Title: A flourishing Yin: gender in China's medical history, 960-1665
Author: Furth, Charlotte
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | Asian History | Asian Studies | Women's Studies | China | Medicine
Publisher's Description: This book brings the study of gender to Chinese medicine and in so doing contextualizes Chinese medicine in history. It examines the rich but neglected tradition of fuke , or medicine for women, over the seven hundred years between the Song and the end of the Ming dynasty. Using medical classics, popular handbooks, case histories, and belles lettres , it explores evolving understandings of fertility and menstruation, gestation and childbirth, sexuality, and gynecological disorders.Furth locates medical practice in the home, where knowledge was not the monopoly of the learned physician and male doctors had to negotiate the class and gender boundaries of everyday life. Women as healers and as patients both participated in the dominant medical culture and sheltered a female sphere of expertise centered on, but not limited to, gestation and birth. Ultimately, her analysis of the relationship of language, text, and practice reaches beyond her immediate subject to address theoretical problems that arise when we look at the epistemological foundations of our knowledge of the body and its history.   [brief]
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Title: Fountain of fortune: money and monetary policy in China, 1000-1700
Author: Von Glahn, Richard
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | China | Asian History | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: In this study, the first of its kind in the English language, Richard von Glahn offers a definitive analysis of the economic, political, and social history of money and monetary policy during the Song, Yuan, Ming, and early Qing dynasties. Von Glahn presents a revisionist interpretation of previously held ideas about the effect of money and international trade in bullion on the rise and decline of dynastic power in China.Von Glahn's study also links Chinese monetary history to changing trends in money use and trade in gold and silver in Asia, Europe, and the Western Hemisphere. China's shift to a silver economy had a decisive influence not only on the growth of a market economy in China, but also on the formation of a global economy in the early modern era.Exhaustively researched from original archival sources, Fountain of Fortune critically examines the many facets of China's domestic and foreign monetary policy: the foundations of Chinese monetary theory; mining and minting of bronze coin; the rise and fall of paper currency; and the transition to silver bullion as the monetary standard. Providing keen insight into the economic and social history of Chinese society, this volume will serve as an indispensable reference for the reader seeking to understand China's distinctive history and its relationship to the world at large.   [brief]
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Title: From friend to comrade: the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, 1920-1927
Author: Van de Ven, Hans J
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | China | Politics
Publisher's Description: Scholars have long held that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was a centralized organization from its founding in 1921. In a departure from that view, From Friend to Comrade demonstrates how the CCP began as a group of study societies, only evolving into a mass Marxist-Leninist party by 1927.Hans J. van de Ven's study is based on party documents of the 1920s that have only recently become available, as well as the writings of a wide range of Chinese communists. He analyzes the party's difficulty in building a cohesive organization firmly rooted in Chinese society. While past scholarship has emphasized the influence of Soviet communism on the CCP, van de Ven stresses the thinking and actions of Chinese communists themselves, placing their struggle in the context of China's political history and highly complex society.   [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: From the soil, the foundations of Chinese society: a translation of Fei Xiaotong's Xiangtu Zhongguo ; with an introduction and epilogue by Gary G. Hamilton and Wang Zheng
Author: Fei, Xiaotong
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Sociology | China | Asian History
Publisher's Description: This classic text by Fei Xiaotong, China's finest social scientist, was first published in 1947 and is Fei's chief theoretical statement about the distinctive characteristics of Chinese society. Written in Chinese from a Chinese point of view for a Chinese audience, From the Soil describes the contrasting organizational principles of Chinese and Western societies, thereby conveying the essential features of both. Fei shows how these unique features reflect and are reflected in the moral and ethical characters of people in these societies. This profound, challenging book is both succinct and accessible. In its first complete English-language edition, it is likely to have a wide impact on Western social theorists.Gary G. Hamilton and Wang Zheng's translation captures Fei's jargonless, straightforward style of writing. Their introduction describes Fei's education and career as a sociologist, the fate of his writings on and off the Mainland, and the sociological significance of his analysis. The translators' epilogue highlights the social reforms for China that Fei drew from his analysis and advocated in a companion text written in the same period.   [brief]
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Title: Golden inches: the China memoir of Grace Service 
Author: Service, Grace 1879-1954
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | Autobiographies and Biographies | Christianity | Asian History | China
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Title: Heritage of China: contemporary perspectives on Chinese civilization
Author: Ropp, Paul S 1944-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | China | Asian History
Publisher's Description: The thirteen essays in this volume, all by experts in the field of Chinese studies, reflect the diversity of approaches scholars follow in the study of China's past. Together they reveal the depth and vitality of Chinese civilization and demonstrate how an understanding of traditional China can enri . . . [more]
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Title: High culture fever: politics, aesthetics, and ideology in Deng's China 
Author: Wang, Jing 1950-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Asian Studies | Asian Literature | Asian History | Politics | China
