Title: Bureaucracy, politics, and decision making in post-Mao China 
Author: Lieberthal, Kenneth
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Politics | China
Publisher's Description: Using a model of "fragmented authoritarianism," this volume sharpens our view of the inner workings of the Chinese bureaucracy. The contributors' interviews with politically well-placed bureaucrats and scholars, along with documentary and field research, illuminate the bargaining and maneuvering amo . . . [more]
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Title: Chinese local elites and patterns of dominance 
Author: Esherick, Joseph
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | China
Publisher's Description: This important volume affords a panoramic view of local elites during the dramatic changes of late imperial and Republic China. Eleven specialists present fresh, detailed studies of subjects ranging from cultivated upper gentry to twentieth-century militarists, from wealthy urban merchants to village leaders. In the introduction and conclusion the editors reassess the pioneering gentry studies of the 1960s, draw comparisons to elites in Europe, and suggest new ways of looking at the top people in Chinese local social systems. Chinese Local Elites and Patterns of Dominance lays the foundation for future discussions of Chinese elites and provides a solid introduction for non-specialists.Essays are by Stephen C. Averill, Lenore Barkan, Lynda S. Bell, Timothy Brook, Prasenjit Duara, Edward A. McCord, William T. Rowe, Keith Schoppa, David Strand, Rubie S. Watson, and Madeleine Zelin.   [brief]
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Title: From revolutionary cadres to party technocrats in socialist China 
Author: Lee, Hong Yung 1939-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Politics | China
Publisher's Description: Using a wide variety of sources previously unavailable, Hong Yung Lee offers for the first time a theoretical and historical perspective on China's ruling elite, examining their politics and the bureaucratic system in which they participate. He traces the evolution of these cadres from the guerrilla fighters who first joined the communist movement and founded the new regime in 1949 to the technocratic specialists who wield power today.In the revolution the Communist leaders built a peasant-based party organization whose members were largely recruited from uneducated poor peasants and hired laborers. Even after they became the founders of a new regime, their rural orientation and revolutionary experiences continued to affect the political process.Lee shows that the requirements of modernization have compelled the state to replace the revolutionary cadres with bureaucratic technocrats. Selected from the postliberation generation, the new leaders are more committed to problem-solving than to socialism. Despite uncertainties in the immediate future, this elite transformation signifies an end to modern China's revolutionary era. Lee argues that it seems only a matter of time before China will have a bureaucratic-authoritarian regime led by technocrats possessing a managerial perspective and a pragmatic economic orientation.   [brief]
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Title: Voices of the song lyric in China/ 
Author: Yu, Pauline 1949-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | China
Publisher's Description: This collection is the first comprehensive treatment of the song lyric ( tz'u ) in China from its origins through the nineteenth century. Engaging issues of form, language, voice, and transmission, these essays explore the changing and frequently problematic situation of the tz'u over centuries of l . . . [more]
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Title: Contemplating the ancients: aesthetic and social issues in early Chinese portraiture 
Author: Spiro, Audrey
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Art | Architecture | China
Publisher's Description: Drawing on a wide variety of contemporaneous sources from Chinese history, literature, religious writings, and art and literary criticism, Spiro provides the modern reader with an aesthetic and social context for understanding early Chinese portraiture. Contemplating the Ancients introduces portraits that were never intended to be physical likenesses of their subjects and illuminates the meaning they held for the viewers for whom they were made.Spiro focusses on fourth- and fifth-century sets of almost identi- cal portraits of individuals known collectively in Chinese history as the Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove. Unlike the earlier Han dynasty portraits whose messages were universal, these exemplary portraits addressed a specific elitist audience. The subjects of these portraits served as idealized representations for a largely nouvel-arrivé aristocracy.Spiro examines the complex and sometimes ironic changes that occur when historical individuals are transformed by tradition into classical exemplars. She shows how the visual arts translate ideals of personal character into stylistic cues and how these cues, in turn, affect the values and behavior of human beings.   [brief]
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Title: Chinese families in the post-Mao era 
Author: Davis, Deborah 1945-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Sociology | Anthropology | China
Publisher's Description: How have the momentous policy shifts that followed the death of Mao Zedong changed families in China? What are the effects of the decollectivization of agriculture, the encouragement of limited private enterprise, and the world's strictest birth-control policy? Eleven sociologists and anthropologists explore these and other questions in this path-breaking volume. The essays concern both urban and rural communities and range from intellectual to working-class families. They show that there is no single trend in Chinese family organization today, but rather a mosaic of forms and strategies that must be seen in the light of particular local conditions.   [brief]
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Title: Resistance and revolution in China: the Communists and the second united front 
Author: Kataoka, Tetsuya
Published: University of California Press,  1974
Subjects: Asian Studies | China
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Title: The stubborn earth: American agriculturalists on Chinese soil, 1898-1937 
Author: Stross, Randall E
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Asian Studies | China
Publisher's Description: This is a study of the first major American effort to aid a developing country - China - in the early twentieth century. Anyone interested in U.S.-China relations and in the American presence abroad will find it provocative and frequently moving.
