought about by the famine presented an overwhelming challenge to government and foreign relief efforts. Despite these obstacles, however, Timothy Richard of the Baptist Missionary Society succeeded in organizing an effective, systematic scheme of relief distribution in several districts of Shantung and Shansi. His work on the scene in turn stimulated the foreign community to organize the China Famine Relief Fund Committee, and his method of rendering aid set the pattern of foreign almsgiving which did much to ease the suffering of thousands. This study analyzes Richard's role in the North China famine and evaluates his contribution to the relief effort. It concentrates on Richard's initial distribution attempts in Shantung, 1876-1877, and his more extensive activities in Shansi, 1877-1879. By comparing Richard's relief measures with those of the Ch'ing government as well as with those of the foreign distributors supported by the China Famine Relief Fund Committee, the study attempts to describe the various approaches to the problem of famine relief and to illuminate the many difficulties encountered by Chinese and foreigners in the relief work. Richard emerged from the calamity convinced that he must urge China's leaders to eradicate the basic causes of famine and similar natural disasters and to elevate the physical as well as the spiritual welfare of the rural masses.

Recollections of the author of her experiences in China between 1925 and 1927. Translation from the Russian of Dva goda v vosstavshem Kitae.

Four case studies, all revisions of papers originally prepared for a seminar on Chinese Communist society held in the spring of 1970 at the East Asian Research Center, Harvard University.

The decade of 1864-1873 is known as the era of the Taewon'gun ('Prince of the Great Court') in Korea, When he ascended the throne in 1864 King Kojong was too young to rule, so his father, Yi Ha-ung, ruled in his place and set out to restore the powers of the monarchy.

Within a tightly controlled environment, literature has become the major screen onto which the political class of the People's Republic of China projects some of its battles. This work explores the potential of literary analysis for illuminating the PRC's social, intellectual, and political history, illustrating swings in the Party line with stories, articles, and cartoons from the popular press. This book presents materials hitherto scarcely topped and should offer new insights to those interested in Chinese literature, Russian and East European literature, and modern social and political history.

“Other than the devil, there is no Buddha; other than the Buddha, there is no devil.” The Chinese monk Siming Zhili (960–1028) uttered this remark as part of his justification for his self-immolation. An exposition of the intent, implications, and resonances of this one sentence, this book expands and unravels the context in which the seeming paradox of the ultimate identity of good and evil is to be understood. In analyzing this idea, Brook Ziporyn provides an overview of the development of Tiantai thought from the fifth through the eleventh centuries in China and contributes to our understanding of Chinese intellectual culture and Chinese Buddhism, as well as to basic ontological, epistemological, and axiological issues of interest in modern philosophy.

A compilation of numerous documents from the People's Republic of China on the government's agrarian policies between 1949 and 1956.

Drawing from a broad array of literary, historical, dramatic and anecdotal sources, Yenna Wu makes a rich exploration of an unusually prominent theme in premodern Chinese prose fiction and drama: that of jealous and belligerent wives, or viragos, who dominate their husbands and abuse other women. Focusing on Chinese literary works from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, she presents many colorful perspectives on this type of aggression, reviewing early literary and historical examples of the phenomenon. Wu argues that although the various portraits of the virago often reveal the writers'insecurities about strong-willed women in general, the authors also satirize the kind of man whose behavioral patterns have been catalysts for female aggression. She also shows that, while the women in these works are to some extent male constructs designed to affirm the patriarchal system, various elements of these portraits constitute a subversive form of parody that casts a revealing light on the patriarchal hierarchy of premodern China.

China's sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw an unprecedented explosion in the production and circulation of woodblock-printed books. What can surviving traces of that era's print culture reveal about the makers and consumers of these books? Home and the World addresses this question by carefully examining a wide range of late Ming books, considering them not merely as texts, but as material objects and economic commodities designed, produced, and marketed to stand out in the distinctive book marketplace of the time, and promising high enjoyment and usefulness to readers. Although many of the mass-market commercial imprints studied here might have struck scholars from the eighteenth century on as too trivial, lowbrow, or slipshod to merit serious study, they prove to be an invaluable resource, providing insight into their readers'orientations toward the increasingly complex global stage of early modernity and toward traditional Chinese conceptions of textual, political, and moral authority. On a more intimate scale, they tell us about readers'ideals of a fashionable and pleasurable private life. Through studying these works, we come closer to recapturing the trend-conscious, sophisticated, and often subversive ways readers at this important moment in China's history imagined their world and their place within it. 2015 Joseph Levenson Book Prize, Pre-1900 Category, China and Inner Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies

This translation of 65 pieces from Qian Zhongshu's Guanzhui bian (Limited Views) makes available for the first time in English a representative selection from Qian's massive four-volume collection of essays and reading notes on the classics of early Chinese literature. First published in 1979, it has been hailed as one of the most insightful and comprehensive treatments of themes and motifs in early Chinese writing to appear in this century. Scholar, novelist, and essayist Qian Zhongshu (b. 1910) is arguably contemporary China's foremost man of letters, andLimited Views is recognized as the culmination of his study of literature in both the Chinese and the Western traditions.

