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Tears from Iron
This multi-layered history of a horrific famine that took place in late-nineteenth-century China focuses on cultural responses to trauma. The massive drought/famine that killed at least ten million people in north China during the late 1870s remains one of China's most severe disasters and provides a vivid window through which to study the social side of a nation's tragedy. Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley's original approach explores an array of new source materials, including songs, poems, stele inscriptions, folklore, and oral accounts of the famine from Shanxi Province, its epicenter. She juxtaposes these narratives with central government, treaty-port, and foreign debates over the meaning of the events and shows how the famine, which occurred during a period of deepening national crisis, elicited widely divergent reactions from different levels of Chinese society.
The Church as Safe Haven
The Church as Safe Haven conceptualizes the rise of Chinese Christianity as a new civilizational paradigm that encouraged individuals and communities to construct a sacred order for empowerment in modern China. Once Christianity enrooted itself in Chinese society as an indigenous religion, local congregations acquired much autonomy which enabled new religious institutions to take charge of community governance. Our contributors draw on newly-released archival sources, as well as on fieldwork observations investigating what Christianity meant to Chinese believers, how native actors built their churches and faith-based associations within the pre-existing social networks, and how they appropriated Christian resources in response to the fast-changing world. This book reconstructs the narratives of ordinary Christians, and places everyday faith experience at the center. Contributors are: Christie Chui-Shan Chow, Lydia Gerber, Melissa Inouye, Diana Junio, David Jong Hyuk Kang, Lars Peter Laamann, Joseph Tse-Hei Lee, George Kam Wah Mak, John R. Stanley, R. G. Tiedemann, Man-Shun Yeung.
Between Birth and Death
Female infanticide is a social practice often closely associated with Chinese culture. Journalists, social scientists, and historians alike emphasize that it is a result of the persistence of son preference, from China's ancient past to its modern present. Yet how is it that the killing of newborn daughters has come to be so intimately associated with Chinese culture? Between Birth and Death locates a significant historical shift in the representation of female infanticide during the nineteenth century. It was during these years that the practice transformed from a moral and deeply local issue affecting communities into an emblematic cultural marker of a backwards Chinese civilization, requi...
The River, the Plain, and the State
This book explores the human-engineered flooding of China's Yellow River, and how it affected the state, environment, and inhabitants of the region.
China Networks
Networks ranging from village level to transnational level have always played a crucial role in Chinese society. The contributors to this volume aim to trace the interaction between various networks which have existed from the 19th century to the present day. The articles deal with theoretical concepts, historical examples, such as non-state responses to the North China Famine (1876 - 1879), the role of missionaries in the modernization of China and disaster management, including recent inter-ethnic business competition in Hong Kong, Han settlers in Xinjiang, temple festivals in Macau and urban migrants' social networks in today's China. By drawing on new material and theoretical frameworks, these studies shed fresh light on the ways in which various forms of networks have shaped Chinese society, while at the same time questioning traditional and rigid perspectives of Chinese society based solely on networks and guanxi.
What Remains
The Taiping Rebellion was one of the costliest civil wars in human history. Many millions of people lost their lives. Yet while the Rebellion has been intensely studied by scholars in China and elsewhere, we still know little of how individuals coped with these cataclysmic events. Drawing upon a rich array of primary sources, What Remains explores the issues that preoccupied Chinese and Western survivors. Individuals, families, and communities grappled with fundamental questions of loyalty and loss as they struggled to rebuild shattered cities, bury the dead, and make sense of the horrors that they had witnessed. Driven by compelling accounts of raw emotion and deep injury, What Remains opens a window to a world described by survivors themselves. This book transforms our understanding of China's 19th century and recontextualizes suffering and loss in China during the 20th century.
Forgotten Ally
A history of the Chinese experience in WWII, named a Book of the Year by both the Economist and the Financial Times: “Superb” (The New York Times Book Review). In 1937, two years before Hitler invaded Poland, Chinese troops clashed with Japanese occupiers in the first battle of World War II. Joining with the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain, China became the fourth great ally in a devastating struggle for its very survival. In this book, prize-winning historian Rana Mitter unfurls China’s drama of invasion, resistance, slaughter, and political intrigue as never before. Based on groundbreaking research, this gripping narrative focuses on a handful of unforgettable char...
When the Yellow River Floods
When the Yellow River Floods explores the relationship between environmental degradation, hydraulic engineering, and nation-building in the context of Liu E’s The Travels of Lao Can. This book contributes to the field by providing a unique perspective on modern Chinese literary history that goes beyond conventional narratives that focus solely on political and cultural factors. The main areas covered include the role of water management in literary nation-building and the connections between the novel’s various themes, such as river engineering, medical and political discourses, national sentiment, and landscape description. The book is targeted toward scholars and students of Chinese li...
Famine Politics in Maoist China and the Soviet Union
During the twentieth century, 80 percent of all famine victims worldwide died in China and the Soviet Union. In this rigorous and thoughtful study, Felix Wemheuer analyzes the historical and political roots of these socialist-era famines, in which overambitious industrial programs endorsed by Stalin and Mao Zedong created greater disasters than those suffered under prerevolutionary regimes. Focusing on famine as a political tool, Wemheuer systematically exposes how conflicts about food among peasants, urban populations, and the socialist state resulted in the starvation death of millions. A major contribution to Chinese and Soviet history, this provocative analysis examines the long-term effects of the great famines on the relationship between the state and its citizens and argues that the lessons governments learned from the catastrophes enabled them to overcome famine in their later decades of rule.
Coming to Terms with the Nation
Studies China's "Ethnic classification project" (minzu shibie) of 1954, conducted in Yunnan province.
