A Historical Pattern: The Imperial Mode

1. Western Perceptions of China from the Late Sixteenth Century to the Present, Jonathan Spence 2. Early Civilization in China: Reflections on How it Became Chinese, David. N. Keightley 3. The Evolution of Government in China, Jack L. Dull 4. Sage Kings and Laws in the Chinese and Greek Traditions, Karen Turner 5. The Confucian Tradition in Chinese History, Tu Wei-ming 6. Religious Traditions in Chinese Civilization, T. H. Barrett 7. Science and Medicine in Chinese History, Nathan Sivin 8. Women, Marriage and the Family in Chinese History, Patricia Ebrey 9. Chinese Economic History in Comparative Perspective, Albert Feuerwerker 10. Modern Chinese Social History in Comparative Perspective, William T. Rowe 11. Chinese Art and its Impact on the West, Michael Sullivan 12. Poetry in the Chinese Tradition, Stephen Owen 13. The Distinctive Art of Chinese Fiction, Paul S. Ropp

Reviewed by: Military Culture in Imperial China Peter Worthing Military Culture in Imperial China. Edited by Nicola Di Cosmo. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009. 456 pp. $45.00 (cloth). Like many edited volumes, this book has its origins in an academic conference. In 2001 a group of scholars specializing in Chinese military [End Page 500] history convened at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, and offered their views on the topic "Military Culture in Chinese History." The conference produced papers dealing with many aspects of Chinese military culture, fourteen of which appear as chapters in this book. In his introduction, Nicola Di Cosmo provides a multifaceted definition of "military culture," which can include the system of conduct and behavior that regulated the actions of members of the military, the cultural forces that shaped strategic decision making of both civil and military elites, the values and traditions that determined a society's willingness to engage in war, and the presence of a literary or aesthetic tradition that deals with military events and personalities. In short, the essays, which range chronologically from the Zhou to the Qing, explore the manner in which the wu (military) has influenced the wen (civil) in Chinese history, and vice versa. The efforts of the editor and the contributors are successful for multiple reasons. First, several of the chapters shed important light on the issue of Chinese military history and culture, in particular by breaking down traditional barriers between the cultures of China's civil and military elites. Second, each author carefully links his or her research to the editor's introduction and the major themes of the work. This reflects an excellent job of editing and lends this collection of essays a coherence and continuity that is sometimes lacking in edited volumes. Third, while some regard the study of military history as an archaic tradition dominated by a "swords and saddles" approach, this volume reveals the broad research agendas of the contributors, whose studies of China's military tradition touch on literature, economics, politics, foreign relations, religion, and the law. A few examples will suffice to demonstrate the skillful and diverse manner in which the authors explore these definitions of military culture. In his chapter "Law and the Military in Early China," Robin D. S. Yates examines the close connection between the military and the development of civil law in China. Indeed, military officials typically meted out punishment to civilian transgressors as the military doubled as a police force. Dating back to the Warring States era, intellectuals and officials borrowed methods designed to promote military discipline and order among the increasingly large military units of the time and applied them to the growing populations of their states. The Legalists who built the powerful Qin state, which would unify China in 221 b.c., borrowed heavily from the military when devising methods to control the population at large. Well-known systems of collective responsibility and mutual protection, such as Lianzuo and Baojia, had their origins in military law. A period of important change on many fronts, [End Page 501] the Warring States era saw the expansion of military law into the realm of the administrative law of civil officials. Yates sees strong continuity throughout imperial China, with military law deeply embedded in civil law all the way through the Qing. David A. Graff's contribution, "Narrative Maneuvers: The Representation of Battle in Tang Historical Writing," takes a different approach by analyzing Tang dynasty texts in order to understand the attitudes of the men who wrote these histories. Sifting through battle descriptions from a variety of literary sources, Graff determines that the authors of these works, Confucian scholars with no military experience, showed scant interest in tactics, weapons, formations, or the experiences of the soldiers. Instead, they extolled the intelligence of the victorious commanders and attributed their success to cunning, craftiness, and ability to outsmart the enemy. According to Graff, the pervasive emphasis in Tang sources on the intellectual capabilities of the commander, rather than the technical details of combat, reflects in part the weight of literary tradition in China, but also the Confucian preference for the intellectual and abstract over the specialized skills of...

