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: Season of high adventure: Edgar Snow in China 
Author: Thomas, S. Bernard 1921-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | China | Autobiographies and Biographies | Asian Studies
Publisher's Description: In 1928, Edgar Snow (1905-1972) set out to see the world, hoping to make his mark as a travel-adventure writer. Shanghai was to be a mere stopover, but Snow stayed on in China for thirteen more years. The idealistic young Midwesterner became a journalist and ultimately developed close friendships with China's emerging revolutionary leaders. His 1938 classic, Red Star over China , strongly influenced American views of the Chinese Communists and is still in print nearly sixty years later.This biography breaks fresh ground with its unique and extensive use of Snow's diaries of over forty years. These writings convey Snow's private hopes and fears, his moods and motivations. Thomas skillfully links them with Snow's public writings and deeds. By recreating the milieu in which Snow worked in China, Thomas provides a clearer understanding of both the man and his times.Snow came to China devoid of any political agenda or sinological background. He returned home a politically astute China hand and famed journalist-author. His writing had taken on the nature of political action, which resulted in troubled soul-searching that Snow usually confined to his diary. Thomas's portrait of Ed Snow reveals a man caught up in an important historical moment, a man who profoundly influenced, and was influenced by, the events that swirled around him.   [brief]
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Title: Suspended music: chime-bells in the culture of Bronze Age China
Author: Falkenhausen, Lothar von
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | Music | Asian History | China | Art History
Publisher's Description: The Chinese made the world's first bronze chime-bells, which they used to perform ritual music, particularly during the Shang and Zhou dynasties (ca. 1700-221 B.C.). Lothar von Falkenhausen's rich and detailed study reconstructs how the music of these bells - the only Bronze Age instruments that can still be played - may have sounded and how it was conceptualized in theoretical terms. His analysis and discussion of the ritual, political, and technical aspects of this music provide a unique window into ancient Chinese culture.This is the first interdisciplinary perspective on recent archaeological finds that have transformed our understanding of ancient Chinese music. Of great significance to the understanding of Chinese culture in its crucial formative stage, it provides a fresh point of departure for exploring later Asian musical history and offers great possibilities for comparisons with music worldwide.   [brief]
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Title: China's new nationalism: pride, politics, and diplomacy
Author: Gries, Peter Hays 1967-
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Politics | Asian Studies | China | International Relations
Publisher's Description: Three American missiles hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and what Americans view as an appalling and tragic mistake, many Chinese see as a "barbaric" and intentional "criminal act," the latest in a long series of Western aggressions against China. In this book, Peter Hays Gries explores the roles of perception and sentiment in the growth of popular nationalism in China. At a time when the direction of China's foreign and domestic policies have profound ramifications worldwide, Gries offers a rare, in-depth look at the nature of China's new nationalism, particularly as it involves Sino-American and Sino-Japanese relations - two bilateral relations that carry extraordinary implications for peace and stability in the twenty-first century. Through recent Chinese books and magazines, movies, television shows, posters, and cartoons, Gries traces the emergence of this new nationalism. Anti-Western sentiment, once created and encouraged by China's ruling PRC, has been taken up independently by a new generation of Chinese. Deeply rooted in narratives about past "humiliations" at the hands of the West and impassioned notions of Chinese identity, popular nationalism is now undermining the Communist Party's monopoly on political discourse, threatening the regime's stability. As readable as it is closely researched and reasoned, this timely book analyzes the impact that popular nationalism will have on twenty-first century China and the world.   [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 political logic of economic reform in China
Author: Shirk, Susan L
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Politics | Economics and Business | China
