The first volume of Historical Studies of Contemporary China offers an examination of some key events, developments, issues, and figures in China since the founding of the People’s Republic. Drawing on rich primary and secondary sources, leading experts in the political, economic, intellectual, military and national defense, and diplomatic history of the PRC present insights and analysis on a wide range of topics, including emergency measures during the Difficult Three Year Period, the relationship between Neo-Confucianism and Marxism, the evolution of China’s international arms control policies, the Chinese government’s public opinion campaign prior to reestablishing diplomatic relations with Japan, the “Kashmir Princess” incident, and others. These accounts will help readers form a more nuanced understanding of China’s efforts to deal with an array of new problems while trying to recover from the ravages of two wars.

The establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 heralded dramatic changes in Chinese cultural practices. This volume, the latest entry in the Historical Studies of Contemporary China series, includes 11 articles translated from Historical Studies of Contemporary China (Dangdai Zhongguo shi yanjiu), one of China’s leading academic journals. The broad range of cultural forms covered include the book trade and publishing industry, comic strips, literacy and education, popular visual art, Peking Opera, and rural temple fairs. This volume introduces readers to cutting edge Chinese language scholarship and a vibrant cultural scene as it transitioned to the era of the People’s Republic, tracing the continuities as well as the changes in cultural life in China throughout the 20th century.

Selected Essays on China’s Education: Research and Review (4 volumes) consists of 22 most influential theses on the history and tradition of Chinese Education. These essays, selected and translated from China’s Education: Research and Review, a serial publication in Chinese, reflect the progress of qualitative research on Chinese education both within and outside China. Volume 1 focuses on Written and Oral Narratives, including six articles; Volume 2 focuses on History and Current Reality, including five articles; Volume 3 focuses on Knowledge and Tradition, including six articles; and Volume 4 focuses on Gender and Education, including five articles. Aiming to promote academic dialogues on Chinese culture and education, these essays explore important educational and cultural issues in China with a transcultural perspective.

“Thoughtful, probing...a worthy successor to the famous histories of Fairbank and Spence [that] will be read by all students and scholars of modern China.” —William C. Kirby, coauthor of Can China Lead? It is tempting to attribute the rise of China to Deng Xiaoping and to recent changes in economic policy. But China has a long history of creative adaptation. In the eighteenth century, the Qing Empire dominated a third of the world’s population. Then, as the Opium Wars and the Taiping Rebellion ripped the country apart, China found itself verging on free fall. More recently, after Mao, China managed a surprising recovery, rapidly undergoing profound economic and social change. A dynamic story of crisis and recovery, failure and triumph, Making China Modern explores the versatility and resourcefulness that guaranteed China’s survival, powered its rise, and will determine its future. “Chronicles reforms, revolutions, and wars through the lens of institutions, often rebutting Western impressions.” —New Yorker “A remarkable accomplishment. Unlike an earlier generation of scholarship, Making China Modern does not treat China’s contemporary transformation as a postscript. It accepts China as a major and active player in the world, places China at the center of an interconnected and global network of engagement, links domestic politics to international dynamics, and seeks to approach China on its own terms.” —Wen-hsin Yeh, author of Shanghai Splendor

Challenging the stereotype of premodern China as an agricultural nation, this book examines the development of the maritime sector, maritime institutions, and sea power in the premodern era. Initially discussing topics related to China's exports, such as ship design and construction, goods produced solely for export, capital accumulation and investment in the maritime sector, and trade networking, the volume goes on to consider the impact of maritime institutions, governmental trade and non-trade policies, and Confucian attitudes toward maritime activities. Finally, the book shows how China obtained technological, economic, and naval supremacy in Asian waters until the 18th century and goes on to discuss the reasons for the decline of the maritime sector in the 19th century.

Selected Essays on China’s Education: Research and Review (4 volumes) consists of 22 most influential theses on the history and tradition of Chinese Education. These essays, selected and translated from China’s Education: Research and Review, a serial publication in Chinese, reflect the progress of qualitative research on Chinese education both within and outside China. Volume 1 focuses on Written and Oral Narratives, including six articles; Volume 2 focuses on History and Current Reality, including five articles; Volume 3 focuses on Knowledge and Tradition, including six articles; and Volume 4 focuses on Gender and Education, including five articles. Aiming to promote academic dialogues on Chinese culture and education, these essays explore important educational and cultural issues in China with a transcultural perspective.

