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"Weixing was a highly-organized lottery practice wherein people bet on the surnames of which candidates would pass the civil and military examinations in China. This book reconstructs the inner mechanisms of Weixing and other lottery games and traces a series of institutional revenue innovations surrounding lottery regulation from the 1850s to the early 1900s, depicting an expansive community created by the lottery with cultural and informational channels stretching around the world."--
China, Geremie R. Barmé notes, has become one of the greatest writing and publishing nations on the planet, and both cultural activists and the state are embroiled in debates about the production and distribution of its cultural products. But what happens when global culture and Chinese capitalist-socialism meet in the marketplace? In the Redinvestigates what goes on behind the rhetoric of the official Chinese government and the dissident community and provides a unique perspective on mainstream Western perceptions of cultural developments, artistic freedom, and popular lifestyles in China today. Illustrated with fascinating cartoons and photographs and rich with facts, anecdotes, and event...
The Homeric epics and the Book of Songs are not just the fountainheads of the Western and Chinese literary traditions; for centuries they played a central role in education and communal life, and thus exercised a lasting influence on both civilizations. This volume presents the first systematic comparison of the two corpora. Part One analyzes their genesis and their reception, while Part Two discusses their characteristics as poetic creations. The book brings together Chinese and Western sinologists and classicists, and so promotes significant interdisciplinary and intercultural dialogue. Though the contributors rank among the leading experts in their fields, the essays here are accessible not only to their peers, but also to the interested ‘general reader’, and so to all those who seek a deeper understanding of Chinese and Western civilizations, their common human basis and their characteristic differences.
"Ancestors, Kings, and the Dao outlines the evolution of musical performance in early China, first within and then ultimately away from the socio-religious context of ancestor worship. Examining newly discovered bamboo texts from the Warring States period, Constance A. Cook compares the rhetoric of Western Zhou (1046–771 BCE) and Spring and Autumn (770–481 BCE) bronze inscriptions with later occurrences of similar terms in which ritual music began to be used as a form of self-cultivation and education. Cook’s analysis links the creation of such classics as the Book of Odes with the ascendance of the individual practitioner, further connecting the social actors in three types of ritual:...
Publisher’s note: This is a 2nd edition due to an article retraction
The term home economics often conjures images of sterile classrooms where girls learn to cook dinner and swaddle dolls, far removed from the seats of power. Helen Schneider unsettles this assumption by revealing how Chinese women helped to build a nation, one family at a time. From the 1920s to the early 1950s, home economists transformed the most fundamental of political spaces � the home � by teaching women to nurture ideal families and manage projects of social reform. Although their discipline came undone after 1949, it created a legacy of gendered professionalism and reinforced the idea that leaders should shape domestic rituals of the people.
Over the past hundred years, the global motto has been "more, more, more" in terms of growth - of population, of the built environment, of human and financial capital, and of all manner of worldly goods. But reality is changing from the population boom of the 1960s and 1970s, as the earth's population begins to decline. In Smaller Cities in a Shrinking World, urban policy expert Alan Mallach seeks to understand how declining population and economic growth, coupled with the other forces that will influence their fates, particularly climate change, will affect the world's cities over the coming decades. Mallach has woven together his vast experience, research, and analysis in this fascinating, realistic-yet-hopeful look at how smaller, shrinking cities can thrive, despite the daunting challenges they face.
A study on the forging of Chinese communism in the furnace of the anti-Japanese war. It focuses on North China, where the Chinese Communist Party first took root and later expanded to conquer China.