Best of
China

2001

River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze


Peter Hessler - 2001
    Surrounded by the terraced hills of the Yangtze River valley, Fuling has long been a place of continuity, far from the bustling political centers of Beijing and Shanghai. But now Fuling is heading down a new path, and gradually, along with scores of other towns in this vast and ever-evolving country, it is becoming a place of change and vitality, tension and reform, disruption and growth. As the people of Fuling hold on to the China they know, they are also opening up and struggling to adapt to a world in which their fate is uncertain.Fuling's position at the crossroads came into remarkably sharp focus when Peter Hessler arrived as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1996, marking the first time in more than half a century that the city had an American resident. He found himself teaching English and American literature at the local college, discovering how Shakespeare and other classics look when seen through the eyes of students who have been raised in the Sichuan countryside and educated in Communist Party doctrine. His students, though, are the ones who taught him about the ways of Fuling — and about the complex process of understanding that takes place when one is immersed in a radically different society.As he learns the language and comes to know the people, Hessler begins to see that it is indeed a unique moment for Fuling. In its past is Communist China's troubled history — the struggles of land reform, the decades of misguided economic policies, and the unthinkable damage of the Cultural Revolution — and in the future is the Three Gorges Dam, which upon completion will partly flood thecity and force the resettlement of more than a million people. Making his way in the city and traveling by boat and train throughout Sichuan province and beyond, Hessler offers vivid descriptions of the people he meets, from priests to prostitutes and peasants to professors, and gives voice to their views. This is both an intimate personal story of his life in Fuling and a colorful, beautifully written account of the surrounding landscape and its history. Imaginative, poignant, funny, and utterly compelling, River Town is an unforgettable portrait of a city that, much like China itself, is seeking to understand both what it was and what it someday will be.

The Distant Land of My Father


Bo Caldwell - 2001
    Her father, the son of missionaries, leads a charmed and secretive life, though his greatest joy is sharing his beloved city with his only daughter. Yet when Anna and her mother flee Japanese-occupied Shanghai to return to California, he stays behind, believing his connections and a little bit of luck will keep him safe.Through Anna's memories and her father's journals we learn of his fall from charismatic millionaire to tortured prisoner, in a story of betrayal and reconciliation that spans two continents. The Distant Land of My Father, a breathtaking and richly lyrical debut, unfolds to reveal an enduring family love through tragic circumstances.

Sandalwood Death


Mo Yan - 2001
    Against a broad historical canvas, the novel centers on the interplay between its female protagonist, Sun Meiniang, and the three paternal figures in her life. One of these men is her biological father, Sun Bing, an opera virtuoso and a leader of the Boxer Rebellion. As the bitter events surrounding the revolt unfold, we watch Sun Bing march toward his cruel fate, the gruesome “sandalwood punishment,” whose purpose, as in crucifixions, is to keep the condemned individual alive in mind-numbing pain as long as possible.Filled with the sensual imagery and lacerating expressions for which Mo Yan is so celebrated, Sandalwood Death brilliantly exhibits a range of artistic styles, from stylized arias and poetry to the antiquated idiom of late Imperial China to contemporary prose. Its starkly beautiful language is here masterfully rendered into English by renowned translator Howard Goldblatt.

Spilled Water


Sally Grindley - 2001
    Torn from her family, she is taken to the smog-wrapped tower blocks and factories of the big city. There she is destined to become a servant to a wealthy family, and someday to marry their son. But Lu Si-Yan is not going to spend her life in servitude. Determined to return to her beloved mother and brother, she embarks on an epic journey to escape and find her way home.

The Bonesetter's Daughter


Amy Tan - 2001
    Now, before she succumbs to forgetfulness, LuLing gives Ruth some of her writings, which reveal a side of LuLing that Ruth has never known. . . .In a remote mountain village where ghosts and tradition rule, LuLing grows up in the care of her mute Precious Auntie as the family endures a curse laid upon a relative known as the bonesetter. When headstrong LuLing rejects the marriage proposal of the coffinmaker, a shocking series of events are set in motion–all of which lead back to Ruth and LuLing in modern San Francisco. The truth that Ruth learns from her mother’s past will forever change her perception of family, love, and forgiveness.