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Title: Medieval Chinese society and the local "community" 
Author: Tanigawa, Michio 1925-
Published: University of California Press,  1985
Subjects: Asian Studies | China
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Title: Classicism, politics, and kinship: the Chʿang-chou school of new text Confucianism in late imperial China 
Author: Elman, Benjamin A 1946-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | China | Philosophy
Publisher's Description: Scholars have generally agreed that the story of New Text Confucianism in late imperial China centers on K'ang Yu-wei and the late nineteenth-century political reforms he took credit for after fleeing China in 1898. In this important new book, Benjamin Elman explores the roots of New Text ideas and shows that Confucians first dissented from the orthodox raison d'etre of the imperial state over three hundred years earlier, during the transition from the late Ming to early Ch'ing dynasties.New Text scholars, although not revolutionary, stood for new forms of belief, and they challenged the authenticity of classical sources upon which much orthodox political discourse had been based. Their notions of historical change proved to be important stepping stones toward an influential New Text vision of social and political transformation that climaxed in the 1898 reform movement.Elman examines the conflicting New Text versus Old Text portraits of Confucius in order to gain a more precise grasp of classical studies in imperial China as the ideological source for the "constitutionality" of the Confucian imperium. Central to his argument is the discovery that kinship organizations in pre-modern China played an important role in fostering schools of learning such as the Ch'ang-chou New Text school. Accordingly, this study affords us a unique perspective on how gentry sought to impose their agenda on the state in an effort to weather the great changes occurring during the Ming and Ch'ing dynasties.   [brief]
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Title: Ordering the world: approaches to state and society in Sung Dynasty China 
Author: Hymes, Robert P
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Asian History | China
Publisher's Description: These essays examine the relation of society and the state or, more broadly, the place of political action in society and in the history of Sung China. Connections between intellectual change and sociopolitical change are a consistent focus; attitudes toward history and problems of authority are a recurrent concern. The authors suggest new kinds of continuity between the disparate intellectual worlds of Northern and Southern Sung China. Their findings have important implications for our understanding of the neo-Confucian movement in Sung history and of the Sung in the history of Chinese ideas about politics and social action.   [brief]
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Title: Perspectives on the Yi of Southwest China 
Author: Harrell, Stevan
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Anthropology | China | Ethnic Studies | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Nearly seven million Yi people live in Southwest China, but most educated people outside China have never heard of them. This book, the first scholarly study in a Western language on the Yi in four decades, brings this little-known part of the world to life. Perspectives on the Yi of Southwest China is a remarkable collection of work by both Yi and foreign scholars describing their history, traditional society, and recent social changes. In addition to being valuable as an ethnographic study, this book is also an experiment in communication among three discourses: the cosmopolitan disciplines of history and the social sciences, the Chinese discourse of ethnology and ethnohistory, and the Yi folk discourse of genealogy and ritual. This book uses the case of the Yi to conduct an international conversation across formerly isolated disciplines.   [brief]
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Title: The magistrate's tael: rationalizing fiscal reform in eighteenth-century Chʿing China 
Author: Zelin, Madeleine
Published: University of California Press,  1984
Subjects: History | Asian History | China
Publisher's Description: Madeleine Zelin shatters the image of China as a backward empire wracked by corruption and economic stagnation, thrust into the modern world when the western gunboats arrived in the 1840s, by providing an account of the indigenous evolution of the Chinese state. The Magistrate's Tael makes it possib . . . [more]
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Title: War and popular culture: resistance in modern China, 1937-1945 
Author: Hung, Chang-tai 1949-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | Asian History | China
Publisher's Description: This is the first comprehensive study of popular culture in twentieth-century China, and of its political impact during the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945 (known in China as "The War of Resistance against Japan"). Chang-tai Hung shows in compelling detail how Chinese resisters used a variety of popular cultural forms - especially dramas, cartoons, and newspapers - to reach out to the rural audience and galvanize support for the war cause. While the Nationalists used popular culture as a patriotic tool, the Communists refashioned it into a socialist propaganda instrument, creating lively symbols of peasant heroes and joyful images of village life under their rule. In the end, Hung argues, the Communists' use of popular culture contributed to their victory in revolution.   [brief]
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Title: The power of the gun: the emergence of modern Chinese warlordism 
Author: McCord, Edward Allen
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Politics | Asian History | China
Publisher's Description: This detailed study offers a new interpretation of the emergence of warlordism in early twentieth-century China. Focusing on the provinces of Hunan and Hubei, Edward McCord shows how the repeated use of the military to settle disputes over the structure and allocation of political power in the early Republic ultimately thwarted the consolidation of civil authority. Warlordism flourished as military commanders took advantage of the growing militarization of politics to establish their dominance over early Republican government.McCord's study brings into sharp focus the social and political context of warlordism and is an essential bridge completing the narrative of events between two revolutionary eras. With the role of the military in modern Chinese politics receiving renewed attention today, this work is especially timely.   [brief]
