Download or read book The Columbia Guide to Modern Chinese History written by R. Keith Schoppa and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2000-08-05 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China, the world's oldest and most populous state, remains an enigma to most people in the West, even at a time when that country is playing an increasingly prominent role on the international stage. At the heart of modern Chinese history have been the efforts of the Chinese people to transform their polity into a modern nation state, the Confucian orthodoxy into an ideology that can help direct that process, and an agrarian economy into an industrial one. These efforts are ongoing and of great importance. This book is both an introduction to the major features of modern Chinese history and a resource for researchers interested in virtually any topic relating to the Chinese experience of the last 220 years. This valuable reference contains: a historical narrative providing a comprehensive overview of five core aspects of Chinese history: domestic politics, society, the economy, the world of culture and thought, and relations with the outside world; a compendium of 250 short, descriptive articles on key figures, events, and terms; a resource guide containing approximately 500 annotated entries for the most authoritative sources for further research in English, as well as descriptions of important films depicting modern China and a guide to electronic resources; and appendices, including a chronology, excerpts from key primary source documents, and a wealth of tables and graphs on demographic, social, and economic trends.
Download or read book A History of Cultic Images in China written by Alain Arrault and published by The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press. This book was released on 2019-07-15 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the past twenty years, work on the local culture of central Hunan has been one of the most exciting sources for rethinking the nature and variety of Chinese local society. At the heart of this society is a kind of statuary found nowhere else in China--sculpted images of local people, primarily religious specialists of a wide range, but also parents and ancestors who, according to Confucian orthodoxy, should be represented by tablets, not statues. While the consecration ceremonies of these statues include rites that are common to all China, they are embedded in unique local ritual traditions. Based on two decades of international collaborative research, Alain Arrault focuses on some 4,000 of these statues and studies them on the basis of consecration certificates inserted in the statues, the earliest of which date to the sixteenth century.
Download or read book Tea War written by Andrew B. Liu and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of capitalism in nineteenth‑ and twentieth‑century China and India that explores the competition between their tea industries “Tea War is not only a detailed comparative history of the transformation of tea production in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but it also intervenes in larger debates about the nature of capitalism, global modernity, and global history.”— Alexander F. Day, Occidental College Tea remains the world’s most popular commercial drink today, and at the turn of the twentieth century, it represented the largest export industry of both China and colonial India. In analyzing the global competition between Chinese and Indian tea, Andrew B. Liu challenges past economic histories premised on the technical “divergence” between the West and the Rest, arguing instead that seemingly traditional technologies and practices were central to modern capital accumulation across Asia. He shows how competitive pressures compelled Chinese merchants to adopt abstract industrial conceptions of time, while colonial planters in India pushed for labor indenture laws to support factory-style tea plantations. Characterizations of China and India as premodern backwaters, he explains, were themselves the historical result of new notions of political economy adopted by Chinese and Indian nationalists, who discovered that these abstract ideas corresponded to concrete social changes in their local surroundings. Together, these stories point toward a more flexible and globally oriented conceptualization of the history of capitalism in China and India.
Download or read book Vernacular Industrialism in China written by Eugenia Lean and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In early twentieth-century China, Chen Diexian (1879–1940) was a maverick entrepreneur—at once a prolific man of letters and captain of industry, a magazine editor and cosmetics magnate. He tinkered with chemistry in his private studio, used local cuttlefish to source magnesium carbonate, and published manufacturing tips in how-to columns. In a rapidly changing society, Chen copied foreign technologies and translated manufacturing processes from abroad to produce adaptations of global commodities that bested foreign brands. Engaging in the worlds of journalism, industry, and commerce, he drew on literati practices associated with late-imperial elites but deployed them in novel ways within a culture of educated tinkering that generated industrial innovation. Through the lens of Chen’s career, Eugenia Lean explores how unlikely individuals devised unconventional, homegrown approaches to industry and science in early twentieth-century China. She contends that Chen’s activities exemplify “vernacular industrialism,” the pursuit of industry and science outside of conventional venues, often involving ad hoc forms of knowledge and material work. Lean shows how vernacular industrialists accessed worldwide circuits of law and science and experimented with local and global processes of manufacturing to navigate, innovate, and compete in global capitalism. In doing so, they presaged the approach that has helped fuel China’s economic ascent in the twenty-first century. Rather than conventional narratives that depict China as belatedly borrowing from Western technology, Vernacular Industrialism in China offers a new understanding of industrialization, going beyond material factors to show the central role of culture and knowledge production in technological and industrial change.