The Power of Tiananmen: State-Society Relations and the 1989 Beijing Student Movement


Dingxin Zhao - 2001
    Television screens across the world filled with searing images from Tiananmen Square of protesters thronging the streets, massive hunger strikes, tanks set ablaze, and survivors tending to the dead and wounded after a swift and brutal government crackdown.Dingxin Zhao's award-winning The Power of Tiananmen is the definitive treatment of these historic events. Along with grassroots tales and interviews with the young men and women who launched the demonstrations, Zhao carries out a penetrating analysis of the many parallel changes in China's state-society relations during the 1980s. Such changes prepared an alienated academy, gave rise to ecology-based student mobilization, restricted government policy choices, and shaped student emotions and public opinion, all of which, Zhao argues, account for the tragic events in Tiananmen.

Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy


Philip J. Ivanhoe - 2001
    This new edition offers expanded selections from the works of Kongzi (Confucius), Mengzi (Mencius), Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu), and Xunzi (Hsun Tzu); two new works, the dialogues Robber Zhi and White Horse; a concise general introduction; brief introductions to, and selective bibliographies for, each work; and four appendices that shed light on important figures, periods, texts, and terms in Chinese thought.

The Stone of Heaven: Unearthing the Secret History of Imperial Green Jade


Adrian Levy - 2001
    Journalists Levy and Scott-Clark risked their lives to reach the remote "Lost Valley of Capelan" in Burma, where jadeite is still being mined. They tell a tragic story about miners held there, dying in horrifying numbers of AIDS, because they have been paid in the form of heroin. They weave this shocking contemporary story with the mythology and obsessive secret history of this unusual gem -- going back to the Burmese Court.

The Age of Wild Ghosts: Memory, Violence, and Place in Southwest China


Erik Mueggler - 2001
    Here, people describe the present age, beginning with the Great Leap Famine of 1958-1960 and continuing through the 1990s, as "the age of wild ghosts." Their stories of this age converge on a dream of community—a bad dream, embodied in the life, death, and reawakening of a single institution: a rotating headman-ship system that expired violently under the Maoist regime. Displaying a sensitive understanding of both Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman language spoken in this region, Mueggler explores memories of this institution, including the rituals and poetics that once surrounded it and the bitter conflicts that now haunt it.To exorcise "wild ghosts," he shows, is nothing less than to imagine the state and its power, to trace the responsibility for violence to its morally ambiguous origins, and to enunciate calls for justice and articulate longings for reconciliation.

Tales of the Taoist Immortals


Eva Wong - 2001
    These popular tales of the Taoist immortals were also often dramatized in Chinese operas.The stories are of famous characters in Chinese history and myth: a hero's battle with the lords of evil, the founder of the Ming dynasty's treacherous betrayal of his friends, a young girl who saves her town by imitating rooster calls. Entertaining and often provocative, these tales usually include a moral. The immortals are role models in Chinese culture, as well as examples of enlightenment. Some of the immortals were healers, some were social activists, some were aristocrats, and some were entrepreneurs. The tales chosen by Eva Wong here are of the best-known immortals among the Chinese. Their names are household words and their stories are told and retold by one generation to the next.

Silk Dragon: Translations from the Chinese


Arthur Sze - 2001
    A second-generation Chinese-American, Sze has gathered over 70 poems by poets who have had a profound effect on Chinese culture, American poetics and Sze's own maturation as an artist. Also included is an informative insightful essay on the methods and processes involved in translating ideogrammic poetry.MOONLIGHT NIGHTby Tu Fucan only look out alone at the moon. From Ch'ang-an I pity my children who cannot yet remember or understand.Her hair is damp in the fragrant mist. Her arms are cold in the clear light. When will we lean beside the window and the moon shine on our dried tears?Sze's anthology features poets who have become literary icons to generations of Chinese readers and scholars. Included are the poems of the great, rarely translated female poet Li Ching Chao alongside the remorseful exile poems of Su Tung-p'o. This book will prove a necessary and insightful addition to the library of any reader of poetry in translation.The poets include: T'ao Ch'ien Wang Han Wang Wei Li Po Tu Fu Po Chü-yi Tu Mu Li Shang-yin Su Tung-p'o Li Ch'ing-chao Shen Chou Chu Ta Wen I-to Yen ChenArthur Sze is the author of six previous books of poetry, including The Redshifting Web and Archipelago. He has received the Asian American Literary Award for his poetry and translation, a prestigious Lannan Literary Award, and was recently a finalist for the Leonore Marshall Poetry Prize. He teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts.from A Painting of a CatNan Ch'uan wanted to be reborn as a water buffalo, but who did the body of the malicious cat become? Black clouds and covering snow are alike. It took thirty years for clouds to disperse, snow to melt.-Pa-ta-shan-jen (1626-1705)The Last DayWater sobs and sobs in the bamboo pipe gutter. Green tongues of banana leaves lick at the windowpanes. The four sur

