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Documents the rise and fall of a market economy in China from 10001500. Since the economic liberalization of the 1980s, the Chinese economy has boomed and is poised to become the worlds largest market economy, a position traditional China held a millennium ago. William Guanglin Lius bold and fascinating book is the first to rely on quantitative methods to investigate the early market economy that existed in China, making use of rare market and population data produced by the Song dynasty in the eleventh century. A counterexample comes from the century around 1400 when the early Ming court deliberately turned agrarian society into a command economy system. This radical change not only shrank markets, but also caused a sharp decline in the living standards of common people. Lius landmark study of the rise and fall of a market economy highlights important issues for contemporary China at both the empirical and theoretical levels.
This book examines the effectiveness and sustainability of China's foreign aid in Africa, as well as the political, economic and diplomatic factors that influence Chinese aid disbursement policies.
"This is a study of an Inner Asian people called the *Taghbach (Ch. Tuoba), who half a century after collapse of the Han state (206 BCE-220 CE) began the process of building a new kind of empire in East Asia. Though addressing larger historiographical issues, the book's main purpose is, within the limits of our sources, to see this people in and of themselves, in a detailed narrative that follows them from the emergence of the khan Liwei in the mid-third century, in the highland frontier between Inner Asia and the Chinese world, and ends almost three hundred years later, with the drowning of the dynasty's last matriarch in the Yellow River. Across the centuries, they repeatedly changed their...
Yang also introduces the new discovery of a previously unidentified medium that is located in the gray zone between writing and decoration, which he calls "pictorial inscriptions." Further, Yang discusses the sources, contexts, and correlation among the three media."--BOOK JACKET.
"On an autumn morning in 1793, Lord Macartney waited to be ushered into the imperial summer retreat to take part in the celebration of the Qianlong Emperor's 82nd birthday. It was a long day; the celebration drama, Ascendant Peace in the Four Seas, lasted five hours. There were many scenes of fish, turtles and other sea creatures, and Macartney guessed it must have had something to do with the marriage between the ocean and land. He could not have been more wrong…" For the Qing court, entertaining foreign visitors was only one of the numerous ritual and political purposes dramas served. Delving into a rich collection of firsthand materials, the author meticulously excavates and combs histo...
While the Handbook is an all-encompassing resource for academic purposes including teaching and exam preparation, the lab-coat-pocket-size of the Minibook is ideal for clinical use, providing all crucial clinical references in a condense and concise format. The Minibook includes the following essential information for quick clinical reference: 159 Eastern and Western diseases with associated TCM patterns and treatments; comprehensive acupuncture chart including eastern and western indications with clinical notes for 361 points; comprehensive chart for 381 single herbs and herb comparison charts in alphabetical order; comprehensive chart for 261 herbal formulas and formauls comparison charts in alphabetical order; biomedicine including diagnosis, diseases, patient intake and top 300 drug list; various treatment information including Korean medicine, Tung style acupuncture, complementary modalities, and cosmetic acupuncture.
Finalist for the 2015 Best First Book in the History of Religions presented by the American Academy of Religion Winner of the 2014 Academic Award for Excellence presented by Chinese Historians in the United States When did Confucianism become the reigning political ideology of imperial China? A pervasive narrative holds it was during the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty (141–87 BCE). In this book, Liang Cai maintains that such a date would have been too early and provides a new account of this transformation. A hidden narrative in Sima Qian's The Grand Scribe's Records (Shi ji) shows that Confucians were a powerless minority in the political realm of this period. Cai argues that the notorious witchcraft scandal of 91–87 BCE reshuffled the power structure of the Western Han bureaucracy and provided Confucians an opportune moment to seize power, evolve into a new elite class, and set the tenor of political discourse for centuries to come.
A first look at gunpowder's revolutionary impact on China's role in global history The Chinese invented gunpowder and began exploring its military uses as early as the 900s, four centuries before the technology passed to the West. But by the early 1800s, China had fallen so far behind the West in gunpowder warfare that it was easily defeated by Britain in the Opium War of 1839–42. What happened? In The Gunpowder Age, Tonio Andrade offers a compelling new answer, opening a fresh perspective on a key question of world history: why did the countries of western Europe surge to global importance starting in the 1500s while China slipped behind? Historians have long argued that gunpowder weapons...