ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This volume is the product of a series of activities jointly sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies/Social Science Research Council (ACLS/ SSRC) and the Academia Sinica Committee on Cooperation in Humanities and Social Sciences, and organized by the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. The objective is to capture the results of new scholarship on Chinese experience in the first half of the twentieth century, which has been carried out in the fields of history, literature, political science, anthropology, and sociology, among other disciplines. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the ACLS/SSRC Joint Committee on Chinese Studies, which made it possible for a planning workshop to be held in Monterey, California, in October 1993. Discussions at the workshop led to the organization of a conference that took place in June 1995 in Oakland, California, with the funding support of the Academia Sinica's Republic of China Committee for Scientific and Scholarly Cooperation with the United States, for which we are grateful.
The conference was organized around four modules: the cities and the countryside, the rise of the nation, modernity and the practices of everyday life, and war and violence. David Strand, Sherman Cochran, Leo Lee, and Paul Pickowicz prepared review papers for the discussion of these modules. The essays collected in this volume reflect the results of intense discussions over a period of three days. The authors wish to acknowledge the critical and constructive comments made by Professors Ch'en Yung-fa, Chang Yu-fa, Yen-p'ing Hao, Cho-yun Hsu, Philip Kuhn, Jonathan Spence, Vivienne Shue, Weiming Tu, and Ying-shih Yu.
Drs. Herbert Ma and Cho-yun Hsu of the Academia Sinica and Stanley Katz and Jason Parker of the ACLS offered invaluable guidance and support for the project, for which we are grateful.
Joan Kask and Elinor Levine of the Institute of East Asian Studies of the University of California at Berkeley coordinated the workshop and the conference respectively.
Sheila Levine of the University of California Press has been unfailingly astute with her editorial comments and encouraging with her support. We are grateful for her guidance in steering the project through the final process of publication.