Focusing the Familiar: A Translation and Philosophical Interpretation of the Zhongyong


Roger T. Ames - 2001
    It achieved truly canonical preeminence when it became one of the Four Books compiled and annotated by the Southern Song dynasty philosopher Zhu Xi (1130-1200). Within the compass of world literature, the influence of these books (Analects of Confucius, Great Learning, Zhongyong, and Mencius) on the Sinitic world of East Asia has been no less than the Bible and the Qu'ran on Western civilization.With this new translation David Hall and Roger Ames provide a distinctly philosophical interpretation of the Zhongyong, remaining attentive to the semantic and conceptual nuances of the text to account for its central place within classical Chinese literature. They present the text in such a way as to provide Western philosophers and other intellectuals access to a set of interpretations and arguments that offer new insights into issues and concerns common to both Chinese and Western thinkers. In addition to the annotated translation, a glossary of terms gives in concise form important senses of the terms that play a key role in the argument of the Zhongyong. An appendix addresses some of the more technical issues relevant to the understanding of both the history of the text and the history of its English translations. Here the translators introduce readers to the best contemporary textual studies of the Zhongyong and make use of the most recent archaeological discoveries in China to place the work within its own intellectual context.

Whom God has joined: Sketches from a marriage in which God is first


Isobel Kuhn - 2001
    Sketches of the marriage of the author and her life as a missionary to China with CIM

Under Confucian Eyes: Writings on Gender in Chinese History


Susan L. Mann - 2001
    The book's title reflects the sometimes ironic relationship between Confucian viewpoints and women's visibility in Chinese historical documents. The texts, written by both men and women, show that Confucian values and scholarly practices produced a rich documentary record of women's lives. Includes a brief guide for use by students and teachers

All Things Considered: Advanced Reader of Modern Chinese


Chih-p'ing Chou - 2001
    It is ideal for students who have completed intermediate courses but need more language practice to prepare them for the complexity of advanced Chinese.The text is divided into two parts. The first section consists of twelve dialogues; the second is a selection of recent newspaper articles about contemporary Chinese society. A novel feature of All Things Considered is that several topics appear in both dialogue and essay forms. This repetition is designed to improve students' retention of grammar and vocabulary as well as to highlight differences between spoken and written Chinese.All of the articles and dialogues center on everyday issues in contemporary China. Several of the topics featured are controversial in the hope that they will spark students' interest and promote participation in class discussions.

The Gardens of Their Dreams: Desertification and Culture in World History


Brian Griffith - 2001
    The author seeks to understand how the great civilizations in the original green lands of North Africa, Ancient Egypt, the Middle East, South Asia and China responded and changed under the pressure of invaders fleeing growing environmental degradation in the surrounding deserts.

The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China


Mark C. Elliott - 2001
    From this event arises one of Chinese history’s great conundrums: How did a barely literate alien people manage to remain in power for nearly 300 years over a highly cultured population that was vastly superior in number? This problem has fascinated scholars for almost a century, but until now no one has approached the question from the Manchu point of view.This book, the first in any language to be based mainly on Manchu documents, supplies a radically new perspective on the formative period of the modern Chinese nation. Drawing on recent critical notions of ethnicity, the author explores the evolution of the “Eight Banners,” a unique Manchu system of social and military organization that was instrumental in the conquest of the Ming.The author argues that as rulers of China the Manchu conquerors had to behave like Confucian monarchs, but that as a non-Han minority they faced other, more complex considerations as well. Their power derived not only from the acceptance of orthodox Chinese notions of legitimacy, but also, the author suggests, from Manchu “ethnic sovereignty,” which depended on the sustained coherence of the conquerors.When, in the early 1700s, this coherence was threatened by rapid acculturation and the prospective loss of Manchu distinctiveness, the Qing court, always insecure, desperately urged its minions to uphold the traditions of an idealized “Manchu Way.” However, the author shows that it was not this appeal but rather the articulation of a broader identity grounded in the realities of Eight Banner life that succeeded in preserving Manchu ethnicity, and the Qing dynasty along with it, into the twentieth century.