Publisher's Description: Jing Wang offers the first overview of the feverish decade of the 1980s in China, from early reexaminations of Maoism through the crackdown in Tiananmen Square. Wang's energetic, creative, and highly intelligent take on Chinese culture provides a broad portrait of the post-revolutionary era and a provocative inquiry into the nature of Chinese modernity.In seven linked essays, the author examines the cultural dynamics that have given rise to the epochal discourse. She traces the Chinese Marxists' short debate over "socialist alienation" and examines the various schools of thought - Li Zehou and the Marxist Reconstruction of Confucianism, the neo-Confucian Revivalists, and the Enlightenment School - that came into play in the Culture Fever. She also critiques the controversial mini-series Yellow River Elegy . In mapping out China's post-revolutionary aesthetics, Wang introduces the debate over "pseudo-modernism," refutes the pseudo-proposition of "Chinese postmodernism," and looks at the dawning of popular culture in the 1990s.This book delivers a ten-year intertwined history of Chinese intellectuals, writers, literary critics, and cultural critics that gives us a deeper understanding of the China of the 1980s, the 1990s, and beyond.   [brief]
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Title: Huang Di nei jing su wen: nature, knowledge, imagery in an ancient Chinese medical text, with an appendix, The doctrine of the five periods and six qi in the Huang Di nei jing su wen
Author: Unschuld, Paul U. (Paul Ulrich) 1943-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | Asian Studies | Medical Anthropology | China | History of Medicine
Publisher's Description: The Huang Di nei jing su wen, known familiarly as the Su wen, is a seminal text of ancient Chinese medicine, yet until now there has been no comprehensive, detailed analysis of its development and contents. At last Paul U. Unschuld offers entry into this still-vital artifact of China's cultural and intellectual past. Unschuld traces the history of the Su wen to its origins in the final centuries B.C.E., when numerous authors wrote short medical essays to explain the foundations of human health and illness on the basis of the newly developed vessel theory. He examines the meaning of the title and the way the work has been received throughout Chinese medical history, both before and after the eleventh century when the text as it is known today emerged. Unschuld's survey of the contents includes illuminating discussions of the yin-yang and five-agents doctrines, the perception of the human body and its organs, qi and blood, pathogenic agents, concepts of disease and diagnosis, and a variety of therapies, including the new technique of acupuncture. An extensive appendix, furthermore, offers a detailed introduction to the complicated climatological theories of Wu yun liu qi ("five periods and six qi"), which were added to the Su wen by Wang Bing in the Tang era. In an epilogue, Unschuld writes about the break with tradition and innovative style of thought represented by the Su wen. For the first time, health care took the form of "medicine," in that it focused on environmental conditions, climatic agents, and behavior as causal in the emergence of disease and on the importance of natural laws in explaining illness. Unschuld points out that much of what we surmise about the human organism is simply a projection, reflecting dominant values and social goals, and he constructs a hypothesis to explain the formation and acceptance of basic notions of health and disease in a given society. Reading the Su wen, he says, not only offers a better understanding of the roots of Chinese medicine as an integrated aspect of Chinese civilization; it also provides a much needed starting point for discussions of the differences and parallels between European and Chinese ways of dealing with illness and the risk of early death.   [brief]
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Title: In one's own shadow: an ethnographic account of the condition of post-reform rural China
Author: Liu, Xin 1957-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Anthropology | China
Publisher's Description: China underwent a dramatic social transformation in the last decade of the twentieth century. This powerful ethnographic study of one community focuses on the logic of everyday practice in post-reform rural China. Enriched with many vivid anecdotes describing life in the village of Zhaojiahe in northwestern China, In One's Own Shadow skillfully analyzes the changes and continuities marking the recent history of this region and highlights the broader implications for the way we understand Chinese modernity. Liu's narrative provides a wonderfully evocative exploration of many domains of everyday life such as kinship and marriage traditions, food systems, ceremonial celebrations, social relations, and village politics. He brings to life many of the personalities and customs of Zhaojiahe as he presents the villagers' strategies to modernize in an environment of scarce resources and a discredited cultural heritage. This accessibly written ethnography will be an essential contribution to the anthropology of China.   [brief]
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Title: The inner quarters: marriage and the lives of Chinese women in the Sung period
Author: Ebrey, Patricia Buckley 1947-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Asian History | China | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: The Sung Dynasty (960-1279) was a paradoxical era for Chinese women. This was a time when footbinding spread, and Confucian scholars began to insist that it was better for a widow to starve than to remarry. Yet there were also improvements in women's status in marriage and property rights. In this thoroughly original work, one of the most respected scholars of premodern China brings to life what it was like to be a woman in Sung times, from having a marriage arranged, serving parents-in-law, rearing children, and coping with concubines, to deciding what to do if widowed.Focusing on marriage, Patricia Buckley Ebrey views family life from the perspective of women. She argues that the ideas, attitudes, and practices that constituted marriage shaped women's lives, providing the context in which they could interpret the opportunities open to them, negotiate their relationships with others, and accommodate or resist those around them.Ebrey questions whether women's situations actually deteriorated in the Sung, linking their experiences to widespread social, political, economic, and cultural changes of this period. She draws from advice books, biographies, government documents, and medical treatises to show that although the family continued to be patrilineal and patriarchal, women found ways to exert their power and authority. No other book explores the history of women in pre-twentieth-century China with such energy and depth.   [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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Title: Is Taiwan Chinese?: the impact of culture, power, and migration on changing identities