Download or read book Early China written by Li Feng and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-30 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical new interpretation of the early history of Chinese civilization based on the most recent scholarship and archaeological discoveries.
Download or read book The Columbia Anthology of Chinese Folk and Popular Literature written by Victor H. Mair and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 662 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Columbia Anthology of Chinese Folk and Popular Literature, two of the world's leading sinologists, Victor H. Mair and Mark Bender, capture the breadth of China's oral-based literary heritage. This collection presents works drawn from the large body of oral literature of many of China's recognized ethnic groups--including the Han, Yi, Miao, Tu, Daur, Tibetan, Uyghur, and Kazak--and the selections include a variety of genres. Chapters cover folk stories, songs, rituals, and drama, as well as epic traditions and professional storytelling, and feature both familiar and little-known texts, from the story of the woman warrior Hua Mulan to the love stories of urban storytellers in the Yangtze delta, the shaman rituals of the Manchu, and a trickster tale of the Daur people from the forests of the northeast. The Cannibal Grandmother of the Yi and other strange creatures and characters unsettle accepted notions of Chinese fable and literary form. Readers are introduced to antiphonal songs of the Zhuang and the Dong, who live among the fantastic limestone hills of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region; work and matchmaking songs of the mountain-dwelling She of Fujian province; and saltwater songs of the Cantonese-speaking boat people of Hong Kong. The editors feature the Mongolian epic poems of Geser Khan and Jangar; the sad tale of the Qeo family girl, from the Tu people of Gansu and Qinghai provinces; and local plays known as "rice sprouts" from Hebei province. These fascinating juxtapositions invite comparisons among cultures, styles, and genres, and expert translations preserve the individual character of each thrillingly imaginative work.
Download or read book Dwelling in the World written by Elizabeth LaCouture and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the early twentieth century, Chinese residents of the northern treaty-port city of Tianjin were dwelling in the world. Divided by nine foreign concessions, Tianjin was one of the world’s most colonized and cosmopolitan cities. Residents could circle the globe in an afternoon, strolling from a Chinese courtyard house through a Japanese garden past a French Beaux-Arts bank to dine at a German café and fall asleep in a British garden city-style semi-attached brick house. Dwelling in the World considers family, house, and home in Tianjin to explore how tempos and structures of everyday life changed with the fall of the Qing Empire and the rise of a colonized city. Elizabeth LaCouture argues that the intimate ideas and practices of the modern home were more important in shaping the gender and status identities of Tianjin’s urban elites than the new public ideology of the nation. Placing the Chinese home in a global context, she challenges Euro-American historical notions that the private sphere emerged from industrialization. She argues that concepts of individual property rights that emerged during the Republican era became foundational to state-society relations in early Communist housing reforms and in today’s middle-class real estate boom. Drawing on diverse sources from municipal archives, women’s magazines, and architectural field work to social surveys and colonial records, Dwelling in the World recasts Chinese social and cultural history, offering new perspectives on gender and class, colonialism and empire, visual and material culture, and technology and everyday life.
Download or read book The History of Imperial China written by Endymion Wilkinson and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive introduction in English to Sinological methods and traditional Chinese historical writing. The time span ranges from earliest times to 1911, with special emphasis on the years between the third century B.C. and the eighteenth century. The author includes introductions to major reference works and biographical information, and explanations of such matters as converting traditional dates. In addition to standard histories, the survey covers biographical writing, historical and administrative geography, works on statecraft, archival sources, and Confucian, Buddhist, and Taoist writings.
