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Origins of the Modern Chinese State

Origins of the Modern Chinese State PDF Author: Philip A. Kuhn
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804749299
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Book Description
What is "Chinese” about China’s modern state? This book proposes that the state we see today has developed over the past two centuries largely as a response to internal challenges emerging from the late empire. Well before the Opium War, Chinese confronted such constitutional questions as: How does the scope of political participation affect state power? How is the state to secure a share of society’s wealth? In response to the changing demands of the age, this agenda has been expressed in changing language. Yet, because the underlying pattern remains recognizable, the modernization of the state in response to foreign aggression can be studied in longer perspective. The author offers three concrete studies to illustrate the constitutional agenda in action: how the early nineteenth-century scholar-activist Wei Yuan confronted the relation between broadened political participation and authoritarian state power; how the reformist proposals of the influential scholar Feng Guifen were received by mainstream bureaucrats during the 1898 reform movement; and how fiscal problems of the late empire formed a backdrop to agricultural collectivization in the 1950s. In each case, the author presents the "modern” constitutional solution as only the most recent answer to old Chinese questions. The book concludes by describing the transformation of the constitutional agenda over the course of the modern period.

Origins of the Modern Chinese State

Origins of the Modern Chinese State PDF Author: Philip A. Kuhn
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804749299
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Book Description
What is "Chinese” about China’s modern state? This book proposes that the state we see today has developed over the past two centuries largely as a response to internal challenges emerging from the late empire. Well before the Opium War, Chinese confronted such constitutional questions as: How does the scope of political participation affect state power? How is the state to secure a share of society’s wealth? In response to the changing demands of the age, this agenda has been expressed in changing language. Yet, because the underlying pattern remains recognizable, the modernization of the state in response to foreign aggression can be studied in longer perspective. The author offers three concrete studies to illustrate the constitutional agenda in action: how the early nineteenth-century scholar-activist Wei Yuan confronted the relation between broadened political participation and authoritarian state power; how the reformist proposals of the influential scholar Feng Guifen were received by mainstream bureaucrats during the 1898 reform movement; and how fiscal problems of the late empire formed a backdrop to agricultural collectivization in the 1950s. In each case, the author presents the "modern” constitutional solution as only the most recent answer to old Chinese questions. The book concludes by describing the transformation of the constitutional agenda over the course of the modern period.

The Search for Modern China

The Search for Modern China PDF Author: Jonathan D. Spence
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393307801
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1054

Book Description
This work chronicles the history of China for over four hundred years through the spring of 1989.

After Empire

After Empire PDF Author: Peter Zarrow
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804781877
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 413

Book Description
From 1885–1924, China underwent a period of acute political struggle and cultural change, brought on by a radical change in thought: after over 2,000 years of monarchical rule, the Chinese people stopped believing in the emperor. These forty years saw the collapse of Confucian political orthodoxy and the struggle among competing definitions of modern citizenship and the state. What made it possible to suddenly imagine a world without the emperor? After Empire traces the formation of the modern Chinese idea of the state through the radical reform programs of the late Qing (1885–1911), the Revolution of 1911, and the first years of the Republic through the final expulsion of the last emperor of the Qing from the Forbidden City in 1924. It contributes to longstanding debates on modern Chinese nationalism by highlighting the evolving ideas of major political thinkers and the views reflected in the general political culture. Zarrow uses a wide range of sources to show how "statism" became a hegemonic discourse that continues to shape China today. Essential to this process were the notions of citizenship and sovereignty, which were consciously adopted and modified from Western discourses on legal theory and international state practices on the basis of Chinese needs and understandings. This text provides fresh interpretations and keen insights into China's pivotal transition from dynasty to republic.

China from Empire to Nation-State

China from Empire to Nation-State PDF Author: Hui Wang
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674966961
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 196

Book Description
This translation of the Introduction to Wang Hui’s Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (2004) makes part of his four-volume masterwork available to English readers for the first time. A leading public intellectual in China, Wang charts the historical currents that have shaped Chinese modernity from the Song Dynasty to the present day, and along the way challenges the West to rethink some of its most basic assumptions about what it means to be modern. China from Empire to Nation-State exposes oversimplifications and distortions implicit in Western critiques of Chinese history, which long held that China was culturally resistant to modernization, only able to join the community of modern nations when the Qing Empire finally collapsed in 1912. Noting that Western ideas have failed to take into account the diversity of Chinese experience, Wang recovers important strains of premodern thought. Chinese thinkers theorized politics in ways that do not line up neatly with political thought in the West—for example, the notion of a “Heavenly Principle” that governed everything from the ordering of the cosmos to the structure of society and rationality itself. Often dismissed as evidence of imperial China’s irredeemably backward culture, many Neo-Confucian concepts reemerged in twentieth-century Chinese political discourse, as thinkers and activists from across the ideological spectrum appealed to ancient precedents and principles in support of their political and cultural agendas. Wang thus enables us to see how many aspects of premodern thought contributed to a distinctly Chinese vision of modernity.