The Formation of the Chinese Communist Party


Yoshihiro Ishikawa - 2001
    Conducting careful readings and translations of recently released documents in Russian, Japanese, and Chinese, Ishikawa Yoshihiro builds a portrait of the party's multifaceted character, revealing the provocative influences that shaped the movement and the ideologies of its competitors.Making use of public and private documents and research, Ishikawa begins the story in 1919 with Chinese intellectuals who wrote extensively under pen names and, in fact, plagiarized or translated many iconic texts of early Chinese Marxism. Chinese Marxists initially drew intellectual sustenance from their Japanese counterparts, until Japan clamped down on leftist activities. The Chinese then turned to American and British sources.Ishikawa traces these networks through an exhaustive survey of journals, newspapers, and other intellectual and popular publications. He reports on numerous early meetings involving a range of groups, only some of which were later funneled into CCP membership, and he follows the developments at Soviet Russian gatherings attended by a number of Chinese representatives who claimed to speak for a nascent CCP. Concluding his narrative in 1922, one year after the party's official founding, Ishikawa clarifies a traditionally opaque period in Chinese history and sheds new light on the subsequent behavior and attitude of the party.

Protracted Contest: Sino-Indian Rivalry in the Twentieth Century


John W. Garver - 2001
    Garver offers a scrupulous examination of the two countries' actions and policy decisions over the past fifty years. He has interviewed many of the key figures who have shaped their diplomatic history and has combed through the public and private statements made by officials, as well as the extensive record of government documents and media reports. He presents a thorough and compelling account of the rivalry between these powerful neighbors and its influence on the region and the larger world.

สังคมจีนในไทย


G. William Skinner - 2001
    Published in 1957, it includes a contemporary description of Chinese society in Thailand at a time when China was a newly-emerged major Communist power. This digital edition was derived from ACLS Humanities E-Book's (http: //www.humanitiesebook.org) online version of the same title.

Saving the World: Chen Hongmou and Elite Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century China


William T. Rowe - 2001
    He served as governor-general, governor, or in lesser provincial-level posts in more than a dozen provinces, achieving after his death cult status as a “model official.”In this magisterial study, the author draws on Chen’s life and career to answer a range of questions: What did mid-Qing bureaucrats think they were doing? How did they conceive the universe and their society, what did they see as their potential to “save the world,” and what would the world, properly saved, be like? The answers to these questions are important not only because vast numbers of people were subject to these officials’ governance, but because the verdict of their successors was that they did their jobs remarkably well and should be emulated.Three persistent tensions in elite consciousness focus the author’s investigation. First, the elite adhered to the fundamentalist moral dictates of Song neo-Confucian orthodoxy at the same time that a new valuation of pragmatic, technocratic prowess abhorrent to the moral tradition emerged. Second, two contradictory views on the use of “statecraft” to achieve an ordered world were in play—one that favored the expansive use of the state apparatus, and one that emphasized indigenous local elites and communities. Finally, the subordination of human beings to the service of hierarchical social groupings contended with a growing appreciation of the dignity, moral worth, and productive potential of the individual.The author uses a holistic approach, attempting, for example, to explore how notions regarding gender roles and funerary ritual related to Qing economic thought, how the encounter with other cultures on the expanding frontiers helped form ideas of “civilized” conduct at home, and how an official’s negotiation of the complex Qing bureaucracy affected his approach to social policy. The author also considers how attitudes formed during the prosperous and highly dynamic eighteenth century conditioned China’s responses to the crises it confronted in the centuries to follow.

