The Chinese Gazette In European Sources

By looking at China from the periphery, this study shows how European sources offer a unique way of expanding the knowledge about the gazette of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its interconnected history illustrates how the Chinese gazette, as translated by European missionaries, became a major source for reflections on state and society by Enlightenment thinkers.

In the face of rapid and radical social changes since the late 1970s, contemporary China faces tremendous challenges. What is China transforming toward? What are the ideological positions and, more generally, cultural values that inform, question, and demand critical assessment of the social transformations in the reform era? This collection of essays aims at addressing these questions. Written by some of the leading intellectuals and thinkers in and outside of contemporary China, the essays, in different ways, examine the extent to which three major cultural resources, namely traditional, May Fourth, and socialist, have been (re)interpreted, (re)appropriated, and mobilized to address the challenges brought about by the changed and changing social and economic conditions of the reform era.

In the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), China experienced far greater access to political information than suggested by the blunt measures of control and censorship employed by modern Chinese regimes. A tenuous partnership between the court and the dynamic commercial publishing enterprises of late imperial China enabled the publication of gazettes in a wide range of print and manuscript formats. For both domestic and foreign readers these official gazettes offered vital information about the Qing state and its activities, transmitting state news across a vast empire and beyond. And the most essential window onto Qing politics was the Peking Gazette, a genre that circulated globally over the course of the dynasty. This illuminating study presents a comprehensive history of the Peking Gazette and frames it as the cornerstone of a Qing information policy that, paradoxically, prized both transparency and secrecy. Gazettes gave readers a glimpse into the state’s inner workings but also served as a carefully curated form of public relations. Historian Emily Mokros draws from international archives to reconstruct who read the gazette and how they used it to guide their interactions with the Chinese state. Her research into the Peking Gazette’s evolution over more than two centuries is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the relationship between media, information, and state power.

This volume excavates the genealogy of xin 信--a term that has become the modern Chinese counterpart for the English word "faith." More than twenty experts trace its religious and non-religious roots in several traditions, including Confucian, Buddhist, Daoist, Muslim, Christian, Japanese, popular religious, and modern secular contexts.

This fundamentally new interpretation of the Qing reveals how Sino-Western engagements transformed traditions, institutions, and networks of communications.

A landmark comparative history of Europe and China that examines why the Industrial Revolution emerged in the West The Great Divergence sheds light on one of the great questions of history: Why did sustained industrial growth begin in Northwest Europe? Historian Kenneth Pomeranz shows that as recently as 1750, life expectancy, consumption, and product and factor markets were comparable in Europe and East Asia. Moreover, key regions in China and Japan were no worse off ecologically than those in Western Europe, with each region facing corresponding shortages of land-intensive products. Pomeranz’s comparative lens reveals the two critical factors resulting in Europe's nineteenth-century divergence—the fortunate location of coal and access to trade with the New World. As East Asia’s economy stagnated, Europe narrowly escaped the same fate largely due to favorable resource stocks from underground and overseas. This Princeton Classics edition includes a preface from the author and makes a powerful historical work available to new readers.

In The Intercultural Weaving of Historical Texts Nicolas Standaert analyses an early case of “intercultural historiography,” in which various Chinese views on marvellous births are interwoven with their European interpretations in the seventeenth and eighteenth century.