China's national policy formulation undergone economic transformation and shaped the making of policies in promotion of private business and stock market regulation. China's distinctive process of central-local interaction in policy generation is one of its core strengths in reforming its economy.

China formally adopted the policy of reform and opening up to the outside world in 1978. Since then, both economic practice and economic theory in China have undergone profound changes, and the academic study of modern Chinese economic history has been encouraged to expand its research horizons under the rubric of “liberating the mind and seeking truth in the facts”. A number of important monographs and essays have been produced and the study of modern Chinese economic history has entered a flourishing period. Current research focuses on two major topics: China's New Democratic economy and the planned economy during the period 1949–78; and, China's socialist market economy from 1978–2006. The study of these two areas shows numerous interconnections, points of comparison and causal links. The many and important lessons to be drawn from these studies both exhibit Chinese characteristics and have universal implications.

Book Review| May 01 1982 Chung-kuo chin-tai ching-chi-shih [Modern] Chinese economic history] Chung-kuo chin-tai ching-chi-shih [Modern] Chinese economic history]. 2 vols. By the Modern Chinese Economic History Compilation Group, Department of Political Economy, Chinese People's University. Peking: Jen-min ch'upan'she, 1979. 335; 266 pp. Tables. N.p. William T. Rowe William T. Rowe University of North Carolina, Charlotte Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Asian Studies (1982) 41 (3): 582–584. https://doi.org/10.2307/2055262 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation William T. Rowe; Chung-kuo chin-tai ching-chi-shih [Modern] Chinese economic history]. Journal of Asian Studies 1 May 1982; 41 (3): 582–584. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/2055262 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsJournal of Asian Studies Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 19821982 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Naitō Konan’s hypothesis on the “Tang-Song transition” was first expressed in lecture notes from his 1909 class on modern Chinese history at Kyoto University and, then, expounded in subsequent works such as “A General View of the Tang and Song Dynasties” and “Modern Chinese History.” The theory systematically outlines that an evolutionary medieval to modern transition occurred in Chinese society during the period between the Tang and the Song dynasties, focusing in particular on the areas of politics/government, the economy, and culture. Political change is regarded as the core metric, demonstrated in concentrated form by the government’s transformation from an aristocratic to a monarchical autocratic system alongside a rise in the status and position of the common people. The “Tang-Song transition theory,” underpinned theoretically by a cultural-historical perspective, advocates for a periodization of Chinese history based on the stages and characteristics of China’s cultural development, which is also attributed to cultural shifts, downward to the commoner class from a culture monopolized by the aristocracy during the period between the Tang and Song, with concomitant changes in society. For over a century since it was first proposed, the “Tang-Song transition theory” has had far-reaching influence in Chinese, Japanese, and Western academic circles, continuing to be lively and vigorous even now. We might be able to find the cause in its originality and liberality, which leave significant room for later thinkers’ continued adherence and development or criticism and falsification and continue to inspire new questions. Naitō’s proposal was also intimately connected to his observations of China’s circumstances in the late Qing dynasty and early Republican period, which also provided a “sample of the era” regarding realistic approaches to historical studies.

I have proposed an alternative analytical framework to observe modernization in general and Chinese modernization in particular from a perspective emphasizing the institutions and institutional changes of a nation’s domestic organizational structure. Labor allocation patterns (LAPs) have been proposed and used as the indicators for this analytical approach. After a brief review of LAPs in the two-thousand-year history of China and an examination of the LAPs in contemporary China, I have come to the point of conclusion. Section I attempts an assessment of the analytical framework proposed and used in this book. Its explanatory power and limits will be discussed based on its application in the Chinese case. Section II briefly summarizes the main findings of this book. The institutional features and the comprehensive institutional changes of the Chinese domestic organizational structure will be briefly revisited and explained. These findings may help us to narrow the currently tremendous uncertainties in China studies. Section III revisits some of the questions posted in Chapter 4 and speculates about the future of Chinese modernization, based on the findings of this study.

