New essays on the cultural representations of the relationship between Britain and China in the nineteenth century, focusing on the Amherst diplomatic problem.

This is a comparative study of the politics of Chinese cultural identity facing China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the US-Chinese, and the Chinese diaspora in the West. The author challenges current discussions of hybridity and nationalism by contrasting the experiences of Taiwan, Hong Kong and US-Chinese with those of China and the Chinese diaspora.

Archaeological discoveries over the past one hundred years have resulted in repeated calls to "rewrite ancient Chinese history." This is especially true of documents written on oracle bones, bronze vessels, and bamboo strips. In Writing Early China, Edward L. Shaughnessy surveys all of these types of documents and considers what they reveal about the creation and transmission of knowledge in ancient China. Opposed to the common view that most knowledge was transmitted orally in ancient China, Shaughnessy demonstrates that by no later than the tenth century BCE scribes were writing lengthy texts like portions of the Chinese classics, and that by the fourth century BCE the primary mode of textual transmission was by way of visual copying from one manuscript to another.

This innovative collection explores the life stories of Chinese women and men between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries. It draws on both biographical and autobiographical narratives and on perspectives taken from life writing theory to ask how lives were lived and written within and against the rules of the auto/biographical game.

The legal institutions of the short-lived Qin dynasty (221–207 BCE) have been vilified by history as harsh and draconian. Yet ironically, many Qin institutional features, such as written statutory law, were readily adopted by subsequent dynasties as the primary means for maintaining administrative and social control. This book utilizes both traditional texts and archeologically excavated materials to explore how these influential Qin legal institutions developed. First, it investigates the socio-political conditions which led to the production of law in written form. It then goes on to consider how the intended function of written law influenced the linguistic composition of legal statutes, as well as their physical construction. Using a function and form approach, it specifically analyses the Shuihudi legal corpus. However, unlike many previous studies of Chinese legal manuscripts, which have focused on codicological issues of transcription and translation, this book considers the linguistic aspects of these manuscripts and thus their importance for understanding the development of early Chinese legal thought. Writing Chinese Laws will be useful to students and scholars of Chinese Studies, as well as Asian law and history more generally.

Dr. Wu Dan’s Introducing Writing Across the Curriculum into China is an important and provocative research study that is broadly international in scope. Of particular significance for education in China, this book provides a historical analysis of writing instruction in China and an original application of activity theory used to analyze problems and possibilities for Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) in higher education. Through an examination of important aspects of WAC as it has developed in the United States, Dr. Wu Dan brings together various perspectives in support of developing and sustaining WAC programs in China and by analogy throughout the world. Her work opens new avenues for research in writing and for the teaching of courses throughout the curriculum using a writing-in-the-disciplines approach. A major contribution to international WAC scholarship, Introducing Writing Across the Curriculum into China will be invaluable to English faculty and to all readers interested in educational innovations in China.

Mastering Chinese characters in reading and writing is the key to mastering vocabulary and all the practical language skills involved in Chinese language study. This book introduces the reader to the 2436 Chinese characters for the six levels of the official Chinese Language Proficiency Exam (HSK) by offering information on their pronunciation in Hanyu Pinyin, their basic English meaning definitions, their stroke order and other relevant information. Exercise sheets are included for each character entry with gray shaded lines that allow to draw along the character lines with a thin pencil in the correct stroke order. For HSK exam preparation, the book may be used to concentrate on Chinese characters not yet known while disregarding those already known. Other students who are not preparing for the exam may benefit from this dictionary and book of exercises as well.

This book offers a completely new sequence for learning Chinese writing. If foreign students start learning to write Chinese by first inputting Radicals on the computer, they will make faster progress in being able to remember the vocabulary, and their transition to writing Chinese by hand will be more successful. At every stage in this carefully thought out sequence, the student should be encouraged to also practice what they have learnt on computer by writing the characters out by hand. The biggest problem that students have with learning Mandarin Chinese is being able to write Chinese. It is a daunting task because of the sheer number of different characters involved and also because until now each character has been treated as a unique and separate entity. The time needed to commit all this vocabulary to memory and gain fluency and facility in writing Chinese is immense, but using this method it will make learning faster.

Reading and Writing Chinese has been the best-selling standard reference text for foreign students and teachers of Chinese for the last 25 years. Now completely revised with modern (simplified) characters, it draws on the lessons learned from the use of the book in classrooms to provide a convenient and up-to-date introduction to the Chinese writing system. Materials are organized in units of progressive difficulty and complexity, with clear definitions of the individual characters presented in a logical and systematical sequence. For each of the basic 1,067 characters, the pronunciation and core meanings are given, along with examples of its use in common compounds and a stroke-order diagram showing how to write it correctly. Memorization tips and cross-references to look-alike characters are also provided. Charts of modern and traditional radicals, necessary to look up words in comprehensive Chinese dictionaries, are printed inside the front and back covers.

This book traces the evolving uses of writing to command assent and obedience in early China, an evolution that culminated in the establishment of a textual canon as the foundation of imperial authority. Its central theme is the emergence of this body of writings as the textual double of the state, and of the text-based sage as the double of the ruler. The book examines the full range of writings employed in early China, such as divinatory records, written communications with ancestors, government documents, the collective writings of philosophical and textual traditions, speeches attributed to historical figures, chronicles, verse anthologies, commentaries, and encyclopedic compendia. Lewis shows how these writings served to administer populations, control officials, form new social groups, invent new models of authority, and create an artificial language whose mastery generated power and whose graphs became potent objects. Writing and Authority in Early China traces the enterprise of creating a parallel reality within texts that depicted the entire world. These texts provided models for the invention of a world empire, and one version ultimately became the first state canon of imperial China. This canon served to perpetuate the dream and the reality of the imperial system across the centuries.