|
Showing 1 - 10 of
10 matches in All Departments
In a brisk revisionist history, William Rowe challenges the
standard narrative of Qing China as a decadent, inward-looking
state that failed to keep pace with the modern West. The Great Qing
was the second major Chinese empire ruled by foreigners. Three
strong Manchu emperors worked diligently to secure an alliance with
the conquered Ming gentry, though many of their social
edicts-especially the requirement that ethnic Han men wear
queues-were fiercely resisted. As advocates of a "universal"
empire, Qing rulers also achieved an enormous expansion of the
Chinese realm over the course of three centuries, including the
conquest and incorporation of Turkic and Tibetan peoples in the
west, vast migration into the southwest, and the colonization of
Taiwan. Despite this geographic range and the accompanying social
and economic complexity, the Qing ideal of "small government"
worked well when outside threats were minimal. But the
nineteenth-century Opium Wars forced China to become a player in a
predatory international contest involving Western powers, while the
devastating uprisings of the Taiping and Boxer rebellions signaled
an urgent need for internal reform. Comprehensive state-mandated
changes during the early twentieth century were not enough to hold
back the nationalist tide of 1911, but they provided a new
foundation for the Republican and Communist states that would
follow. This original, thought-provoking history of China's last
empire is a must-read for understanding the challenges facing China
today.
This collection of essays represents current research in modern
(post-1800) Chinese history. All contributors are former students
of Professor C. Martin Wilbur, one of the great names in the China
field over the past forty years, who recently retired from a long
tenure as modern Chinese historian at Columbia University. While
diverse in their subje
This collection of essays represents current research in modern
(post-1800) Chinese history. All contributors are former students
of Professor C. Martin Wilbur, one of the great names in the China
field over the past forty years, who recently retired from a long
tenure as modern Chinese historian at Columbia University. While
diverse in their subje
This brilliantly crafted narrative explores the roots of violence
in Chinese rural society over the past seven hundred years, based
on the study of a single highland county, Macheng, Hubei province,
in the Great Divide Mountains separating the Yangzi valley from the
North China Plain. Between the expulsion of the Mongols in the
mid-fourteenth century and the invasion of the Japanese in 1938,
Macheng experienced repeated, often self-inflicted waves of mass
"extermination" of segments of its population. This book argues
that, beyond its strategic military centrality and ingrained social
tensions, cultural factors such as popular religion, folklore,
collective memory, and local historical production played key roles
in the continued proclivity of the county's population for massive
carnage. In the process, the history of Macheng also provides a
case study in the way events and trends of national significance in
the history of China have been experienced at the local level.
Chen Hongmou (1696-1771) was arguably the most influential Chinese
official of the eighteenth century and unquestionably its most
celebrated field administrator. 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.
This is the second volume of a two-volume social history of
nineteenth-century Hankow, a city of over one million inhabitants
and the commercial hub of central China. In the first volume,
Hankow: Commerce and Society in a Chinese City, 1796-1889 (1984),
the author emphasized the dynamism of late imperial commerce, the
relation of the metropolis to its hinterland, and the corporate
institutions of the city, notably its guilds, which assumed a
number of functions we normally attribute to a municipal
government. In this volume, the focus is on the people of Hankow,
in all their ethnic diversity, occupational variety, and constant
mobility, and on the social bonds that enabled this mass of people
to live and work in a crowded city with much less disruptive social
conflict than occurred in Hankow's counterparts in early modern
Europe. Built into the argument of the book is a running comparison
nineteenth-century Hankow with such cities as London and Paris in
the somewhat earlier period when they, too, were experiencing the
growing pains of nascent preindustrial capitalism. How are we to
account for the fact that the cities of early modern Europe were so
much more prone to protest and social upheaval than Hankow was in a
comparable stage of development? The author finds the answer in the
cultural hegemony of an activist elite that fostered moral
consensus, social harmony, and an aura of solicitude for the
well-being of residents at every social level, exemplified in such
service institutions as poor relief, firefighting, and public
security. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, the
social bonds that had held Hankow together were beginning to
fragment, as social polarization and growing class-consciousness
fostered an atmosphere of increasing unrest.
In the first half of the nineteenth century the Qing Empire faced a
crisis. It was broadly perceived both inside and outside of
government that the “prosperous age” of the eighteenth century
was over. Bureaucratic corruption and malaise, population pressure
and food shortages, ecological and infrastructural decay, domestic
and frontier rebellion, adverse balances of trade, and, eventually,
a previously inconceivable foreign threat from the West seemed to
present hopelessly daunting challenges. This study uses the
literati reformer Bao Shichen as a prism to understand contemporary
perceptions of and proposed solutions to this general crisis.
Though Bao only briefly and inconsequentially served in office
himself, he was widely recognized as an expert on each of these
matters, and his advice was regularly sought by reform-minded
administrators. From examination of his thought on bureaucratic and
fiscal restructuring, agricultural improvement, the grain tribute
administration, the salt monopoly, monetary policy, and foreign
relations, Bao emerges as a consistent advocate of the hard-nosed
pursuit of material “profit,” in the interests not only of the
rural populace but also of the Chinese state and nation,
anticipating the arguments of “self-strengthening” reformers
later in the century.
This study brings a valuable perspective to the important issue of
Cold War politics on American Soviet trade policy over the past
forty years. Generally, American presidents from Truman through
Reagan have been more sophisticated than Congress or the public in
their approach to trade policies with the USSR and the Communist
bloc. The author is particularly critical of Congress, where
anti-Communist sentiment resulted in restrictive trade measures
that limited the Executive's flexibility in economic policy.
|
|