Reviewed by: Railroads and the Transformation of China by Elisabeth Köll Tim Wright t.wright@sheffield.ac.uk Elisabeth Köll . Railroads and the Transformation of China. Harvard Studies in Business History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. 396 pp. $39.95 (cloth). Elisabeth Köll's book is the most comprehensive institutional history of China's railroads to date. As such it makes important contributions on many issues in modern Chinese history. In many cases, useful parallels can be drawn with the shipping industry as discussed in Anne Reinhardt's recent book. 1 The book is organized basically along chronological lines, but the focus on a specific period often also comes with a particular thematic emphasis. Part 1 on the early history of the railroads concentrates first of all on foreign involvement and the semicolonial aspects of the industry, before going on to examine institutional transition during the early Republic. Part 2 deals with the Republican period up to 1928 and is the only one with a predominantly economic focus, examining freight traffic in chapter 3 and passenger traffic in chapter 4. Köll argues that the railroads' main impact was on agriculture rather than industry, though coal mining might have been an exception to that. Part 3 discusses the period between 1928 and 1949, with an emphasis on the development of technical education and a skilled workforce (something that was paralleled in shipping 2 ), and then looks at the role of the railroads during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The final part briefly covers the period of the People's Republic, and chapter 7 highlights institutional change and continuity after 1949 and railroad construction in the 1950s. The last substantive chapter, before a brief conclusion, follows the story of the railroads during the political upheavals of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s before touching on the development of the high-speed rail network and the partial corporatization of the railroads in the 2010s. Köll addresses many important issues in this book, and a brief review can only allude to a few of her arguments. Like Reinhardt, 3 she emphasizes (21, 38) that any opposition to the development of modern transport in China in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries represented not a Luddite rejection of modernity but rather specific political and economic concerns: identification of gravesite or fengshui issues in the context of railroad construction was most often a way of squeezing more compensation out of the company. In fact, land acquisition for the railroads proceeded relatively smoothly, and Köll is skeptical of reports that the farmers were forced to sell at inadequate prices. Second, at least up to 1949, the author highlights the regional aspects of the system. In economic and social terms, any transformation brought about by the railroads was limited to a particular region, and China was a long way from having a national system. In institutional terms (the main focus of the book), regionalism was reflected in the powerful position of the regional railroad bureaus, whose distinctiveness originated in the different foreign powers involved in the construction of the different railroads. For all the centralizing efforts of the 1930s, or even after 1949, the entrenched power of the bureaus led to regional interests often being prioritized. Even after corporatization in 2013, the bureaus remained important players. [End Page E-12] In relation to the Second Sino-Japanese War, the book makes two arguments that contradict the standard narratives promoted in the People's Republic of China. Because of the importance of the railroads to their plans, the Japanese in fact treated railroad workers well, in terms of both wages and conditions. There were patriotic feelings among the workers, but any sabotage of railway transport that took place was the work of Nationalist much more than Communist guerrillas. A final theme that emerges from the book, though less explicitly, is how frequently the railroads were rocked by political or military upheavals: it was really only from as late as the 1980s that they were able to develop free from such noneconomic shocks. The potential reader should be aware of the choices made by the author in her research, choices clearly explained and...