The Lhasa Atlas


Knud Larsen - 2001
    

Onoto Watanna: The Story of Winnifred Eaton (Asian American Experience)


Diana Birchall - 2001
    While her eldest sister (now acknowledged as the mother of Asian American fiction), was writing stories of downtrodden Chinese immigrants under the name Sui Sin Far, Winnifred's Japanese romance novels and stories became all the rage, thrusting her into the glittering world of New York literati. Diana Birchall chronicles the sometimes desperate, sometimes canny, and always bold course of her grandmother's amazing professional career as a journalist, a bestselling novelist, and a Hollywood scriptwriting protegee of Carl Laemmle at Universal Studios.

Frontier Taiwan: An Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry


Michelle Yeh - 2001
    The in-depth introduction outlines the development of modern poetry in the unique historical and cultural context of Taiwan.

The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937


Shu-mei Shih - 2001
    In The Lure of the Modern, Shih argues for the contextualization of Chinese modernism in the semicolonial cultural and political formation of the time. Engaging critically with theories of modernism, postcoloniality, and global and local cultural studies, Shih analyzes pivotal issues—such as psychoanalysis, decadence, Orientalism, Occidentalism, semicolonial subjectivity, cosmopolitanism, and urbanism—that were mediated by Japanese as well as Western modernisms.

Red Crag


Lo Kuang-Pin - 2001
    The year is 1949. "Focusing mainly on the actual life-and-death struggles inside the camps on the eve of the city's liberation, the story extol's the revolutionary martyrs whose unfailing optimism, fortitude and resourcefulness enable them to overcome the ordeals of torture, hunger and truth drugs. They finally establish contact with the Party Underground outside the prison, strengthening the overall revolutionary struggle. "On the basis of the authors' intimate knowledge of the events in the countryside, factories, schools, U.S.-Chiang spy organizations and concentration camps as China's War of Liberation draws to a victorious close, the characters are superbly delineated and the story is magnificently built scene after scene into an intricately woven plot. The reader will be gripped, moved and inspired after following these heroic people through the pages of this novel as they fight for a better world."

A Swift, Elusive Sword: What if Sun Tzu and John Boyd Did a National Defense Review?


Chet Richards - 2001
    Chester Richards (USAF Ret.), suggests that ancient strategic wisdom may help solve the dilemma confronting the U.S. military: spending on defense exceeds that of any combination of potential adversaries, but the services still face cancellation of weapon systems and lack of funds for training, spares, and care and feeding of the troops. Richards suggests U.S. military leaders can break out of the "dollars equals defense" mindset, and create more effective forces. The second edition contains a new forward written in response to the effects that the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against the United States have engendered in the U.S. military.

Incense at the Altar: Pioneering Sinologists and the Development of Classical Chinese Philology


David B. Honey - 2001
    Despite the variety of new scholarly fashions and approaches to the study of premodern China that have arisen during the past half-century, the careful examination of texts remains fundamental for all serious Sinological work. In this we are beholden to those European, and latterly, American, scholars who, over several generations, painstakingly established the standards for such work. But no comprehensive history of the field has heretofore been published in a Western language. Now Professor Honey offers just such a history of Sinology, spanning its beginnings in the first efforts of seventeenth-century Jesuit missionaries to the growing disciplinary fragmentation of the field in the second half of the twentieth century. Honey gives his most thorough attention to the major figures of French, German, Dutch, British, and American Sinology from approximately 1800 to 1980, with extensive discussion of their most significant works and individual techniques. This is a book of special importance for every student of China who cares about the history of the field.

Whither China?: Intellectual Politics in Contemporary China


Xudong Zhang - 2001
    Because many cultural and intellectual paradigms of the previous decade were left in ruins by that event, Chinese intellectuals were forced in the early 1990s to search for new analytical and critical frameworks. Soon, however, they found themselves engulfed by tidal waves of globalization, surrounded by a new social landscape marked by unabashed commodification, and stunned by a drastically reconfigured socialist state infrastructure. The contributors to Whither China? describe how, instead of spearheading the popular-mandated and state-sanctioned project of modernization, intellectuals now find themselves caught amid rapidly changing structures of economic, social, political, and cultural relations that are both global in nature and local in an irreducibly political sense. Individual essays interrogate the space of Chinese intellectual production today, lay out the issues at stake, and cover major debates and discursive interventions from the 1990s. Those who write within the Chinese context are joined by Western observers of contemporary Chinese cultural and intellectual life. Together, these two groups undertake a truly international intellectual struggle not only to interpret but to change the world.Contributors. Rey Chow, Zhiyuan Cui, Michael Dutton, Gan Yang, Harry Harootunian, Peter Hitchcock, Rebecca Karl, Louisa Schein, Wang Hui, Wang Shaoguang, Xudong Zhang

