Empowered by Ancestors: Controversy over the Imperial Temple in Song China (960–1279) examines the enduring tension between cultural authority and political power in imperial China by inquiring into ...Song ritual debates over the Imperial Temple. During these debates, Song-educated elites utilized various discourses to rectify temple rituals in their own ways. In this process, political interests were less emphasized and even detached from ritual discussions. Meanwhile, Song scholars of particular schools developed various ritual theories that were used to reshape society in later periods. Hence, the Song ritual debates exemplified the great transmission of ancestral ritual norms from the top stratum of imperial court downward to society. In this book, the author attempts to provide a lens through which historians, anthropologists, experts in Chinese Classics, and scholars from other disciplines can explore Chinese ritual in its intellectual, social, and political forms.
Članek izhaja iz predpostavke, da sta razsvetljenska koncepta avtonomnega subjekta in humanizma v sedanji obliki zastarela in neprimerna za idejno osnovo sodobnega časa. Svobodna volja posameznika ...nima več opore v etičnih maksimah, saj te znotraj visoko diferenciranih socialnih in tehnoloških kontekstov sodobnih družb ne morejo več služiti kot zanesljivi kriteriji realizacije moralnih imperativov. To pa pomeni, da je ogrožena tako moralna kot tudi politična avtonomija posameznika. Avtorica izhaja iz predpostavke, da sodijo tovrstne ideje po drugi strani k najpomembnejšim kulturnim in filozofskim dediščinam Evrope in da je zato treba ta koncepta postaviti v plodno kontrastivno, poliloško in dialektično razmerje s sorodnimi dediščinami neevropskih kultur. Sinteza različnih tradicij humanizma namreč ni samo mogoča, temveč tudi nujna. Članek se pri tem osredotoča na pregled subjektu sorodnih konceptov znotraj kitajske filozofije, pri čemer poudari tradicionalne osnove ter specifično kitajsko razumevanje pojma sebstva.
This major new study examines the history of Chinese theologies as they have navigated dynastic change, anti-imperialism, and the heights of Maoist propagandaIn this groundbreaking and authoritative ...study, Chloë Starr explores key writings of Chinese Christian intellectuals, from philosophical dialogues of the late imperial era to sermons and micro blogs of theological educators and pastors in the twenty-first century. Through a series of close textual readings, she sheds new light on the fraught issues of Chinese Christian identity and the evolving question of how Christianity should relate to Chinese society.
Since the mid-twentieth century China and India have entertained a difficult relationship, erupting into open war in 1962. Shadow States is the first book to unpack Sino-Indian tensions from the ...angle of competitive state-building - through a study of their simultaneous attempts to win the approval and support of the Himalayan people. When China and India tried to expand into the Himalayas in the twentieth century, their lack of strong ties to the region and the absence of an easily enforceable border made their proximity threatening - observing China and India's state-making efforts, local inhabitants were in a position to compare and potentially choose between them. Using rich and original archival research, Bérénice Guyot-Réchard shows how India and China became each other's 'shadow states'. Understanding these recent, competing processes of state formation in the Himalayas is fundamental to understanding the roots of tensions in Sino-Indian relations.
In the Qing period (1644-1912), China's population tripled, and
the flurry of new development generated unprecedented demand for
timber. Standard environmental histories have often depicted this
as ...an era of reckless deforestation, akin to the resource misuse
that devastated European forests at the same time. This
comprehensive new study shows that the reality was more complex: as
old-growth forests were cut down, new economic arrangements emerged
to develop renewable timber resources.
Historian Meng Zhang traces the trade routes that connected
population centers of the Lower Yangzi Delta to timber supplies on
China's southwestern frontier. She documents innovative property
rights systems and economic incentives that convinced landowners to
invest years in growing trees. Delving into rare archives to
reconstruct business histories, she considers both the formal legal
mechanisms and the informal interactions that helped balance
economic profit with environmental management. Of driving concern
were questions of sustainability: How to maintain a reliable source
of timber across decades and centuries? And how to sustain a
business network across a thousand miles? This carefully
constructed study makes a major contribution to Chinese economic
and environmental history and to world-historical discourses on
resource management, early modern commercialization, and
sustainable development.