Beijing (also known as Peking in older romanization of Mandarin Chinese) is the current capital city of the People’s Republic of China. It is one of the six great ancient capitals of China, the other five being Xi’an, Luoyang, Kaifeng, Nanjing, and Hangzhou. Given the long Chinese history and compared to other ancient capitals, Beijing is relatively young. It served as the capitals for the last three imperial dynasties, the Yuan (1279–1368), the Ming (1368–1644), and the Qing (1644–1911), as well as the Beiyang period of the Republic China (1912–1927). During the 10th to 13th centuries when the north and south were split, it served as capital for the northern regimes of the Liao and Jin empires, both of which were founded by non-Chinese-speaking peoples, the Khitan and the Jurchen respectively. Before the unification of China by the First Emperor of Qin in 221 bce, the capital for the Yan state of the Spring and Autumn period (771–476 bce) and the Warring States period (476–221 bce) was also located in the Beijing area. During the period from the Qin dynasty to the Five dynasties (3rd century bce to 10th century ce), the area hosted the seats for prefecture-level local government under various names. Beijing means the Northern Capital. The current Beijing city was developed from the Ming-Qing imperial capital of the same name. The city was known by many different names in different historical periods. According to the Nine Provinces (Jiuzhou) division of the Xia and Shang dynasties (21st–11th centuries bce) in the Book of Documents (Shangshu), one of the Confucian classics that contains some of the oldest historical records of ancient China, Beijing belonged to the province of Youzhou. During the Zhou periods (11th–3rd centuries bce), it was known as Ji or Yandu, the Capital of the Yan State. As a prefecture-level city, it was known as Ji in the Qin dynasty (221–206 bce), Guangyang in the Han dynasty (202 bce–220 ce), and Yan during the Western Jin and the Age of Disunion period (220–589). The area became the Zhuo county during the Sui dynasty (581–618) and the You prefecture during the Tang dynasty (618–906). It was called Nanjing, or the Southern Capital, in the Liao dynasty (907–1125), and Zhongdu, or the Middle Capital, in the Jin dynasty (1115–1234). Under the Mongol rule of the Yuan dynasty, the city, called Dadu, the Great Capital, became the capital of an enormous empire unifying the north and the south for the first time. During the early years of the Ming dynasty from 1368 to 1402 and during the late years of the Republic period from 1928 to 1949 when the city was not the national capital, it was called Beiping. Like the name, the specific location of the city also kept changing in history. The current location of the central city was anchored during the Yuan dynasty with a minor shift to the south during the Ming reconstruction. The history of architecture in Beijing can be traced back to the prehistoric time. Archaeologists have discovered tombs and remains of dwellings from about ten thousand years ago. Extant buildings in the Beijing area, however, are no earlier than the Liao dynasty. Literatures on architecture of Beijing are mostly dispersed in books on Chinese architecture in general or of a specific dynasty, period, regime, type, or religious tradition, which are not included in this bibliography. Books written specifically on the architecture of Beijing concentrate on the late imperial to the modern period. Some of them are typologically focused, for instance, on Buddhist temples; others are case studies on significant buildings, complexes, or urban elements, for instance, the Forbidden City, Chang’an Avenue, Tiananmen Square, etc. Some historical documents, for instance the local gazetteers, contain important information on the architecture and urban space of Beijing, which are also included in the following lists. Some specialized studies on the folkways and traditional urban life of Beijing are closely related to architecture and the urban space, for instance the traditional theater and the hutong life, which are classified under the last category.

Just a few years after the overthrow of China's last imperial dynasty, the Qing dynasty loyalist Chen Botao 陳伯陶 (1855–1930) assembled scholars at the Terrace of the Song Emperors 宋王臺 (Song Wang Tai, or Sung Wong Toi) in Hong Kong Kowloon to compose and recite poetry as a tribute to the adherents of the Song dynasty 宋 (960–1279) that sought refuge in Kowloon more than six centuries before. The poetic odes to Sung Wong Toi, compiled in the 1917 collection Song tai qiu chang 宋臺秋唱 (Autumn Chants on the Terrace of the Song Emperors), construct a dialectical tension between Kowloon as a place of exile in Chinese history and the lyrical symbolism of its representation in the compilation's classical poetry. More than merely a commemoration to a long-lost past, Chen's efforts instigated a collective response from loyalist scholars that created a literary space in early republican-era Hong Kong for them to express their commitment to the fallen dynasty and at the same time defined the historical and cultural significance of place and history in Hong Kong Kowloon. In the context of the British colonial administration, these scholars' historical narratives and lyrical poetics effectively nurtured a discourse on loyalism in Hong Kong literature.

The Han dynasty was an imperial dynasty in Chinese history that had been interacted with the Xiongnu (), a nomadic tribal confederation which was mainly active in the northwest region near Hans boundaries in Eurasian continent, for four hundred years. Han Shu () is a historical record that comprehensively documents Han history, and Han Shu's recordings of the Xiongnu have been an essential source for Xiongnu studies. However, though there are concise and concrete facts and descriptions in the text of Han Shu, given the nationality of the author, Ban Gu (), bias that come from the imagination of Xiongnu that Han had and the reality of Han Dynasty inevitably exists in the text. Therefore, a deeper understanding of Xiongnu might be required for Han because of interactions and corporations happened between those two opposing nations. This paper will discuss the reasons for the existence of bias based on the text of Han Shu and attribute the bias to the imagination that Han people had of Xiongnu due to the geographical separation created by natural mountains and villages, and to the reality that Han interacted with Xiongnu in both peaceful and unpeaceful ways which led to complex feelings.

