China

The Spring and Autumn is an annals text composed of brief records covering the period 722-479 BCE and written from the perspective of the ancient Chinese state of Lu. A long neglected part of the Chinese canon, it is traditionally ascribed to Confucius,...

Scholarship on early China has traditionally focused on a core group of canonical texts. However, understudied sources have the potential to shift perspectives on fundamental aspects of Chinese intellectual, religious, and political history. Yegor...

This book is edited based on a series of lectures on Chinese cultural history delivered at the Peking University in 2004. It stands out with its distinctive methodology and unique stand, and is popular with readers, with 17 reprints for the Chinese...

In Touring China, Yajun Mo explores how early twentieth century Chinese sightseers described the destinations that they visited, and how their travel accounts gave Chinese readers a means to imagine their vast country. The roots of China's tourism...

Longlisted for the 2024 SHNH Natural History Book Prize An exploration of plant wisdom, from the Southern Mountain Tea Flower to the Dawn RedwoodChina's vast and ancient body of documented knowledge about plants includes horticultural manuals and...

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...

Tyrant or national hero? An interdisciplinary exploration of China's First EmperorYing Zheng, founder of the Qin empire, is recognized as a pivotal figure in world history, alongside other notable conquerors such as Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and...

Recent concern about mainland China's intentions towards Taiwan, and more general concern about the risk of instability in the region, has led to growing interest in Taiwan's military strategy, in how Taiwan perceives threats to itself, and in how the...

This book seeks to explore Nordic approaches to China and the idea of sub-regional diplomacy. China's multi-tiered approach to Europe can be seen vividly in the Nordic sub-region, which has been engaging Beijing through a variety of different means...

With a large and growing economy and a leadership dedicated both to domestic reform and the further integration into international society and the world economy, China is facing and posing important challenges at the local, national, regional and wider...

This book takes a new look at the impacts of Christianity in the late-nineteenth-century China. Using American Baptist and English Presbyterian examples in Guangdong province, it examines the scale of Chinese conversions, the creation of Christian...

From the mid-1500s to December 1999, Macao was the longest-standing site of economic, religious and political contact between the Chinese and European worlds. Yet this surprising capacity for survival has resulted, ironically, form the very weakness of...

In Other Chinas Ralph A. Litzinger investigates the politics of ethnic identity in postsocialist China. By combining innovative research with extensive fieldwork conducted during the late 1980s and early 1990s in south-central and southwestern China,...

Scholars have long been puzzled by why Muslim landowners in Central Asia, called begs, stayed loyal to the Qing empire when its political legitimacy and military power were routinely challenged. Borderland Capitalism argues that converging interests held...

These four conceptual and critical essays on state and society in contemporary China argue vigorously against the grain of prevailing scholarly interpretation. In substantive content, they explore two major themes from different historical and...

The Manchu Qing victory over the Chinese Ming Dynasty in the mid-seventeenth century was one of the most surprising and traumatic developments in China's long history. In the last year of the Ming, the southwest region of China became the base of...

The Cultural Revolution in China was a time of upheaval and change. Millions of lives were disrupted and much effort was spent by the government and the Party to "reeducate" the populace through a great propaganda campaign. Posters, ceramic...

Explores first person narative documentary in post-Mao China. Focuses on the performative and reflexive process of documentary film. Proposes action as a crucial aspect of first person documentary, contributing to the debates around art practice as...

One of the central issues in the study of the Chinese Communist Party and its foreign policy is its relations with Moscow. Was the CCP a Chinese nationalist party antagonistic to an intrusive Soviet Union or was it rather an internationalist party with...

In the decades following the introduction of Communist Party rule in Shanghai in 1949, the city's economy, infrastructure and links with the world all atrophied. However, the past decade has seen far-reaching economic reforms implemented to recreate...

This book, an in-depth study of Nationalist tariff policy, fundamentally challenges the widely accepted idea that the key to the Communist seizure of power in China lay in the incompetence of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government. It argues instead...

Li Mengyang (1473 1530) was a scholar-official who initiated the literary archaist movement that sought to restore ancient styles of prose and poetry in sixteenth-century China. Chang Woei Ong situates Li's quest to redefine literati learning as a way to...

In 1817 a Cantonese scholar was mocked in Beijing as surprisingly learned for someone from the boondocks; in 1855 another Cantonese scholar boasted of the flourishing of literati culture in his home region. Not without reason, the second man pointed to...

Shrines to Living Men in the Ming Political Cosmos, the first book focusing on premortem shrines in any era of Chinese history, places the institution at the intersection of politics and religion. When a local official left his post, grateful subjects...

The history of Chinese medicine hinges on three major turning points: the formation of canonical theory in the Han dynasty; the transformation of medicine via the integration of earlier medical theories and practices in the Song dynasty; and the impact...

Through a cultural analysis of the symbols of death - flesh, blood, bones, souls, time numbers, food and money - Chinese Death Rituals in Singapore throws light upon the Chinese perception of death and how they cope with its eventuality. In the seeming...

This book argues that the fundamental shift in Chinese Cinema away from Socialism and towards Post-Socialism can be located earlier than the emergence of the "Fifth Generation" in the mid-eighties when it is usually assumed to have occured. By...

Sun Tzu and other classical Chinese strategic thinkers wrote in an era of social, economic and military revolution, and hoped to identify enduring principles of war and statecraft. The twenty-first century is a time of similarly revolutionary change, and...

This book explores the political, economic, and cultural forces, locally and globally that have shaped the evolution of Chinese primetime television dramas, and the way that these dramas in turn have actively engaged in the major intellectual and policy...

The People's Republic of China (PRC) is a newly emerging world power, and yet is still a developing state that must deal with the liabilities and opportunities of globalization. While integrating with the world economy, the PRC has had to articulate a...

China's one-child population policy, first initiated in 1979, has had an enormous effect on the country's development. By reducing its fertility in the past two decades to less than two children per woman, and developing a family planning program focused...

In the vast majority of literature on 'Chinese nationalism' the distinction between nation and state is rarely made, consequently nationalism usually appears as loyalty to the state rather than identification with the nation. Yet, since 1989, both the...

The descriptions Chinese and Japanese people attribute to themselves and to each other differ vastly and stand in stark contrast to Western perceptions that usually identify a 'similar disposition' between the two nations. Academic Nationals in China and...

Virtually every major media, information and telecommunications enterprise in the world is significantly tied to China. This volume provides the most expert, up-to-date and multidisciplinary analyses on how the contemporary media function in what has...

The history of China's National Games reflects both the transformation of elite sport in China and wider Chinese society. This is the first book to describe the origins and development of the National Games through their dynamic relationship with Chinese...

Each successive wave of revolution to hit modern China-political, cultural, and economic-has radically reshaped Chinese society. Whereas patriarchy defined the familial social structure for thousands of years, changing realities in the last hundred years...

In imperial China, intellectuals devoted years of their lives to passing rigorous examinations in order to obtain a civil service position in the state bureaucracy. This traditional employment of the literati class conferred social power and moral...

This study of poetry by women in late imperial China examines the metamorphosis of the trope of the "inner chambers" (gui), to which women were confined in traditional Chinese households, and which in literature were both a real and an...

The scientists and explorers profiled in this engaging study of pioneering Euro-American exploration of late imperial and Republican China range from botanists to ethnographers to missionaries. Although a diverse lot, all believed in objective,...

The heart of Urbanization in Early and Medieval China consists of translations of three gazetteers written during the Han (206 BCE-220 CE), Tang (618-907), and Northern Song (960-1126) dynasties describing the city of Suzhou. The texts allow the reader...