The Siege of the Peking Embassy 1900


Tim Coates - 2001
    Sir Claude MacDonald, the British ambassador in Peking, responded promptly, and wired for a relief force to be sent from the port of Taku. This publication offers diplomatic papers relating to the events during that turbulent period. In the centre of the story is the diary kept by Sir Claude MacDonald. The text contains despatches that describe how the largest international force fought its way out from Taku to Peking in order to rescue the hundreds of diplomats and their families who were stranded the Legation buildings.

China's Trial by Fire: The Shanghai War of 1932


Donald Allan Jordan - 2001
    Often obscured by the larger World War II, this history details how the Chinese fought from trenches against Japan's modern bombers and navy, and formed a defense that brought the country together for the first time.Unlike other histories' brief generalizations of the incident, this study traces the war from the initial January 28th Japanese marine raid on Chinese Shanghai. It also studies the roles played by the prevailing Japanese leaders, including the last prewar civilian Prime Minister, Emperor Hirohito, and Admiral Nomura, who was later assigned to pre-Pearl Harbor negotiations.Not least, the work bridges scholarly boundaries by highlighting the economics of China's leading trade metropolis, Shanghai; the desperate attempts of Chinese politicians and press to manipulate anti-imperialist and anti-Japanese propaganda; and the ways in which the failure of positional trench warfare against Japanese mechanized mobility provided lessons to German observers and the Communists.Donald Jordan has drawn from as complete a range of primary sources as are available. Both the Nanking and Taipei archives, as well as resources from Tokyo, Settlement Shanghai's police records, Washington, the League of Nations, and London were researched.Knowing how greatly the Nationalist defense in 1932 influenced the Chinese Communists expands the relevance for scholars of this illustrated study. Others, especially those curious about the U. S. entanglement leading to Pearl Harbor, will find much more than the story of a regional skirmish.Donald Jordan is Professor of East Asian History, Ohio University.

The Colour of Difference: Journeys in Transracial Adoption


Sarah Armstrong - 2001
    The authors introduce the issues around cross-cultural adoption and themes arising from the adoptees' stories. They also provide statistics on the scale of cross-cultural adoption.

The Battle of Red Cliffs from Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Young Learners Classic Readers)


Luo Guanzhong - 2001
    He wants to control all of China. But there are strong generals in the south who are ready to fight him. The problem is that Cao Cao’s army is very large. How can the smaller army in the south fight him? They need a clever man to lead them. Zhou Yu believes Zhuge Liang might be that man. But can Zhuge Liang be trusted? The fate of China may be decided as the armies meet to battle at Red Cliffs.

Chinese Political Culture


Shiping Hua - 2001
    The book is organized into three major areas: Chinese identities and popular culture (regional identities, anti-politics attitudes, Hong Kong identity); public opinion surveys (the Beijing area, Chinese workers, the Shanghai area); and ideological debates (the new Confucianism, masculinity and Confucianism, why authoritarianism is popular in China, the decline of Chinese official ideology). Here is the first work that reveals just how much, how rapidly, and how dramatically China is changing and why our perceptions of China must keep pace.

China: Yunnan Province: The Bradt Travel Guide


Stephen Mansfield - 2001
    The natural history of the region, ethnic cultures, monasteries and festivals are backed up by practical travel information.

Lonely Planet World Food Hong Kong


Lonely Planet - 2001
    Each guide traces the unique cultural influences that helped shape the culinary traditions of the featured country, with fascinating sidebars on special ingredients and preparation techniques. The best feature of the World Food Guides is the fact that recipes are included, so you can try your hand at making Spanish romesco sauce, Moroccan bastila, or Vietnamese bahn xeo. You'll also find a food glossary, vivid photographs of ingredients and markets, tips and techniques, and much more.