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Title: A Ming society: Tài-ho County, Kiangsi, fourteenth to seventeenth centuries 
Author: Dardess, John W 1937-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | Asian History | China
Publisher's Description: John Dardess has selected a region of great political and intellectual importance, but one which local history has left almost untouched, for this detailed social history of T'ai-ho county during the Ming dynasty. Rather than making a sweeping, general survey of the region, he follows the careers of a large number of native sons and their relationship to Ming imperial politics. Using previously unexplored primary sources, Dardess details the rise and development of T'ai-ho village kinship, family lineage, landscape, agriculture, and economy. He follows its literati to positions of prominence in imperial government. This concentration on the history of one county over almost three centuries gives rise to an unusually sound and immediate understanding of how Ming society functioned and changed over time.   [brief]
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Title: Christian souls and Chinese spirits: a Hakka community in Hong Kong 
Author: Constable, Nicole
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Christianity | China
Publisher's Description: How do the people of a village that is both Chinese and Christian reconcile the contradictions between their religious and ethnic identities? This ethnographic study explores the construction and changing meanings of ethnic identity in Hong Kong. Established at the turn of the century by Hakka Christians who sought to escape hardships and discrimination in China, Shung Him Tong was constructed as an "ideal" Chinese and Christian village. The Hakka Christians translate "traditional" Chinese beliefs - such as ancestral worship and death rituals - that are incompatible with their Christian ideals into secular form, providing a crucial link with the past and with a Chinese identity. Despite accusations to the contrary, these villagers maintain that while they are Christian, they are still Chinese.   [brief]
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Title: China's new business elite: the political consequences of economic reform 
Author: Pearson, Margaret M 1959-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Politics | Economics and Business | China
Publisher's Description: The transition from a planned to a market economy that began in China in the late 1970s unleashed an extraordinary series of changes, including increases in private enterprise, foreign investment, the standard of living, and corruption. Another result of economic reform has been the creation of a new class - China's new business elite. Margaret M. Pearson considers the impact that this new class is having on China's politics. She concludes that, contrary to the assumptions of Westerners, these groups are not at the forefront of the emergence of a civil society; rather, they are part of a system shaped deliberately by the Chinese state to ensure that economic development will not lead to democratization.   [brief]
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Title: Becoming Chinese: passages to modernity and beyond 
Author: Yeh, Wen-Hsin
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: History | China | Asian Literature | Asian History
Publisher's Description: This volume evaluates the dual roles of war and modernity in the transformation of twentieth-century Chinese identity. The contributors, all leading researchers, argue that war, no less than revolution, deserves attention as a major force in the making of twentieth-century Chinese history. Further, they show that modernity in material culture and changes in intellectual consciousness should serve as twin foci of a new wave of scholarly analysis. Examining in particular the rise of modern Chinese cities and the making of the Chinese nation-state, the contributors to this interdisciplinary volume of cultural history provide new ways of thinking about China's modern transformation up to the 1950s. Taken together, the essays demonstrate that the combined effect of a modernizing state and an industrializing economy weakened the Chinese bourgeoisie and undercut the individual's quest for autonomy. Drawing upon new archival sources, these theoretically informed, thoroughly revisionist essays focus on topics such as Western-inspired modernity, urban cosmopolitanism, consumer culture, gender relationships, interchanges between city and countryside, and the growing impact of the state on the lives of individuals. The volume makes an important contribution toward a postsocialist understanding of twentieth-century China.   [brief]
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Title: Inscribed landscapes: travel writing from imperial China 
Author: Strassberg, Richard E
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | Literature in Translation | Asian History | China
Publisher's Description: Alongside the scores of travel books about China written by foreign visitors, Chinese travelers' impressions of their own country rarely appear in translation. This anthology is the only comprehensive collection in English of Chinese travel writing from the first century A.D. through the nineteenth. Early examples of the genre describe sites important for their geography, history, and role in cultural mythology, but by the T'ang dynasty in the mid-eighth century certain historiographical and poetic discourses converged to form the "travel account" ( yu-chi ) and later the "travel diary" ( jih-chi ) as vehicles of personal expression and autobiography. These first-person narratives provide rich material for understanding the attitudes of Chinese literati toward place, nature, politics, and the self.The anthology is abundantly illustrated with paintings, portraits, maps, and drawings. Each selection is meticulously translated, carefully annotated, and prefaced by a brief description of the writer's life and work. The entire collection is introduced by an in-depth survey of the rise of Chinese travel writing as a cultural phenomenon. Inscribed Landscapes provides a unique resource for travelers as well as for scholars of Chinese literature, art, and history.   [brief]
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