Volume 1 of a syllabus and reference work for understanding Ch'ing documents, written by John K. Fairbank and used for one of his history courses at Harvard University. Also includes an introduction, notes, and an appendix.

'This book is about the ritual world of a group of rural settlements in Shanxi province in pre-1949 North China. Temple festivals, with their giant processions, elaborate rituals, and operas, were the most important influence on the symbolic universe of ordinary villagers and demonstrate their remarkable capacity for religious and artistic creation. The great festivals described in this book were their supreme collective achievements and were carried out virtually without assistance from local officials or educated elites, clerical or lay. Chinese culture was a performance culture, and ritual was the highest form of performance. Village ritual life everywhere in pre-revolutionary China was complex, conservative, and extraordinarily diverse. Festivals and their associated rituals and operas provided the emotional and intellectual materials out of which ordinary people constructed their ideas about the world of men and the realm of the gods. It is, David Johnson argues, impossible to form an adequate idea of traditional Chinese society without a thorough understanding of village ritual. Newly discovered liturgical manuscripts allow him to reconstruct North Chinese temple festivals in unprecedented detail and prove that they are sharply different from the Daoist- and Buddhist-based communal rituals of South China.'

Examines patterns and trends in Korea's rapid urbanization and problems and challenges that have resulted. One of the studies on the economic and social modernization of Korea undertaken jointly by the Harvard Institute for International Development and the Korea Development Institute.

'The first systematic economic analysis of China's prewar railway development... provides significant contributions to the study of railroad economics... includes a substantial case study in the field of'imperialism'in which the effects of foreign investment in Chinese railroads are described and evaluated in great detail.'Huenemann addresses the political and diplomatic climate in which China's railroads were built, probes the economics of those railroads, and assesses the impact of outsiders and the gains and losses China experienced.

This final volume in the series Studies in the Modernization of the Republic of Korea, 1945–1975, is an analysis of the contribution of tax and expenditure policy to Korea's rapid economic development during the 1953–1975 period. Based upon specially compiled and comprehensive revenue and expenditure data, the authors first trace the history of Korean fiscal policy during the modernization period and then examine how Korea's fiscal development has differed from that of other countries. The results of the analysis show that Korea did not follow the traditional path of a steadily increasing tax effort, reliance on direct taxes, and emphasis on income distribution. Instead, through improved tax administration and expenditure control, the savings rate was increased dramatically.

This study analyzes the recent history of Sino-Soviet relations, focusing on the 1968-1971 period, specifically the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslavakia, the Ussuri clashes of 1969, and the Vietnam war as causes of the restructuring of the international system and Sino-Soviet relations within it.

Since the early 1960s the Korean experience represents a fairly extreme example of 1 development strategy--the open, export led, labor intensive model. Since the onset of rapid economic growth in the early 1960s, triggered by a set of liberalizing economic policy reforms, manufactured exports have expanded at an average annual rate of over 25% and have provided much of the impetus for the growth of industry and industrial employment. Expanded domestic markets for intermediates and capital equipment have brought substantial import-substituting industrial growth and a relative abundance of domestic and international finance. Another aspect of Korea's experience which makes it a valuable case study is the fact that the country entered this period of development with an exceptionally equally distributed stock of human and physical wealth. The Korean case represents close to an extreme in 2 dimensions: rapid, open, export led, labor intensive growth combined with markedly egalitarian initial social and economic structures. For the student of demographic transition, Korea's experience is noteworthy because of the rapidity of change. The crude birthrate declined 40% between 1960-75. The mechanisms and socioeconomic determinants of this transition are questions of substantial interest to those concerned with population problems. Kwon illuminates the historical antecedents to this period of rapid demographic change. It was the drastic upheaval of Korean society during the wartime period that set the stage for fertility transition. The dislocations and destruction of the Korean War completed the process. The war greatly weakened the family structure of Korean society and put and end to early marriage. In addition to affecting family values and birth control practice in Korea, it directly interfered with family formation and fertility. Repetto explores the channels of influence through which the economic development of Korea affected the demographic transition. Kim demonstrates that the policies with the most pronounced effect of population growth and distribution have been implicit and indirect. Kim and Sloboda sheds light on the economic forces behind migration through the analysis of new data on the economic characteristics of migrants.