Publisher's Description: In the past decade, China was able to carry out economic reform without political reform, while the Soviet Union attempted the opposite strategy. How did China succeed at economic market reform without changing communist rule? Susan Shirk shows that Chinese communist political institutions are more flexible and less centralized than their Soviet counterparts were.Shirk pioneers a rational choice institutional approach to analyze policy-making in a non-democratic authoritarian country and to explain the history of Chinese market reforms from 1979 to the present. Drawing on extensive interviews with high-level Chinese officials, she pieces together detailed histories of economic reform policy decisions and shows how the political logic of Chinese communist institutions shaped those decisions.Combining theoretical ambition with the flavor of on-the-ground policy-making in Beijing, this book is a major contribution to the study of reform in China and other communist countries.   [brief]
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Title: The sinister way: the divine and the demonic in Chinese religious culture
Author: Von Glahn, Richard
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: History | Religion | Asian History | China | Anthropology
Publisher's Description: The most striking feature of Wutong, the preeminent God of Wealth in late imperial China, was the deity's diabolical character. Wutong was perceived not as a heroic figure or paragon of noble qualities but rather as an embodiment of humanity's basest vices, greed and lust, a maleficent demon who preyed on the weak and vulnerable. In The Sinister Way, Richard von Glahn examines the emergence and evolution of the Wutong cult within the larger framework of the historical development of Chinese popular or vernacular religion - as opposed to institutional religions such as Buddhism or Daoism. Von Glahn's study, spanning three millennia, gives due recognition to the morally ambivalent and demonic aspects of divine power within the common Chinese religious culture.   [brief]
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Title: China among equals: the Middle Kingdom and its neighbors, 10th-14th centuries
Author: Rossabi, Morris
Published: University of California Press,  1983
Subjects: Asian Studies | Asian History | Asian Studies | China
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Title: The snow lion and the dragon: China, Tibet, and the Dalai Lama 
Author: Goldstein, Melvyn C
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | Politics | Asian History | China | Cultural Anthropology | Tibet
Publisher's Description: Tensions over the "Tibet Question" - the political status of Tibet - are escalating every day. The Dalai Lama has gained broad international sympathy in his appeals for autonomy from China, yet the Chinese government maintains a hard-line position against it. What is the history of the conflict? Can the two sides come to an acceptable compromise? In this thoughtful analysis, distinguished professor and longtime Tibet analyst Melvyn C. Goldstein presents a balanced and accessible view of the conflict and a proposal for the future.Tibet's political fortunes have undergone numerous vicissitudes since the fifth Dalai Lama first ascended to political power in Tibet in 1642. In this century, a forty-year period of de facto independence following the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 ended abruptly when the Chinese Communists forcibly incorporated Tibet into their new state and began the series of changes that destroyed much of Tibet's traditional social, cultural, and economic system. After the death of Mao in 1976, the rise to power of Deng Xiaoping quickly produced a change in attitude in Beijing and a major initiative to negotiate with the Dalai Lama to solve the conflict. This failed. With the death of Deng Xiaoping, the future of Tibet is more uncertain than ever, and Goldstein argues that the conflict could easily erupt into violence.Drawing upon his deep knowledge of the Tibetan culture and people, Goldstein takes us through the history of Tibet, concentrating on the political and cultural negotiations over the status of Tibet from the turn of the century to the present. He describes the role of Tibet in Chinese politics, the feeble and conflicting responses of foreign governments, overtures and rebuffs on both sides, and the nationalistic emotions that are inextricably entwined in the political debate. Ultimately, he presents a plan for a reasoned compromise, identifying key aspects of the conflict and appealing to the United States to play an active diplomatic role. Clearly written and carefully argued, this book will become the definitive source for anyone seeking an understanding of the Tibet Question during this dangerous turning point in its turbulent history.   [brief]
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Title: Spymaster: Dai Li and the Chinese secret service
Author: Wakeman, Frederic E