Author: Brown, Melissa J
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Anthropology | Asian Studies | China | Sociology
Publisher's Description: The "one China" policy officially supported by the People's Republic of China, the United States, and other countries asserts that there is only one China and Taiwan is a part of it. The debate over whether the people of Taiwan are Chinese or independently Taiwanese is, Melissa J. Brown argues, a matter of identity: Han ethnic identity, Chinese national identity, and the relationship of both of these to the new Taiwanese identity forged in the 1990s. In a unique comparison of ethnographic and historical case studies drawn from both Taiwan and China, Brown's book shows how identity is shaped by social experience - not culture and ancestry, as is commonly claimed in political rhetoric.   [brief]
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Title: Khubilai Khan: his life and times
Author: Rossabi, Morris
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Asian Studies | History | Asian History | China | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: Living from 1215 to 1294 Khubilai Khan is one of history's most renowned figures. Here for the first time is an English-language biography of the man. Morris Rossabi draws on sources from a variety of East Asian, Middle Eastern, and European languages as he focuses on the life and times of the great . . . [more]
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Title: Land without ghosts: Chinese impressions of America from the mid-nineteenth century to the present
Author: Arkush, R. David 1940-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Politics | United States History | China | American Studies | Californian and Western History
Publisher's Description: Americans have long been fascinated with European views of the United States. The many Chinese commentaries on America, however, have remained largely unavailable to the English reader. Land without Ghosts presents for the first time selections on America from Chinese writings over the last 150 year . . . [more]
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Title: The last emperors: a social history of Qing imperial institutions
Author: Rawski, Evelyn Sakakida
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | Anthropology | China | Asian History
Publisher's Description: The Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) was the last and arguably the greatest of the conquest dynasties to rule China. Its rulers, Manchus from the north, held power for three centuries despite major cultural and ideological differences with the Han majority. In this book, Evelyn Rawski offers a bold new interpretation of the remarkable success of this dynasty, arguing that it derived not from the assimilation of the dominant Chinese culture, as has previously been believed, but rather from an artful synthesis of Manchu leadership styles with Han Chinese policies.   [brief]
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Title: Learning to be a sage: selections from the Conversations of Master Chu, arranged topically
Author: Zhu, Xi 1130-1200
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Philosophy | Asian Studies | China | Intellectual History
Publisher's Description: Students and teachers of Chinese history and philosophy will not want to miss Daniel Gardner's accessible translation of the teachings of Chu Hsi (1130-1200) - a luminary of the Confucian tradition who dominated Chinese intellectual life for centuries. Homing in on a primary concern of our own time, Gardner focuses on Chu Hsi's passionate interest in education and its importance to individual development.For hundreds of years, every literate person in China was familiar with Chu Hsi's teachings. They informed the curricula of private academies and public schools and became the basis of the state's prestigious civil service examinations. Nor was Chu's influence limited to China. In Korea and Japan as well, his teachings defined the terms of scholarly debate and served as the foundation for state ideology.Chu Hsi was convinced that through education anyone could learn to be fully moral and thus travel the road to sagehood. Throughout his life, he struggled with the philosophical questions underlying education: What should people learn? How should they go about learning? What enables them to learn? What are the aims and the effects of learning?Part One of Learning to Be a Sage examines Chu Hsi's views on learning and how he arrived at them. Part Two presents a translation of the chapters devoted to learning in the Conversations of Master Chu .   [brief]
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Title: The lure of the modern: writing modernism in semicolonial China, 1917-1937
Author: Shi, Shumei 1961-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Literature | China | Asian Literature | Asian History | Cultural Anthropology | Postcolonial Studies | Japan | Comparative Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism
Publisher's Description: Shu-mei Shih's study is the first book in English to offer a comprehensive account of Chinese literary modernism from Republican China. In The Lure of the Modern, Shih argues for the contextualization of Chinese modernism in the semicolonial cultural and political formation of the time. Engaging critically with theories of modernism, postcoloniality, and global and local cultural studies, Shih analyzes pivotal issues - such as psychoanalysis, decadence, Orientalism, Occidentalism, semicolonial subjectivity, cosmopolitanism, and urbanism - that were mediated by Japanese as well as Western modernisms.   [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: The Manchurian myth: nationalism, resistance and collaboration in modern China
Author: Mitter, Rana 1969-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: History | China | Japan
Publisher's Description: A powerful element in twentieth-century Chinese politics has been the myth of Chinese resistance to Japan's seizure of Manchuria in 1931. Investigating the shifting alliances of key players in that event, Rana Mitter traces the development of the narrative of resistance to the occupation and shows how it became part of China's political consciousness, enduring even today. After Japan's September 1931 military strike leading to a takeover of the Northeast, the Chinese responded in three major ways: collaboration, resistance in exile, and resistance on the ground. What motives prompted some Chinese to collaborate, others to resist? What were conditions like under the Japanese? Through careful reading of Chinese and Japanese sources, particularly local government records, newspapers, and journals published both inside and outside occupied Manchuria, Mitter sheds important new light on these questions.   [brief]
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