Download or read book China s War on Smuggling written by Philip Thai and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-12 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Smuggling along the Chinese coast has been a thorn in the side of many regimes. From opium and weapons concealed aboard foreign steamships in the Qing dynasty to nylon stockings and wristwatches trafficked in the People’s Republic, contests between state and smuggler have exerted a surprising but crucial influence on the political economy of modern China. Seeking to consolidate domestic authority and confront foreign challenges, states introduced tighter regulations, higher taxes, and harsher enforcement. These interventions sparked widespread defiance, triggering further coercive measures. Smuggling simultaneously threatened the state’s power while inviting repression that strengthened its authority. Philip Thai chronicles the vicissitudes of smuggling in modern China—its practice, suppression, and significance—to demonstrate the intimate link between illicit coastal trade and the amplification of state power. China’s War on Smuggling shows that the fight against smuggling was not a simple law enforcement problem but rather an impetus to centralize authority and expand economic controls. The smuggling epidemic gave Chinese states pretext to define legal and illegal behavior, and the resulting constraints on consumption and movement remade everyday life for individuals, merchants, and communities. Drawing from varied sources such as legal cases, customs records, and popular press reports and including diverse perspectives from political leaders, frontline enforcers, organized traffickers, and petty runners, Thai uncovers how different regimes policed maritime trade and the unintended consequences their campaigns unleashed. China’s War on Smuggling traces how defiance and repression redefined state power, offering new insights into modern Chinese social, legal, and economic history.
Download or read book The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier written by Benno Weiner and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-15 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier, Benno Weiner provides the first in-depth study of an ethnic minority region during the first decade of the People's Republic of China: the Amdo region in the Sino-Tibetan borderland. Employing previously inaccessible local archives as well as other rare primary sources, he demonstrates that the Communist Party's goal in 1950s Amdo was not just state-building but also nation-building. Such an objective required the construction of narratives and policies capable of convincing Tibetans of their membership in a wider political community. As Weiner shows, however, early efforts to gradually and organically transform a vast multiethnic empire into a singular nation-state lost out to a revolutionary impatience, demanding more immediate paths to national integration and socialist transformation. This led in 1958 to communization, then to large-scale rebellion and its brutal pacification. Rather than joining voluntarily, Amdo was integrated through the widespread, often indiscriminate use of violence, a violence that lingers in the living memory of Amdo Tibetans and others.
Download or read book Global Entanglements of a Man Who Never Traveled written by Dominic Sachsenmaier and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-29 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born into a low-level literati family in the port city of Ningbo, the seventeenth-century Chinese Christian convert Zhu Zongyuan likely never left his home province. Yet Zhu nonetheless led a remarkably globally connected life. His relations with the outside world, ranging from scholarly activities to involvement with globalizing Catholicism, put him in contact with a complex and contradictory set of foreign and domestic forces. In Global Entanglements of a Man Who Never Traveled, Dominic Sachsenmaier explores the mid-seventeenth-century world and the worldwide flows of ideas through the lens of Zhu‘s life, combining the local, regional, and global. Taking particular aspects of Zhu‘s multiple belongings as a starting point, Sachsenmaier analyzes the contexts that framed his worlds as he balanced a local life and his border-crossing faith. At the local level, the book pays attention to the intellectual, political, and social environments of late Ming and early Qing society, including Confucian learning and the Manchu conquest, questioning the role of ethnic and religious identities. At the global level, it considers how individuals like Zhu were situated within the history of organizations and power structures such as the Catholic Church and early modern empires amid larger transformations and encounters. A strikingly original work, this book is a major contribution to East Asian, transnational, and global history, with important implications for historical approaches and methodologies.
Download or read book Breaking with the Past written by Hans Van de Ven and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-25 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1854 to 1952, the Chinese Maritime Customs Service delivered one-third to one-half of all revenue available to China’s central authorities. Much more than a tax collector, the institution managed China’s harbors and surveyed the Chinese coast. It oversaw a college training Chinese diplomats; translated legal, philosophical, economic, and scientific documents; organized contributions to international exhibitions; and pioneered China’s modern postal system. After the 1911 Revolution, the agency began managing China’s international loans and domestic bond issues, and in the 1930s, it created a coast guard to combat smuggling. The Customs Service was central to China’s post-Taiping entrance into the world of modern nation-states and twentieth-century trade and finance, and this is the first comprehensive history of the Customs Service’s activities and truly cosmopolitan nature. At times, the Service kept China together when little else did.