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | China | Asian History | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: The most feared man in China, Dai Li, was chief of Chiang Kai-shek's secret service during World War II. This sweeping biography of "China's Himmler," based on recently opened intelligence archives, traces Dai's rise from obscurity as a rural hooligan and Green Gang blood-brother to commander of the paramilitary units of the Blue Shirts and of the dreaded Military Statistics Bureau: the world's largest spy and counterespionage organization of its time. In addition to exposing the inner workings of the secret police, whose death squads, kidnappings, torture, and omnipresent surveillance terrorized critics of the Nationalist regime, Dai Li's personal story opens a unique window on the clandestine history of China's Republican period. This study uncovers the origins of the Cold War in the interactions of Chinese and American special services operatives who cooperated with Dai Li in the resistance to the Japanese invasion in the 1930s and who laid the groundwork for an ongoing alliance against the Communists during the revolution that followed in the 1940s. Frederic Wakeman Jr. illustrates how the anti-Communist activities Dai Li led altered the balance of power within the Chinese Communist Party, setting the stage for Mao Zedong's rise to supremacy. He reveals a complex and remarkable personality that masked a dark presence in modern China - one that still pervades the secret services on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. Wakeman masterfully illuminates a previously little-understood world as he discloses the details of Chinese secret service trade-craft. Anyone interested in the development of modern espionage will be intrigued by Spymaster, which spells out in detail the ways in which the Chinese used their own traditional methods, in addition to adapting foreign ways, to create a modern intelligence service.   [brief]
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Title: To live as long as heaven and earth: a translation and study of Ge Hong's traditions of divine transcendents
Author: Campany, Robert Ford 1959-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Religion | Asian Studies | China | Taoism | Buddhism
Publisher's Description: In late classical and early medieval China, ascetics strove to become transcendents--deathless beings with supernormal powers. Practitioners developed dietetic, alchemical, meditative, gymnastic, sexual, and medicinal disciplines (some of which are still practiced today) to perfect themselves and thus transcend death. Narratives of their achievements circulated widely. Ge Hong (283-343 c.e.) collected and preserved many of their stories in his Traditions of Divine Transcendents, affording us a window onto this extraordinary response to human mortality. Robert Ford Campany's groundbreaking and carefully researched text offers the first complete, critical translation and commentary for this important Chinese religious work, at the same time establishing a method for reconstructing lost texts from medieval China. Clear, exacting, and annotated, the translation comprises over a hundred lively, engaging narratives of individuals deemed to have fought death and won. Additionally, To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth systematically introduces the Chinese quest for transcendence, illuminating a poorly understood tradition that was an important source of Daoist religion and a major social, cultural, and religious phenomenon in its own right.   [brief]
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Title: Early Daoist scriptures
Author: Bokenkamp, Stephen R 1949-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Religion | China | Classical Literature and Language | Taoism
Publisher's Description: For centuries Daoism (Taoism) has played a central role in the development of Chinese thought and civilization, yet to this day only a few of its sacred texts have been translated into English. Now Stephen R. Bokenkamp introduces the reader to ancient scriptures never before published in the West, providing a systematic and easily accessible introduction to early Daoism (c. 2nd-6th C.E.). Representative works from each of the principal Daoist traditions comprise the basic structure of the book, with each chapter accompanied by an introduction that places the material within a historical and cultural context. Included are translations of the earliest Daoist commentary to Laozi's Daode jing (Tao Te Ching); historical documents relating the history of the early Daoist church; a petitioning ritual used to free believers from complaints brought against them by the dead; and two complete scriptures, one on individual meditation practice and another designed to rescue humanity from the terrors of hell through recitation of its powerful charms. In addition, Bokenkamp elucidates the connections Daoism holds with other schools of thought, particularly Confucianism and Buddhism.This book provides a much-needed introduction to Daoism for students of religion and is a welcome addition for scholars wishing to explore Daoist sacred literature. It serves as an overview to every aspect of early Daoist tradition and all the seminal practices which have helped shape the religion as it exists today.   [brief]
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Title: China reporting: an oral history of American journalism in the 1930's and 1940's 
Author: Mackinnon, Stephen R
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | China | Asian History | Print Media
Publisher's Description: China Reporting documents the gathering of American journalists, diplomats and China scholars, "old China hands" all, who met in 1982 to discuss their experience in China.