We survey the recent economics and history literature on the Chinese state to investigate its role in China's long‐term socioeconomic development. We highlight three insights. First, unlike in Europe, where interstate competition helped give rise to capitalist states with high capacity, the Chinese state emerged from a different historical context. Second, the 18th‐ and 19th‐century Chinese state does not fit into the mould of a strong and extractive Oriental despotic state as once commonly believed. By conventional measures, early modern China had a weak state. Third, state building and centre‐local relations are two useful dimensions to understand development and change in China's recent history and political economy. To adapt China to a changing world, Chinese state builders embarked on a long process of state building from the late‐19th century through the Republican and Communist eras. Facilitated partly by regional decentralisation, the process now sees the Chinese state playing a substantially larger role in the economy and everyday life than any previous time in history.

The State in Chinese Economic History

Conference on “Chinese Economic History” June 2006

Reviewed by: China Upside Down: Currency, Society, and Ideologies, 1808-1856 Dennis O. Flynn (bio) Man-houng Lin . China Upside Down: Currency, Society, and Ideologies, 1808–1856. Harvard East Asian Monographs 270. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. xxix, 362 pp. Hardcover $49.95, ISBN-13 978–0–674–02268–3, ISBN-10 0–674–02268–8. Man-houng Lin offers a sweeping and bold reassessment of nineteenth-century Chinese history, claiming that China entered a new global era around 1775, when Latin American silver came to dominate the Chinese economy. Chinese socio-economic fireworks exploded in the early nineteenth century, along with Latin American wars of independence from Spain. Flapping metaphorical Western "butterfly wings" (p. 1)—in the form of severely reduced Latin American silver production during the first half of the nineteenth century—caused a devastating socioeconomic hurricane (1808–1856) that contributed to the Taiping Revolution, nearly destroyed Qing China, and led to Japan's ascendancy as the dominant East Asian power. Powerful stuff, this metal called silver! The chronicle of silver worked as follows. For centuries, silver had been practically the only Western product with sufficient demand inside of China to warrant importation in exchange for massive Chinese exports of ceramics, silks, and teas. Not only did silver imports cease with the collapse of Latin American mine production, but China actually came to export significant amounts of silver during the first half of the nineteenth century. Clearly, the Chinese economy could not continue to export traditional items (in addition to silver exports) unless a significant new import product could be found to substitute for silver imports. Lin accepts the traditional argument that Chinese opium imports substituted for Chinese silver imports. So, in one sense, disruptions in Latin America contributed directly to the famous Opium Wars; had silver continued to enter China as before, there would have been no need to substitute opium for the white metal. But the situation within China was more complicated than merely swapping opium imports for silver imports; indeed, Lin furnishes new evidence to show that both silver and opium were imported into China in large quantities during the second half of the nineteenth century. So what was so special about silver during the first half of that century? Lin claims that restricted silver production led directly to what is labeled the "silver-copper coin crisis" that plagued the first half of nineteenth-century China. The shortage of silver—exacerbated in turn by exports of silver from China—led to a 250 percent rise in the purchasing value of silver vis-à-vis copper cash. (Actually, Lin's numbers show a rise of 150 percent above early nineteenth century figures—not 250 percent as is stated repeatedly.) This wreaked havoc for ordinary Chinese paid wages in copper cash, since the purchasing power of copper monies [End Page 505] declined to less than half its previous market value. Horrible times prevailed; the Qing dynasty itself nearly went bankrupt. The Taiping and other rebellions raged on, and the Chinese population fell by tens of millions (some even claim a decline of over a hundred million). Lin goes to great length to show how these unique circumstances led to changes in intellectual debates on statecraft and why China eventually turned more and more toward a strong state. Fortunately, Latin America's silver industry (along with other parts of the world, like Nevada) experienced a huge explosion of production around the middle of the nineteenth century, and this led to recovery for Qing China as well. The old depressive mechanisms were reversed as China's economy surged ahead along with new infusions of imported silver, although an authoritarian Chinese state was now in place and Japanese ascendancy already assured. China Upside Down contains a treasure trove of useful information about conditions in nineteenth-century China, especially for those of us incapable of reading Chinese sources. As a bonus, Lin provides a fascinating summary of theoretical and practical arguments by important contemporary Chinese thinkers of the time (as did Richard von Glahn in his 1996 Fountain of Fortune classic volume on Chinese monetary history). Yet, I cannot accept the overall conclusions of China Upside Down. Although the criticisms to...