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Village China Under Socialism and Reform offers a comprehensive account of rural life after the communist revolution, detailing villager involvement in political campaigns since the 1950s, agricultural production under the collective system, family farming and non-agricultural economy in the reform, and everyday life in the family and community. Li's rich examination draws on original documents from local agricultural collectives, newly accessible government archives, and his own fieldwork in Qi...

Brilliantly illuminating one of the least-understood areas of American history, best-selling author Eric Jay Dolin now traces our fraught relationship with China back to its roots: the unforgiving nineteenth-century seas that separated a brash, rising naval power from a battered ancient empire. It is a prescient fable for our time, one that surprisingly continues to shed light on our modern relationship with China. Indeed, the furious trade in furs, opium, and beche-de-mer-a rare sea cucumber de...

Colonialism in China was a piecemeal agglomeration that achieved its greatest extent in the first half of the twentieth century, the last edifices falling at the close of the century. The diversity of these colonial arrangements across China’s landscape defies systematic characterization. This book investigates the complexities and subtleties of colonialism in China during the first half of the twentieth century. In particular, the contributors examine the interaction between localities and for...

Like many of her fellow missionaries to China, Pearl Buck found that she was not immune to the influence of her adopted home. In this book Lian Xi tells the story of Buck and two other American missionaries to China in the early twentieth century who gradually came to question, and eventually reject, the evangelical basis of Protestant missions as they developed an appreciation for Chinese religions and culture. Lian Xi uses these stories as windows to understanding the development of a broad th...

Providing historical insights essential to the understanding of contemporary China, this text presents a nation's story of trauma and growth during the early twentieth century. It explains how China's defeat by Japan in 1895 prompted an explosion of radical reform proposals and the beginning of elite Chinese disillusionment with the Qing government. The book explores how this event also prompted five decades of efforts to strengthen the state and the nation, democratize the political system, and...

Since its first publication in 1994, Experiences of China has established itself as a classic firsthand account of China's development, and Sino-British relations, since the 1960s. In this expanded edition, the author updates the story to cover the last five years, including the end of British rule in Hong Kong, the continuing rise of China, and the problems raised by the economic crisis in East Asia. He also looks at the future of China and Hong Kong and examines the issues facing the Western p...

The events of Chinese history between 1938 and 1948 are vividly reconstructed in this third volume of Han Suyin's autobiography. The story of her unhappy marriage to a fanatical army officer is told against the background of the appalling confusion and corruption of China at that time: the Japanese invasion, the misery and squalor of the retreating Chinese, the activities of Chiang Kaishek and his 'Blueshirts', the violent prelude to revolution. Ill-treated and misunderstood, Han Suyin goes to w...

Following the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution, the People's Republic of China gradually permitted the renewal of religious activity. Tibetans, whose traditional religious and cultural institutions had been decimated during the preceding two decades, took advantage of the decisions of 1978 to begin a Buddhist renewal that is one of the most extensive and dramatic examples of religious revitalization in contemporary China. The nature of that revival is the focus of this book. Four specialists...

As belief in the Buddha grew and his teachings were transmitted across Asia, Buddhist images, scriptures, and relics were duplicated and reduplicated to satisfy the needs of increasing numbers of the faithful. Yet how were these countless copies of sacred objects able to retain their authenticity and efficacy? Authentic Replicas explores how Buddhists in medieval China (seventh to twelfth centuries) solved this conundrum through the use of traditional methods of replication such as stamping, mol...

Drawing on more than a quarter century of field and documentary research in rural North China, this book explores the contested relationship between village and state from the 1960s to the start of the twenty-first century. The authors provide a vivid portrait of how resilient villagers struggle to survive and prosper in the face of state power in two epochs of revolution and reform. Highlighting the importance of intra-rural resistance and rural-urban conflicts to Chinese politics and society i...