In Governing the Dead, Linh D. Vu explains how the Chinese Nationalist regime consolidated control by honoring its millions of war dead, allowing China to emerge rapidly from the wreckage of the first half of the twentieth century to become a powerful state, supported by strong nationalistic sentiment and institutional infrastructure. The fall of the empire, internecine conflic...(展开全部)

Rapid social economic changes, the transition from a planned economy to a market economy, or even economic liberalization can lead to political instability and the collapse of authoritarian regimes. Despite experiencing all of these unprecedented changes in the past forty years, China under the Chinese Communist Party’s leadership has so far successfully transformed and improve...(展开全部)

In this original and readable book, Charles Stafford describes the Chinese fascination with separation and reunion. Drawing on his field studies in Taiwan and mainland China, he gives a vivid account of raucous festivals of reunion, elaborate rituals for the sending-off of gods (and daughters), poetic moments of leave-takings between friends, and bitter political rhetoric about...(展开全部)

This is the first English translation of Lee Ao's novel Martyrs' Shrine. Based on the events of the spirited but unsuccessful "Hundred Days' Reforms" movement, this book sweeps readers into the chaotic and fabled world of late imperial China.

Parents in China greatly value higher education for their children, but the intensity and effects of their desire to achieve this goal have largely gone unexamined—until now. Governing Educational Desire explores the cultural, political, and economic origins of Chinese desire for a college education as well as its vast consequences, which include household and national economic...(展开全部)

Vincent Goossaert is deputy director of the Groupe Sociétés, Religions, Laïcités at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Paris. He is the author of The Taoists of Peking, 1800–1949: A Social History of Urban Clerics, among other books. David A. Palmer is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Qigong Fever: Body, Scie...(展开全部)

The cultural fascination with and imagination of theater has long been overlooked as an important historical and literary context for reading Water Margin and Journey to the West. This study focuses on the concept of "the theatrical" to read those novels and their commentaries. Imbued with performances, playacting, spectacles, and spectatorship, the early modern theatrical nove...(展开全部)

Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China is not simply a survey of sixteenth-century images, but rather, a thorough and thoughtful examination of visual culture in China's Ming Dynasty, one that considers images wherever they appeared—not only paintings, but also illustrated books, maps, ceramic bowls, lacquered boxes, painted fans, and even clothing and tomb pictures. Clun...(展开全部)

The role of contract in early modern Chinese economic life, when acknowledged at all, is usually presented as a minor one. This volume demonstrates that contract actually played a critical role in the everyday structure of many kinds of relationships and transactions; contracts are, moreover, of enormous value to present-day scholars as transcriptions of the fine details of day...(展开全部)