Reinventing Modern China

This work offers the first systematic analysis of writings on modern Chinese history by historians in China from the early twentieth century to the present. It traces the construction of major interpretive schemes, the evolution of dominant historical narratives, and the unfolding of debates on the most controversial issues in different periods. Placing history-writing in the context of political rivalry and ideological contestation, Huaiyin Li explicates how the historians’ dedication to faithfully reconstructing the past was compromised by their commitment to an imagined trajectory of history that fit their present-day agenda and served their needs of political legitimation. Beginning with an examination of the contrasting narratives of revolution and modernization in the Republican period, the book scrutinizes changes in the revolutionary historiography after 1949, including its disciplinization in the 1950s and early 1960s and radicalization in the rest of the Mao era. It further investigates the rise of the modernization paradigm in the reform era, the crises of master narratives since the late 1990s, and the latest development of the field. Central to the author’s analysis is the issue of truth and falsehood in historical representation. Li contends that both the revolutionary and modernization historiographies before 1949 reflected historians’ lived experiences and contained a degree of authenticity in mirroring the historical processes of their own times. In sharp contrast, both the revolutionary historiography of the Maoist era and the modernization historiography of the reform era were primarily products of historians’ ideological commitment, which distorted and concealed the past no less than revealed it. In search of a more effective approach to rewriting modern Chinese history, Reinventing Modern China proposes a within-time, open-ended perspective, which allows for different directions in interpreting the events in modern China and views modern Chinese history as an unfinished process remaining to be defined as the country entered the twenty-first century.

The Making of the Modern Chinese State: 1600–1950 offers an historical analysis of the formation of the modern Chinese state from the seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth centuries, providing refreshing and provocative interpretations on almost every major issue regarding the rise of modern China. This book explores the question of why today’s China is unlike any other nation-state in size and structure. It inquires into the reasons behind the striking continuity in China's territorial and ethnic compositions over the past centuries, and explicates the genesis and tenacity of the Chinese state as a highly centralized and unified regime that has been able to survive into the twenty-first century. Its analysis centres on three key variables, namely geopolitical strategy, fiscal constitution, and identity building, and it demonstrates how they worked together to shape the outcome of state transformation in modern China. Enhanced by a selection of informative tables and illustrations, The Making of the Modern Chinese State: 1600–1950 is ideal for undergraduates and graduates studying East Asian history, Chinese history, empires in Asia, and state formation.

Reinventing Licentiousness navigates an overlooked history of representation during the transition from the Qing Empire to the Chinese Republic—a time when older, hierarchical notions of licentiousness were overlaid by a new, pornographic regime. Y. Yvon Wang draws on previously untapped archives—ranging from police archives and surveys to ephemeral texts and pictures—to argue that pornography in China represents a unique configuration of power and desire that both reflects and shapes historical processes. On the one hand, since the late imperial period, pornography has democratized pleasure in China and opened up new possibilities of imagining desire. On the other, ongoing controversies over its definition and control show how the regulatory ideas of premodern cultural politics and the popular products of early modern cultural markets have contoured the globalized world. Reinventing Licentiousness emphasizes the material factors, particularly at the grassroots level of consumption and trade, that governed "proper" sexual desire and led to ideological shifts around the definition of pornography. By linking the past to the present and beyond, Wang's social and intellectual history showcases circulated pornographic material as a motor for cultural change. The result is an astonishing foray into what historicizing pornography can mean for our understandings of desire, legitimacy, capitalism, and culture.

Anarchy in the Pure Land investigates the twentieth-century reinvention of the cult of Maitreya, the future Buddha, conceived by the reformer Taixu and promoted by the Chinese Buddhist reform movement. The cult presents an apparent anomaly: It shows precisely the kind of concern for ritual, supernatural beings, and the afterlife that the reformers supposedly rejected in the name of "modernity." This book shows that, rather than a concession to tradition, the reimagining of ideas and practices associated with Maitreya was an important site for formulating a Buddhist vision of modernity. Justin Ritzinger argues that the cult of Maitreya represents an attempt to articulate a new constellation of values, integrating novel understandings of the good, clustered around modern visions of utopia, with the central Buddhist goal of Buddhahood. In Part One he traces the roots of this constellation to Taixu's youthful career as an anarchist. Part Two examines its articulation in the Maitreya School's theology and its social development from its inception to World War II. Part Three looks at its subsequent decline and contemporary legacy within and beyond orthodox Buddhism. Through these investigations, Anarchy in the Pure Land develops a new framework for alternative understandings of modernity in Buddhism.

This book illustrates how the one-dot theory, which is a dialectical study, is well suited to describing, explaining and inferring contemporary China’s past, present and future. It argues that since October 1949, the field of contemporary China studies has been dominated by modified and abandoned non-dialectical theories and models. It also challenges selected non-dialectical theories and models which were first generated in the West, such as the game theory and rational (choice) theory. With its emphasis on methodology, the book offers a valuable resource for academics, researchers and practitioners alike with an interest in logically, systematically and coherently unraveling Taiwan’s and mainland China’s contemporary politics and international relations.

This volume examines the significance of the Chinese Buddhist canon in modern East Asian Buddhism. Exploring how the Chinese Buddhist canon has evolved and how it is currently utilized, each chapter of this book provides new insights and essential information into the Chinese Buddhist canon during the modern and contemporary periods.

In February 2003, a Chinese physician crossed the border between mainland China and Hong Kong, spreading Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS)—a novel flu-like virus—to over a dozen international hotel guests. SARS went on to kill about 800 people and sicken 8,000 worldwide. By July 2003 the disease had disappeared, but it left an indelible change on public health in China. The Chinese public health system, once famous for its grassroots, low-technology approach, was transformed into a globally-oriented, research-based, scientific endeavor. In Infectious Change, Katherine A. Mason investigates local Chinese public health institutions in Southeastern China, examining how the outbreak of SARS re-imagined public health as a professionalized, biomedicalized, and technological machine—one that frequently failed to serve the Chinese people. Mason recounts the rapid transformation as young, highly-trained biomedical scientists flooded into local public health institutions, replacing bureaucratic government inspectors who had dominated the field for decades. Infectious Change grapples with how public health in China was reinvented into a prestigious profession in which global impact and recognition were paramount—and service to vulnerable local communities was secondary.