According to imperial edict in pre-modern China, an elementary school was to be established in every village in the empire for any boy to attend. This book looks at how the schools worked, how they changed over time, and who promoted them and why. Over the course of the Ming period (1368-1644), schools were sponsored first by the emperor, then by the central bureaucracy, then b...(展开全部)

郑振满，1955年生，福建仙游人。1982年师从傅衣凌教授，研究明清社会经济史，1989年获历史学博士学位。历任厦门大学历史系教授、历史系主任、人文学院副院长，现任厦门大学历史系特聘教授、民间历史文献研究中心主任。主要学术著作有《明清福建家族组织与社会变迁》《乡族与国家：多元视野中的闽台传统社会》、Ritual Alliances of the Putian Plain（合著）。主编《民间信仰与社会空间》《福建宗教碑铭汇编》《民间历史文献论丛》《福建民间契约文书》。

This book examines major areas of late imperial Chinese culture, and their relation to Chinese culture today, focusing on the competence and sophistication of ordinary people. The work provides an overview of late imperial society and its responses to forces for change. Its ethnographically rich treatment of changes in family life under Communist rule is based on the author's f...(展开全部)

Myron L. Cohen is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University and an affiliate of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. He is the author of House United, House Divided: The Chinese Family in Taiwan, and Asia Case Studies in the Social Sciences: A Guide for Teaching.

Throughout much of history, imperial China has exhibited a seemingly capricious relationship with the sea. At times, it has welcomed commerce and travel across its vast waters with open arms, yet at others, it has sought to completely cordon off the littoral and the waters beyond. This intermittent approach has fostered a maritime community that, over time, has become increasin...(展开全部)

In this book, Li Min proposes a new paradigm for the foundation and emergence of the classical tradition in early China, from the late Neolithic through the Zhou period. Using a wide range of historical and archaeological data, he explains the development of ritual authority and particular concepts of kingship over time in relation to social memory. His volume weaves together t...(展开全部)

Will new information technologies, especially the Internet, bring freedom and democracy to authoritarian China? This study argues that the Internet has brought about new dynamics of socio-political changes in China, and that state power and social forces are transforming in Internet-mediated public space. Its findings are fourfold. First, the Internet empowers both the state an...(展开全部)

Although they existed more than a millennium apart, the great civilizations of New Kingdom Egypt (ca. 1548–1086 BCE) and Han dynasty China (206 BCE–220 CE) shared intriguing similarities. Both were centered around major, flood-prone rivers—the Nile and the Yellow River—and established complex hydraulic systems to manage their power. Both spread their territories across vast emp...(展开全部)

Recent movement toward more comprehensive institutional perspectives on development has been stimulated by two distinct challenges to narrow development theories. Theorists of "social capital" have highlighted the degree to which norms of trust and the interpersonal networks on which they are based constitute economic assets. Revisionist theories of the "East Asian Miracle" hav...(展开全部)