Elena Barabantseva looks at the close relationship between state-led nationalism and modernisation, with specific reference to discourses on the overseas Chinese and minority nationalities. The interplay between modernisation programmes and nationalist discourses has shaped China’s national project, whose membership criteria have evolved historically. By looking specifically at the ascribed roles of China’s ethnic minorities and overseas Chinese in successive state-led modernisation efforts, This book offers new perspectives on the changing boundaries of the Chinese nation. It places domestic nation-building and transnational identity politics in a single analytical framework, and examines how they interact to frame the national project of the Chinese state. By exploring the processes taking place at the ethnic and territorial margins of the Chinese nation-state, the author provides a new perspective on China’s national modernisation project, clarifying the processes occurring across national boundaries and illustrating how China has negotiated the basis for belonging to its national project under the challenge to modernise amid both domestic and global transformations. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Asian politics, Chinese politics, nationalism, transnationalism and regionalism.

This collection of essays addresses the perception that our understanding of modern China will be enhanced by opening the literature of China to more rigorous theoretical and comparative study. In doing so, the book confronts the problematic and complex subject of China's literary, theoretical, and cultural responses to the experience of the modern. With chapters by writers, scholars, and critics from mainland China, Hong Kong, and the United States, this volume explores the complexity of representing modernity within the Chinese context. Addressing the problem of finding a proper language for articulating fundamental issues in the historical experience of twentieth-century China, the authors critically re-examine notions of realism, the self/subject, and modernity and draw on perspectives from feminist criticism, ideological analysis, and postmodern theory. Among the many topics explored are subjectivity in Chinese cultural theory, Chinese gender relations, the viability of a Lacanian approach to Chinese identity, the politics of subversion in Chinese reportage, and the ambivalent status of the icon of paternity since Mao. At the same time this book offers a probing look into the transformation that Chinese culture as well as the study of that culture is currently undergoing, it also reconfirms private discourse as an ideal site for an investigation into a real and imaginary, private and collective encounter with history. Contributors. Liu Kang, Xiaobing Tang, Liu Zaifu, Stephen Chan, Lydia H. Liu, Wendy Larson, Theodore Huters, David Wang, Tonglin Lu, Yingjin Zhang, Yuejin Wang, Li Tuo, Leo Ou-fan Lee

This work offers the first systematic analysis of writings on modern Chinese history by historians in China from the early twentieth century to the present. It traces the construction of major interpretive schemes, the evolution of dominant historical narratives, and the unfolding of debates on the most controversial issues in different periods. Placing history-writing in the context of political rivalry and ideological contestation, Huaiyin Li explicates how the historians’ dedication to faithfully reconstructing the past was compromised by their commitment to an imagined trajectory of history that fit their present-day agenda and served their needs of political legitimation. Beginning with an examination of the contrasting narratives of revolution and modernization in the Republican period, the book scrutinizes changes in the revolutionary historiography after 1949, including its disciplinization in the 1950s and early 1960s and radicalization in the rest of the Mao era. It further investigates the rise of the modernization paradigm in the reform era, the crises of master narratives since the late 1990s, and the latest development of the field. Central to the author’s analysis is the issue of truth and falsehood in historical representation. Li contends that both the revolutionary and modernization historiographies before 1949 reflected historians’ lived experiences and contained a degree of authenticity in mirroring the historical processes of their own times. In sharp contrast, both the revolutionary historiography of the Maoist era and the modernization historiography of the reform era were primarily products of historians’ ideological commitment, which distorted and concealed the past no less than revealed it. In search of a more effective approach to rewriting modern Chinese history, Reinventing Modern China proposes a within-time, open-ended perspective, which allows for different directions in interpreting the events in modern China and views modern Chinese history as an unfinished process remaining to be defined as the country entered the twenty-first century.