A Nation-State by Construction

A Nation-State by Construction PDF Author: Suisheng Zhao
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804750011
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 380

Book Description
This is the first historically comprehensive, up-to-date analysis of the causes, content, and consequences of nationalism in China, an ancient empire that has struggled to construct a nation-state and find its place in the modern world. It shows how Chinese political elites have competed to promote different types of nationalism linked to their political values and interests and imposed them on the nation while trying to repress other types of nationalism. In particular, the book reveals how leaders of the PRC have adopted a pragmatic strategy to use nationalism while struggling to prevent it from turning into a menace rather than a prop.

The Rise and Fall of Imperial China

The Rise and Fall of Imperial China PDF Author: Yuhua Wang
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691237514
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Book Description
How social networks shaped the imperial Chinese state China was the world’s leading superpower for almost two millennia, falling behind only in the last two centuries and now rising to dominance again. What factors led to imperial China’s decline? The Rise and Fall of Imperial China offers a systematic look at the Chinese state from the seventh century through to the twentieth. Focusing on how short-lived emperors often ruled a strong state while long-lasting emperors governed a weak one, Yuhua Wang shows why lessons from China’s history can help us better understand state building. Wang argues that Chinese rulers faced a fundamental trade-off that he calls the sovereign’s dilemma: a coherent elite that could collectively strengthen the state could also overthrow the ruler. This dilemma emerged because strengthening state capacity and keeping rulers in power for longer required different social networks in which central elites were embedded. Wang examines how these social networks shaped the Chinese state, and vice versa, and he looks at how the ruler’s pursuit of power by fragmenting the elites became the final culprit for China’s fall. Drawing on more than a thousand years of Chinese history, The Rise and Fall of Imperial China highlights the role of elite social relations in influencing the trajectories of state development.

War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe

War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe PDF Author: Victoria Tin-bor Hui
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521525763
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Book Description
There is a common belief that the system of sovereign territorial states and the roots of liberal democracy are unique to European civilization and alien to non-Western cultures. The view has generated popular cynicism about democracy promotion in general and China's prospect for democratization in particular. This book demonstrates that China in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (656-221 BC) consisted of a system of sovereign territorial states similar to Europe in the early modern period. It examines why China and Europe shared similar processes but experienced opposite outcomes.

The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China

The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China PDF Author: Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191506710
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 444

Book Description
This lavishly illustrated volume explores the history of China during a period of dramatic shifts and surprising transformations, from the founding of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) through to the present day. The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China promises to be essential reading for anyone who wants to understand this rising superpower on the verge of what promises to be the 'Chinese century', introducing readers to important but often overlooked events in China's past, such as the bloody Taiping Civil War (1850-1864), which had a death toll far higher than the roughly contemporaneous American Civil War. It also helps readers see more familiar landmarks in Chinese history in new ways, such as the Opium War (1839-1842), the Boxer Uprising of 1900, the rise to power of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949, and the Tiananmen protests and Beijing Massacre of 1989. This is one of the first major efforts -- and in many ways the most ambitious to date -- to come to terms with the broad sweep of modern Chinese history, taking readers from the origins of modern China right up through the dramatic events of the last few years (the Beijing Games, the financial crisis, and China's rise to global economic pre-eminence) which have so fundamentally altered Western views of China and China's place in the world.

Rescuing History from the Nation

Rescuing History from the Nation PDF Author: Prasenjit Duara
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226167232
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Book Description
Prasenjit Duara offers the first systematic account of the relationship between the nation-state, nationalism, and the concept of linear history. Focusing primarily on China and including discussion of India, Duara argues that many historians of postcolonial nation-states have adopted a linear, evolutionary history of the Enlightenment/colonial model. As a result, they have written repressive, exclusionary, and incomplete accounts. The backlash against such histories has resulted in a tendency to view the past as largely constructed, imagined, or invented. In this book, Duara offers a way out of the impasse between constructionism and the evolving nation; he redefines history as a series of multiple, often conflicting narratives produced simultaneously at national, local, and transnational levels. In a series of closely linked case studies, he considers such examples as the very different histories produced by Chinese nationalist reformers and partisans of popular religions, the conflicting narratives of statist nationalists and of advocates of federalism in early twentieth-century China. He demonstrates the necessity of incorporating contestation, appropriation, repression, and the return of the repressed subject into any account of the past that will be meaningful to the present. Duara demonstrates how to write histories that resist being pressed into the service of the national subject in its progress—or stalled progress—toward modernity.

The Religious Question in Modern China

The Religious Question in Modern China PDF Author: Vincent Goossaert
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226304183
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 480

Book Description
Recent events—from strife in Tibet and the rapid growth of Christianity in China to the spectacular expansion of Chinese Buddhist organizations around the globe—vividly demonstrate that one cannot understand the modern Chinese world without attending closely to the question of religion. The Religious Question in Modern China highlights parallels and contrasts between historical events, political regimes, and cultural movements to explore how religion has challenged and responded to secular Chinese modernity, from 1898 to the present. Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer piece together the puzzle of religion in China not by looking separately at different religions in different contexts, but by writing a unified story of how religion has shaped, and in turn been shaped by, modern Chinese society. From Chinese medicine and the martial arts to communal temple cults and revivalist redemptive societies, the authors demonstrate that from the nineteenth century onward, as the Chinese state shifted, the religious landscape consistently resurfaced in a bewildering variety of old and new forms. The Religious Question in Modern China integrates historical, anthropological, and sociological perspectives in a comprehensive overview of China’s religious history that is certain to become an indispensible reference for specialists and students alike.