Built upon a solid foundation of sources, memoirs, and interviews, this study sheds new light on China's efforts in the Vietnam War. Utilizing secondary works in Chinese, Vietnamese, and Western ...languages, and the author's own familiarity as a former member of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, this examination expands the knowledge of China's relations with the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) during the 1950s and 1960s.
As a communist state bordering Vietnam, China actively facilitated the transformation of Ho Chi Minh's army from a small, loosely organized, poorly equipped guerrilla force in the 1940s into a formidable, well-trained professional army capable of defeating first the French (1946--1954) and then the Americans (1963--1973). Even after the signing of the Geneva Peace Agreement, China continued to aggressively support Vietnam. Between 1955 and 1963, Chinese military aid totaled $106 million and these massive contributions enabled Ho Chi Minh to build up a strong conventional force. After 1964, China increased its aid and provided approximately $20 billion more in military and economic aid to Vietnam.
Western strategists and historians have long speculated about the extent of China's involvement in Vietnam, but it was not until recently that newly available archival materials revealed the true extent of China's influence -- its level of military assistance training, strategic advising, and monetary means during the war. This illuminating study answers questions about China's intention, objective, strategy, and operations of its involvement in the Vietnam Wars.
Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward campaign organized millions of
Chinese peasants into communes in a misguided attempt to rapidly
collectivize agriculture with disastrous effects. Catastrophic
famine ...lingered as the global cholera pandemic of the early 1960s
spread rampantly through the infected waters of southeastern
coastal China. Confronted with a political crisis and the seventh
global cholera pandemic in recorded history, the communist
government committed to social restructuring in order to affirm its
legitimacy and prevent transmission of the disease. Focusing on the
Wenzhou Prefecture in Zhejiang Province, the area most seriously
stricken by cholera at the time, Xiaoping Fang demonstrates how
China's pandemic was far more than a health incident; it became a
significant social and political influence during a dramatic
transition for the People's Republic. China and the Cholera
Pandemic reveals how disease control and prevention, executed
through the government's large-scale, clandestine anticholera
campaign, were integral components of its restructuring
initiatives, aimed at restoring social order. The subsequent rise
of an emergency disciplinary health state furthered these aims
through quarantine and isolation, which profoundly impacted the
social epidemiology of the region, dividing Chinese society and
reinforcing hierarchies according to place, gender, and
socioeconomic status.
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.
The plight of animals in China has attracted intense interest in
recent times. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, speculation about the
origins of the virus have sparked global curiosity Speculation
...about the origins of COVID-19 has sparked curiosity about how
animals are treated, traded and consumed in China today.
In Animal Welfare in China , Peter Li explores the key
animal welfare challenges facing China now, including animal
agriculture, bear farming, and the trade and consumption of exotic
wildlife, dog meat, and other controversial products. He considers
how Chinese policymakers have approached these issues and speaks
with activists from China's growing animal rights movement.
Li also offers an overview of the history of animal welfare in
China, from ancient times through the enormous changes of the 20th
and 21st centuries. Some practices that are today described as
"traditional", he argues, are in fact quite recent developments,
reflecting the contemporary pursuit of economic growth rather than
long-standing cultural traditions.
Based on years of fieldwork and analysis, Animal Welfare in
China makes a compelling case for a more nuanced and
evidence-based approach to these complex issues.
Fragmented Memories and Screening Nostalgia for the Cultural Revolution argues that films and TV dramas about the Cultural Revolution made after China’s accession to the WTO in 2001 tend to represent ...personal memories in a markedly sentimental, nostalgic, and fragmented manner. This new trend is a significant departure from earlier films about the subject, which are generally interpreted as national allegories, not private expressions of grief, regret or other personal feelings. With China entering a postsocialist era, the ideological conflation of socialism and global capitalism has generated enough cultural ambiguity to allow a space for the expression of personalized reminiscences of the past. By presenting these personal memories—in effect alternative narratives to official history—on screen, individuals now seem to have some agency in narrating and constructing history. At the same time such autonomy can be easily undermined since the promotion of the sentiment of nostalgia is often subjected to commodification. Sentimental treatments of the past may simply be a marketing strategy. Underplaying political issues is also a ‘safer’ way for films and TV dramas to secure public release in mainland China. Meng concludes that the new mode of representing the past is shaped by the current sociopolitical conditions: these personal memories and micro-narratives can be understood as the defining ways of remembering in China’s postsocialist era.
PDF