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Title: Rural China takes off: institutional foundations of economic reform 
Author: Oi, Jean Chun
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Politics | China | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: In this incisive analysis of one of the most spectacular economic breakthroughs in the Deng era, Jean C. Oi shows how and why Chinese rural-based industry has become the fastest growing economic sector not just in China but in the world. Oi argues that decollectivization and fiscal decentralization provided party officials of the localities - counties, townships, and villages - with the incentives to act as entrepreneurs and to promote rural industrialization in many areas of the Chinese countryside. As a result, the corporatism practiced by local officials has become effective enough to challenge the centrality of the national state.Dealing not only with the political setting of rural industrial development, Oi's original and strongly argued study also makes a broader contribution to conceptualizations of corporatism in political theory. Oi writes provocatively about property rights and principal-agent relationships and shows the complex financial incentives that underpin and strengthen the growth in local state corporatism and shape its evolution. This book will be essential for those interested in Chinese politics, comparative politics, and communist and post-communist systems.   [brief]
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Title: Contesting citizenship in urban China: peasant migrants, the state, and the logic of the market
Author: Solinger, Dorothy J
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Politics | China | Anthropology | Labor Studies | Demography | Asian History
Publisher's Description: Post-Mao market reforms in China have led to a massive migration of rural peasants toward the cities. Officially denied residency in the cities, the over 80 million members of this "floating population" provide labor for the economic boom in urban areas but are largely denied government benefits that city residents receive. In an incisive and original study that goes against the grain of much of the current discussion on citizenship, Dorothy J. Solinger challenges the notion that markets necessarily promote rights and legal equality in any direct or linear fashion.   [brief]
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Title: The moon and the zither: the story of the western wing
Author: Wang, Shifu fl. 1295-1307
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Literature | China | Literature in Translation
Publisher's Description: China's most important love comedy, Wang Shifu's Xixiangji , or The Story of the Western Wing , is a rollicking play that chronicles the adventures of the star-crossed lovers Oriole and Student Zhang. Since its appearance in the thirteenth century, it has enjoyed unparalleled popularity. The play has given rise to innumerable sequels, parodies, and rewritings; it has influenced countless later plays, short stories, and novels and has played a crucial role in the development of drama criticism. This translation of the full and complete text of the earliest extant version is available in paperback for the first time. The editors' introduction will inform students of Chinese cultural and literary traditions.   [brief]
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Title: Minor heresies, major departures: a China mission boyhood
Author: Espey, John Jenkins 1913-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Asian Studies | China | Literature | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: An American boy, son of Presbyterian missionaries, was born in Shanghai early in this century. The boy lived two lives, one within the pious church compound, the other along the canal and in the alleys of a traditional Chinese city. There he faced the alley brats' Lady Bandit, heard the shrill screams of a child's foot-binding, learned rank obscenities from passing boatmen, and, while still in short pants, chewed Sen-Sen and ogled snake-charmers in the old Native City. He sailed up the Yangtze to attend boarding school, and along with his Boy Scout patrol, met Chiang Kai-shek. And when John Espey grew up, he wrote about his years in China.This memoir is the story of those years, and while it is a wry, affectionate account, it also conveys an often overlooked picture of China in the years before communism. Seen through the eyes of a child, the interplay of religion, commerce, and American colonialism that took place during this period is revealed more tellingly - and more lightheartedly - than in many an analysis by an "old China hand."Espey's bent is to use a "Chinese" approach to his subject, that is, to hide a second meaning within his words, to speak in parables. This he learned from both his single-minded missionary father and the family's Chinese cook. The result is that the reader of Minor Heresies, Major Departures will learn a great deal about the Pacific Rim while having a rollicking good time.   [brief]
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Title: Re-drawing boundaries: work, households, and gender in China 
Author: Entwisle, Barbara
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Sociology | China | Gender Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Asian History
Publisher's Description: Representing the culmination of more than a decade of empirical research in post-Mao China, this collection of essays explores changes in the nature of work in relation to changes in households, migration patterns, and gender roles during an era of economic reform. The contributors are respected scholars in fields that range from history and anthropology to demography and sociology. They use a variety of data and diverse approaches to gauge the impact of new economic opportunities on Chinese households and to show how the rise of the private sector, the industrialization of the countryside, and increased migration have affected Chinese workers and workplaces. The collection also asks us to consider how gender roles have been redefined by the economic and institutional changes that arose from post-Mao market reform.   [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: Chinese history in economic perspective 
Author: Rawski, Thomas G 1943-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | Asian History | China | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: The essays assembled here represent a turning point in the study of Chinese economic history. Previous work has emphasized the institutional and social bases of economic change. These studies break new ground, bringing Western economic theory to the study of China's economy since the seventeenth cen . . . [more]
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