'Urbanization was central to development in late imperial China. Yet its impact is heatedly debated, although scholars agree that it triggered neither Weberian urban autonomy nor Habermasian civil society. This book argues that this conceptual impasse derives from the fact that the seemingly continuous urban expansion was in fact punctuated by a wide variety of “dynastic urbanisms.” Historians should, the author contends, view urbanization not as an automatic by-product of commercial forces but as a process shaped by institutional frameworks and cultural trends in each dynasty. This characteristic is particularly evident in the Ming. As the empire grew increasingly urbanized, the gap between the early Ming valorization of the rural and late Ming reality infringed upon the livelihood and identity of urban residents. This contradiction went almost unremarked in court forums and discussions among elites, leaving its resolution to local initiatives and negotiations. Using Nanjing—a metropolis along the Yangzi River and onetime capital of the Ming—as a central case, the author demonstrates that, prompted by this unique form of urban–rural contradiction, the actions and creations of urban residents transformed the city on multiple levels: as an urban community, as a metropolitan region, as an imagined space, and, finally, as a discursive subject.'

Looks at the roles of foreign trade and foreign aid in the post-colonial economic development of Korea. Includes numerous tables and figures. One of the studies on the economic and social modernization of Korea undertaken jointly by the Harvard Institute for International Development and the Korea Development Institute.

This work provides an in-depth history of the Rinzai Zen monastic institution in Medieval Japan. Contents include chapters on Japanese zen pioneers and their patrons; Chinese émigré monks and Japanese warrior rullers; the gozan system; Zen monastic life and rules; the monastery and its subtemples; and the Zen monastic economy. Includes a foreword by Edwin Reischauer.

'Since the 1950s, Abe Kōbō (1924–1993) has achieved an international reputation for his surreal or grotesque brand of avant-garde literature. From his early forays into science fiction to his more mature psychological novels and films, and finally the complicated experimental works produced near the end of his career, Abe weaves together a range of “voices”: the styles of science and the language of literary forms. In Abe's oeuvre, this stylistic interplay links questions of language and subjectivity with issues of national identity and technological development in a way that ultimately aspires to become the catalyst for an artistic revolution. While recognizing the disruptions such a revolution might entail, Abe's texts embrace these disjunctions as a way of realizing radical new possibilities beyond everyday experience and everyday values. By arguing that the crisis of identity and postwar anomie in Abe's works is inseparable from the need to marshal these different scientific and literary voices, Christopher Bolton explores how this reconciliation of ideas and dialects is for Abe part of the process whereby texts and individuals form themselves—a search for identity that must take place at the level of the self and society at large.'

'This study revolves around the career of Kobayashi Hideo (1902–1983), one of the seminal figures in the history of modern Japanese literary criticism, whose interpretive vision was forged amidst the cultural and ideological crises that dominated intellectual discourse between the 1920s and the 1940s. Kobayashi sought in criticism a vehicle through which to rhetorically restore to the artistic work an aura of concreteness that precluded interpretation and instead inspired awe, to somehow recover a literary experience unmediated by intellectual machinations. In adhering firmly to this worldview for the duration of World War II, Kobayashi came to assume a complex stance toward the wartime regime. Although his interweaving of aesthetics and ideology exhibited elements of both resistance and complicity, his critical ethos served ultimately to undergird his wartime fascist stance by encouraging acquiescence to authority, championing patriotism, and calling for more vigorous thought control. Treating Kobayashi's influential works and the historical context in which they are rooted, James Dorsey traces the emergence of a modern critical consciousness in conversation with such concerns as the nature of materiality in capitalist culture, the relationship of narrative to subjectivity, and the nostalgia for beauty in a time of war.'

'Throughout Chinese history mountains have been integral components of the religious landscape. They have been considered divine or numinous sites, the abodes of deities, the preferred locations for temples and monasteries, and destinations for pilgrims. Early in Chinese history a set of five mountains were co-opted into the imperial cult and declared sacred peaks, yue, demarcating and protecting the boundaries of the Chinese imperium. The Southern Sacred Peak, or Nanyue, is of interest to scholars not the least because the title has been awarded to several different mountains over the years. The dynamic nature of Nanyue raises a significant theoretical issue of the mobility of sacred space and the nature of the struggles involved in such moves. Another facet of Nanyue is the multiple meanings assigned to this place: political, religious, and cultural. Of particular interest is the negotiation of this space by Daoists and Buddhists. The history of their interaction leads to questions about the nature of the divisions between these two religious traditions. James Robson's analysis of these topics demonstrates the value of local studies and the emerging field of Buddho–Daoist studies in research on Chinese religion.'