Cultural Centrality and Political Change in Chinese History

Cultural Centrality and Political Change in Chinese History PDF

Author: Roger V. Des Forges

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 460

ISBN-13: 9780804740449

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The Ming period of Chinese history is often depicted as one of cultural aridity, political despotism, and social stasis. Recent studies have shown that the arts continued to flourish, government remained effective, people enjoyed considerable mobility, and China served as a center of the global economy. This study goes further to argue that China’s perennial quest for cultural centrality resulted in periodic political changes that permitted the Chinese people to retain control over social and economic developments. The study focuses on two and a half million people in three prefectures of northeast Henan, the central province in the heart of the "central plain”--a common synecdoche for China. The author argues that this population may have been more representative of the Chinese people at large than were the residents of more prosperous regions. Many diverse individuals in northeast Henan invoked historical models to deal with the present and shape the future. Though they differed in the lessons they drew, they shared the view that the Han dynasty was particularly relevant to their own time. Han and Ming politics were integral parts of a pattern of Chinese historical development that has lasted to the present.

Modernisation of Chinese Culture

Modernisation of Chinese Culture PDF

Author: Jana S. Rošker

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2014-09-26

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 1443867721

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The editors are grateful to the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for its generous support of their research work which enabled them to publish the present book. The present book carefully maps the Chinese modernisation discourse, highlighting its relationship to other, similar discourses, and situating it within historical and theoretical contexts. In contrast to the majority of recent discussions of a “Chinese development model” that tend to focus more on institutional then cultural factors, and are more narrowly concerned with economic matters than overall social development, the book offers several important focal points for many presently overlooked issues and dilemmas. The multifaceted perspectives contained in this anthology are not limited to economic, social, and ecological issues, but also include political and social functions of ideologies and cultural conditioned values, representing the axial epistemological grounds of modern Chinese society. 2011 was the 100th anniversary of the Xinhai Revolution. The centennial is relevant not only in terms of state ideology, but also plays a significant role within academic research into Chinese society and culture. This historic turning point likewise represents the symbolic and concrete linkages and tensions between tradition and modernity, progress and conservatism, traditional values and the demands for adjustment to contemporary societies. The book shows that Chinese transition from tradition to modernity cannot be understood in a framework of a unified general model of society, but rather through a more complex insight into the interrelations among elements of physical environment, social structure, philosophy, history, and culture.

Exhibiting the Past

Exhibiting the Past PDF

Author: Kirk A. Denton

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2013-12-31

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 0824840062

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During the Mao era, China’s museums served an explicit and uniform propaganda function, underlining official Party history, eulogizing revolutionary heroes, and contributing to nation building and socialist construction. With the implementation of the post-Mao modernization program in the late 1970s and 1980s and the advent of globalization and market reforms in the 1990s, China underwent a radical social and economic transformation that has led to a vastly more heterogeneous culture and polity. Yet China is dominated by a single Leninist party that continues to rely heavily on its revolutionary heritage to generate political legitimacy. With its messages of collectivism, self-sacrifice, and class struggle, that heritage is increasingly at odds with Chinese society and with the state’s own neoliberal ideology of rapid-paced development, glorification of the market, and entrepreneurship. In this ambiguous political environment, museums and their curators must negotiate between revolutionary ideology and new kinds of historical narratives that reflect and highlight a neoliberal present. In Exhibiting the Past, Kirk Denton analyzes types of museums and exhibitionary spaces, from revolutionary history museums, military museums, and memorials to martyrs to museums dedicated to literature, ethnic minorities, and local history. He discusses red tourism—a state sponsored program developed in 2003 as a new form of patriotic education designed to make revolutionary history come alive—and urban planning exhibition halls, which project utopian visions of China’s future that are rooted in new conceptions of the past. Denton’s method is narratological in the sense that he analyzes the stories museums tell about the past and the political and ideological implications of those stories. Focusing on “official” exhibitionary culture rather than alternative or counter memory, Denton reinserts the state back into the discussion of postsocialist culture because of its centrality to that culture and to show that state discourse in China is neither monolithic nor unchanging. The book considers the variety of ways state museums are responding to the dramatic social, technological, and cultural changes China has experienced over the past three decades.

Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century

Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century PDF

Author: Susan Naquin

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 1987-01-01

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780300046021

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During the eighteenth century, China's new Manchu rulers consolidated their control of the largest empire China had ever known. In this book Susan Naquin and Evelyn S. Rawski draw on the most recent research to provide a unique overview and reevaluation of the social history of China during this period--one of the most dynamic periods in China's early modern era. "A lucid, original, and scholarly summary of the social, economic, and demographic history of China's last great period of glory. This will be an important book for students of Chinese history."--Jonathan Spence, Yale University "Engaging, complex, and elegantly written. . . . Absorbing and valuable: a thorough, unique, and richly detailed account of the social forms and cultural and religious life of the people."--Choice " An] interesting and well-informed survey of China between about 1680 and 1820."--W.J.F. Jenner, Asian Affairs "I would be a very odd scholar or general reader who could not derive profit from reading this elegant and painstaking survey of the social, cultural, and economic life of the Qing empire in its apparent prime. . . . A superb survey which readers may absorb and cherish."--Alexander Woodside, Pacific Affairs "A highly readable synthesis of recent secondary literature on the subject."--William S. Atwell, Journal of Asian Studies "Their coverage is comprehensive and their writing is clear and lucid. reading this book obtains one a very broad, yet penetrative, view of Chinese society at the time."--Alan P.L. Liu, Asian Thought & Society "The ground covered by this book is vast. . . . Its very breadth conveys with great clarity the extent of current knowledge of premodern China: it also serves as an excellent introduction to the social history of the Qing dynasty."--Hugh D.R. Baker, China Quarterly "This is a most challenging work and ambitious work. . . . Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century give both the general reader and also the historian who does not study China a tool for grounding himself or herself in the basic patterns and trends that could be found in eighteenth century China as well as in the problems the specialists are now exploring. The book is also of great value to students of traditional and modern China, for it serves to synthesize much of the new literature on China in the High Qing. Thus it serves the 'China hand' as a state of the field essay that shows just where we are even as it suggests directions for future research."--Murray A. Rubinstein, American Asian Review "This excellent book provides an intelligent summary our rapidly changing understanding of Chinese society in a crucial century of political stability and economic and demographic expansion. Susan Naquin and Evelyn S. Rawski are distinguished contributors to the field, energetically engaged in its multinational communication networks."--John E. Wills, Jr., American Historical Review

The Rise and Fall of China's Last Dynasty

The Rise and Fall of China's Last Dynasty PDF

Author: Wei-Bin Zhang

Publisher: Nova Science Pub Incorporated

Published: 2013-01-01

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 9781626181588

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This book elucidates the Qing history from perspectives of Confucianism as well as modern sciences. It emphasises the Chinese spirits in explicating the socio-economic changes of the dynasty. Historians produce increasingly detailed information about structures and functioning of the Qing system from different perspectives. Nevertheless, there are only a few comprehensive and systematical studies of the Qing history from the Chinese cultural perspective. As many new materials about the Qing dynasty have been accumulated and some new theories about socio-economic evolution have been developed in the last few decades, there is a need for re-examining the rise and fall of Chinas last dynasty.

Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period

Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period PDF

Author: Rebecca E. Karl

Publisher: Harvard Univ Asia Center

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9780674008540

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Preliminary Material /Rebecca E. Karl and Peter Zarrow --Introduction /Rebecca E. Karl and Peter Zarrow --The Reform Movement, the Monarchy, and Political Modernity /Peter Zarrow --Literati-Journalists of the Chinese Progress (Shiwu bao) in Discord, 1896-1898 /Seungjoo Yoon --Zhang Zhidong's Proposal for Reform: A New Reading of the Quanxue pian /Tze-ki Hon --The Founding of the Imperial University and the Emergence of Ghinese Modernity /Timothy B. Weston --Placing the Hundred Days: Native-Place Ties and Urban Space /Richard Belsky --Reforming the Feminine: Female Literacy and the Legacy of 1898 /Joan Judge --Naming the First 'New Woman' /Hu Ying --'Slavery,' Citizenship, and Gender in Late Qing China's Global Context /Rebecca E. Karl --'Poetic Revolution,' Colonization, and Form at the Beginning of Modern Chinese Literature /Xiaobing Tang --Index /Rebecca E. Karl and Peter Zarrow --Harvard East Asian Monographs /Rebecca E. Karl and Peter Zarrow.

Chinese Political Culture

Chinese Political Culture PDF

Author: Shiping Hua

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-07-08

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1315500477

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Until this book, there has been no comprehensive, methodologically aware study of all aspects of Chinese political culture. The book is organized into three major areas: Chinese identities and popular culture (regional identities, anti-politics attitudes, Hong Kong identity); public opinion surveys (the Beijing area, Chinese workers, the Shanghai area); and ideological debates (the "new" Confucianism, masculinity and Confucianism, why authoritarianism is popular in China, the decline of Chinese official ideology). Here is the first work that reveals just how much, how rapidly, and how dramatically China is changing and why our perceptions of China must keep pace.

Culture and State in Chinese History

Culture and State in Chinese History PDF

Author: Theodore Huters

Publisher:

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 516

ISBN-13: 9780804765060

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Many observers of late imperial China have noted the relatively small size of the state in comparison to the geographic size and large population of China and have advanced various theories to account for the ability of the state to maintain itself in power. One of the more enduring explanations has been that the Chinese state, despite its limited material capacities, possessed strong ideological powers and was able to influence cultural norms in ways that elicited allegiance and responded to the desire for order. The fourteen papers in this volume re-examine the assumptions of how state power functioned, particularly the assumption of a sharp divide between state and society. The general conclusion is that the state was only one actor--albeit a powerful one--in a culture that elites and commoners could shape, either in cooperation with the state or in competition with it. The temporal range of the papers extends from the twelfth to the twentieth century, though most of the papers deal with the Ming and Qing dynasties. The book is in four parts. Part I deals with philosophical, historiographical, and literary debates and their relation to the late imperial state; Part II with the multiple roles of officials, elites, specialists, and commoners in constructing norms of religious beliefs and practices. Part III presents criticisms by late imperial intellectuals of both state policies and social conventions, and examines official efforts to incorporate and utilize elite commitments to Confucian views of political and cultural order. Part IV discusses ways in which the twentieth-century Chinese political order emerged from a trajectory defined in part by the intersection of late imperial practices with Western categories of knowledge.

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