Bandits, Eunuchs and the Son of Heaven: Rebellion and the Economy of Violence in Mid-Ming China


David M. Robinson - 2001
    This bizarre meeting was the doing of the eunuch Zhang Zhong, the emperor's personal servant and companion. To understand how this extraordinary meeting came about requires a consideration of the economy of violence during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). Here, for the first time in any language, is a detailed look at the role of illicit violence during the Ming.Drawing on court annals, imperial law codes, administrative regulations, private writings, and local gazetteers, David Robinson recreates in vivid detail a world where heavily armed highwaymen and bandits raided the boulevards in and around the Ming capital, Beijing. From the emperor and his high court ministers in the Forbidden City to the merchants and commoners on the street, everyone confronted this volatile economy of violence.Bandits, Eunuchs, and the Son of Heaven reveals how illicit armed violence formed a critical, and until now largely unexplored, facet of late-imperial Chinese history. It offers important new insights into the nature of the late-imperial state, the structure of emperorship, the role of the military, and the place of force in everyday life in early-modern China.

Red Is Not the Only Color: Contemporary Chinese Fiction on Love and Sex between Women, Collected Stories


Patricia Sieber - 2001
    As urban China has undergone rapid transformation, same-sex relations have emerged as a significant, if previously neglected, touchstone for the exploration of the meaning of social change. The short fiction in this volume highlights tensions between tradition and modernization, family and state, art and commerce, love and sex. These stories introduce an emerging generation of acclaimed, and at times controversial, women writers, including Chen Ran, Bikwan Wong, and Chen Xue. By presenting fiction from the PRC, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, the collection deliberately maps the literary contours of same-sex intimacy in broadly cultural rather than purely political terms. The perceptive and informative introduction surveys the social evolution of female same-sex intimacy in twentieth-century China, examines how each author engages with her Chinese context, and discusses how the stories compare with earlier representations of Chinese same-sex intimacy in the United States. Compelling for its literary quality, the anthology will also spur reflection among scholars of modern Chinese literature as well as readers interested in questions of gender, sexuality, and cross-cultural representation.

The Chinese Philippine Life, 1850-1898


Edgar Wickberg - 2001
    During the half century from 1850 to 1898, the Chinese population in the Philippines increased drastically from 5000 to perhaps 100,000, and penetrated every part of the archipelago. Liberalized Spanish immigration laws and their own superior business methods enabled the Chinese to profit from the development of an export crop economy, which involved the exchange of Philippine raw products for foreign manufactured goods, and caused a shift in the emphasis of Chinese enterprise - from small-scale retailing to a virtual monopoly of raw material collection and import distribution. Their increased economic power gave impetus to an anti-Chinese campaign in the latter years of the century, and the Philippine Chinese, for the first time, developed community institutions to resist assimilation and turned to China for aid. The purpose of this study is to describe the position of the Chinese in the Philippines as of 1850 and to determine how it was affected by the ensuing economic and social changes of the next four decades.

Choosing Revolution: Chinese Women Soldiers on the Long March


Helen Praeger Young - 2001
    Until recently, women in the Red Army have only been a small part of the history of the Long March

Modern China: A Guide to a Century of Change


Graham Hutchings - 2001
    Yet several aspects of Chinese society remain an obstacle to internal growth and of deep concern to the outside world.In Modern China Graham Hutchings offers a timely and useful reference guide to the people, places, ideas, and events crucial to an understanding of this rising power. The focus is on society and politics and their impact on both China and the world. After an introduction that discusses key themes in twentieth-century China, Hutchings provides over two hundred insightful short essays, arranged alphabetically, that cover central figures and events from Sun Yat-sen to Jiang Zemin and the Boxer Rebellion to Tiananmen Square. Included are separate entries on each province, the current political leadership, and the two colonies recently returned to Chinese control, Hong Kong and Macau, as well as trenchant essays on subjects that remain sensitive within and controversial outside China, such as religion, ethnic minorities, Tibet, Taiwan, and human rights.Accessible and authoritative, Modern China is invaluable for anyone interested in the transformation of this ancient land into a modern power.

The Phonology of Standard Chinese


San Duanmu - 2001
    It covers several areas that were previously thought to be either absent in Chinese, or not phonological issues, e.g. stress, the definition of the word, the word length problem, and the word order problem. It also offers new analyses of several traditional topics, such as the phonemic inventory, allophonic variation, syllable structure, the [r] suffix, tone, and Tone 3 Sandhi. Unnecessary jargon is avoided and relevant theories are introduced in a non-technical way, so that the contents are accessible to a broad audience.