Download or read book Eurasian Crossroads written by James A. Millward and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a comprehensive study of the central Asian region of Xinjiang's history and people from antiquity to the present. Discusses Xinjiang's rich environmental, cultural and ethno-political heritage.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Local History written by Amy H. Wilson and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-02-06 with total page 815 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Encyclopedia of Local History addresses nearly every aspect of local history, including everyday issues, theoretical approaches, and trends in the field. This encyclopedia provides both the casual browser and the dedicated historian with adept commentary by bringing the voices of over one hundred experts together in one place. Entries include: ·Terms specifically related to the everyday practice of interpreting local history in the United States, such as “African American History,” “City Directories,” and “Latter-Day Saints.” ·Historical and documentary terms applied to local history such as “Abstract,” “Culinary History,” and “Diaries.” ·Detailed entries for major associations and institutions that specifically focus on their usage in local history projects, such as “Library of Congress” and “Society of American Archivists” ·Entries for every state and Canadian province covering major informational sources critical to understanding local history in that region. ·Entries for every major immigrant group and ethnicity. Brand-new to this edition are critical topics covering both the practice of and major current areas of research in local history such as “Digitization,” “LGBT History,” museum theater,” and “STEM education.” Also new to this edition are graphics, including 48 photographs. Overseen by a blue-ribbon Editorial Advisory Board (Anne W. Ackerson, James D. Folts, Tim Grove, Carol Kammen, and Max A. van Balgooy) this essential reference will be frequently consulted in academic libraries with American and Canadian history programs, public libraries supporting local history, museums, historic sites and houses, and local archives in the U.S. and Canada. This third edition is the first to include photographs.
Download or read book The Merchants of Zigong written by Madeleine Zelin and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its dramatic expansion in the early nineteenth century to its decline in the late 1930s, salt production in Zigong was one of the largest and only indigenous large-scale industries in China. Madeleine Zelin's history details the novel ways in which Zigong merchants mobilized capital through financial-industrial networks and spurred growth by developing new technologies, capturing markets, and building integrated business organizations. She provides new insight into the forces and institutions that shaped Chinese economic and social development (independent of Western or Japanese influence) and challenges long-held beliefs that social structure, state extraction, the absence of modern banking, and cultural bias against business precluded industrial development in China.
Download or read book The Chile Pepper in China written by Brian R. Dott and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-12 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chinese cuisine without chile peppers seems unimaginable. Entranced by the fiery taste, diners worldwide have fallen for Chinese cooking. In China, chiles are everywhere, from dried peppers hanging from eaves to Mao’s boast that revolution would be impossible without chiles, from the eighteenth-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber to contemporary music videos. Indeed, they are so common that many Chinese assume they are native. Yet there were no chiles anywhere in China prior to the 1570s, when they were introduced from the Americas. Brian R. Dott explores how the nonnative chile went from obscurity to ubiquity in China, influencing not just cuisine but also medicine, language, and cultural identity. He details how its versatility became essential to a variety of regional cuisines and swayed both elite and popular medical and healing practices. Dott tracks the cultural meaning of the chile across a wide swath of literary texts and artworks, revealing how the spread of chiles fundamentally altered the meaning of the term spicy. He emphasizes the intersection between food and gender, tracing the chile as a symbol for both male virility and female passion. Integrating food studies, the history of medicine, and Chinese cultural history, The Chile Pepper in China sheds new light on the piquant cultural impact of a potent plant and raises broader questions regarding notions of authenticity in cuisine.
Download or read book The Local Museum in the Global Village written by Insa Müller and published by Transcript Verlag, Roswitha Gost, Sigrid Nokel u. Dr. Karin Werner. This book was released on 2020-08-15 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Insa Müller asks how local history museums can recast themselves to strengthen the links to their communities. Combining theoretical deliberations, empirical investigations of the case of two Norwegian islands, and a museum experiment, she offers starting points for rethinking this institution.