Remaking The Chinese City: Modernity And National Identity, 1900 1950


Joseph W. Esherick - 2001
    Collects in one place some of the most interesting and exciting new work on Chinese urban history.

Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing


Ian Buruma - 2001
    Moving from the quarrelsome exile communities of the U. S. to Singapore and Hong Kong and from persecuted Christians to Internet “hacktivists,” Buruma captures an entire spectrum of opposition to the orthodoxies of the Communist Party. He explores its historical antecedents its conflicting notions of freedom and the paradoxical mix of courage and cussedness that inspires its members. Panoramic and intimate, disturbing and inspiring, Bad Elements is a profound meditation on the themes of national identity and political struggle.

The Ideal Chinese Political Leader: A Historical and Cultural Perspective


Xuezhi Guo - 2001
    He investigates the ideal personality criteria of political leaders for both ideal and real politics--a combination of the values and ethics of Confucian, Daoist, and Legalist traditions.While addressing complementary roles of Chinese schools of thought in which ideal personality is grounded, Guo identifies five characteristics of an ideal political leader, traces their evolution, and then analyzes these characteristics as they influence ideal personality of political leaders. As modeled by a paragon of combining the Confucian noble man, the Daoist sage or authentic person, and the Legalist enlightened leader, Chinese political leaders pursue humaneness, ritualism, moralism, and follow naturalism in order to seek political survival and advancement against the radical development of Confucian political zealousness. He emphasizes the philosophical and historical conditions that facilitate the production of agency in an effort to understand how the legacy continues. A provocative analysis that will be of interest to scholars, researchers, and policy makers involved with Chinese politics, history, and philosophy.

Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism: Taixu's Reforms


Don Alvin Pittman - 2001
    This work focuses on his teachings and provides an interpretation of Taixu's aims and the diverse controversies that surrounded him.

Worshiping the Ancestors: Chinese Commemorative Portraits


Jan Stuart - 2001
    This illustrated text explores the artistic, historical, and religious significance of these paintings and places them in context with other types of commemorative portraiture. During the late Ming (1368-1644) and Quing (1644-1911) dynasties, full-length portraits of individual men and women came into vogue. These ancestor portraits were important objects of veneration, and the practice continued into the 20th century, when paintings were gradually replaced by photographs. The authors explore the works in depth, presenting a fascinating glimpse of Chinese life and culture and providing biographies of the sitters. Worshiping the Ancestors should appeal to connoisseurs of Chinese art and to all those interested in social history, portraiture, and devotional art.

The Last Mongol Prince: The Life And Times Of Demchugdongrob, 1902 1966


Sechin Jagchid - 2001
    

Treading Softly: U.S. Marines in China, 1819-1949


George B. Clark - 2001
    This brief history of foreign intervention in China, viewed through the experiences of the United States Marines, examines how the occupying powers dealt with a fellow sovereign nation. In many cases this involved the partition or outright absorption of Chinese territory through naked aggression. Clark contends that, considering the past two centuries, the Chinese have good reason to distrust all foreigners, and he urges the pursuit of a badly needed rapprochement.This is, however, also the story of the evolution of the Marine Corps as a separate service. Although an occupying force, the Marines did make considerable efforts to earn the friendship of the Chinese people. Always on the brink of extinction due to budgetary cuts and the enmity of the army and navy, the Marines managed to perform an onerous and difficult duty in a foreign land. With a resurgent China constantly testing the United States, a fellow Pacific Rim nation, every policymaker should be well aware of the often difficult history that we share and the mistakes that have been made in the past.

Sojourners and Settlers: Histories of Southeast Asia and the Chinese


Anthony Reid - 2001
    Yet interactions between Chinese and Southeast Asians are longstanding and intense, reaching back a thousand years and making it difficult, if not specious, to attempt to disentangle what is Chinese and what is indigenous in much of Southeast Asian culture. Sojourners and Settlers, now back in print, written by some of the most distinguished specialists in the field, demonstrates the depth of that relationship.Contributors: Leonard Blusse, Mary Somers Heidhues, Jamie C. Mackie, Anthony Reid, Craig Reynolds, Claudine Salmon, G. William Skinner, Wang Gungwu, O. W. Wolters.