This book traces the evolving uses of writing to command assent and obedience in early China, an evolution that culminated in the establishment of a textual canon as the foundation of imperial authority. Its central theme is the emergence of this body of writings as the textual double of the state, and of the text-based sage as the double of the ruler. The book examines the full range of writings employed in early China, such as divinatory records, written communications with ancestors, government documents, the collective writings of philosophical and textual traditions, speeches attributed to historical figures, chronicles, verse anthologies, commentaries, and encyclopedic compendia. Lewis shows how these writings served to administer populations, control officials, form new social groups, invent new models of authority, and create an artificial language whose mastery generated power and whose graphs became potent objects. Writing and Authority in Early China traces the enterprise of creating a parallel reality within texts that depicted the entire world. These texts provided models for the invention of a world empire, and one version ultimately became the first state canon of imperial China. This canon served to perpetuate the dream and the reality of the imperial system across the centuries.

《新近海外中国社会史论文选译》是教育部人文社会科学重点研究基地重大项目“二十世纪中国社会史研究的回顾与展望”的子课题——“新近海外中国社会史研究论文选译”的研究成果。

20世纪初，由于义和团运动和辛亥革命的影响，大量中国文物向海外流失。本书作者在大量海外的原始资料和调查研究的基础上，考察了中国文物于近代的各种流出形态，阐明其复杂的历史背景，特别围绕其与日本的关系加以探讨，并着眼于日本古董商对中国文物的传播与收藏的形成所起的作用，阐明其意义，其中尤其突出的是山中商会的会长山中定次郎所处的决定性地位。此外，书中还分别通过对中国古陶瓷器和青铜器的典型事例，考察了日本近代中国美术鉴赏成立的过程和意义。全书资料翔实，尤其是使用到许多国内难得一见的原始资料，视角独特，分析透彻，是一部具有极高学术意义和参考价值的有关中国艺术品流转与鉴赏史的专著。

在今天的世界上，有很多而且是越来越多的人自视为中国人，他们的数量比欧洲和北美居民的总和还要多。作为一个国家、一类文化，中国何以发展繁衍得如此之大？它为什么没有像世界上其他许多帝国，如罗马帝国和奥斯曼帝国那样土崩瓦解？它的单一专制的政府为什么能够而且又是如何统治如此众多的国民的？ 《剑桥插图中国史》探讨了中华文明形成的诸多基本问题，涵盖了中国历史上的艺术、文化、经济、社会、对妇女的态度、对外政策、移民以及政治等方方面面。尤其侧重考察了社会和文化的发展及其对普通人生活的影响。为了避免外国学者阐释中国历史的局限性，作者尽可能地参考了中国各界对许多重大历史事件和历史发展走向的阐释。 对于中国这一独特文明，本书既有宏观上的综合概述，又有微观上的如对它的历史连续性、断裂带所做的具体剖析。这是一本西方人了解中国历史及其社会文化的必读图书。

In the last decades, the scholarship on issues of national and cultural identity of China has been constantly on the rise. This edited volume aims at addressing these issues by applying Pierre Nora’s approach of places of memory (lieux de mémoire) to the Chinese context. The volume assembles a number of articles that focus on the most significant places of memory in modern and contemporary China, ranging from Qin Shihuang’s Terracotta Warriors to the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall. The genesis and nature of these places are discussed in detail by combining approaches of both cultural and historical sciences. In addition, issues of cultural memory and politics are addressed in order to question the ideological construction of these places.

《增长的迷思:海外学者论中国经济发展》内容简介：随着中国的迅速崛起，海外中国问题研究急剧扩展，世界上到处都在述说着“中国故事”。关于中国的“统治说”与“崩溃说”在全球文化语境中各执一端、相互矛盾，这其中包含多少学理上的探究和现实中的策略尚待更进一步的讨论，然而，有一个事实不可否认：在当代全球体系下，“中国”已成为全球学者共同关注的热门词汇。“中国研究”正牵动着世界相关领域专家的问题意识。 处在十字路口的中国何去何从？中国经济高速增长渐成“浮云”？“新”贫困人口层出，如何实现公平？全球争夺石油战中，中国能否胜出？《增长的迷思:海外学者论中国经济发展》收录了世界各国知名学者对中国经济发展的深层思考，分别从区域发展不平衡与贫富差距问题、能源问题、环境与粮食安全问题、科技与知识创新问题、前景等六个方面加以阐释。所选文章均为外籍学者对中国经济发展问题进行学术探讨的第一手资料，集中呈现了海外学界对于“中国经济发展”的研究细节。

Village China Under Socialism and Reform offers a comprehensive account of rural life after the communist revolution, detailing villager involvement in political campaigns since the 1950s, agricultural production under the collective system, family farming and non-agricultural economy in the reform, and everyday life in the family and community. Li's rich examination draws on original documents from local agricultural collectives, newly accessible government archives, and his own fieldwork in Qin village of Jiangsu province to highlight the continuities in rural transformation. Firmly disagreeing with those who claim that recent developments in rural China represent a radical break with pre-reform sociopolitical practices and patterns of production, Li instead draws a clear history connecting the current situation to ecological, social, and institutional changes that have persisted from the collective era.

In China, a nation where the worlds of politics and art are closely linked, Western classical music was considered during the cultural revolution to be an imperialist intrusion, in direct conflict with the native aesthetic. In this revealing chronicle of the relationship between music and politics in twentieth-century China, Richard Kraus examines the evolution of China's ever-changing disposition towards European music and demonstrates the steady westernization of Chinese music. Placing China's cultural conflicts in global perspective, he traces the lives of four Chinese musicians and reflects on how their experiences are indicative of China's place at the furthest edge of an expanding Western international order.

China's one-child rule is unassailably one of the most controversial social policies of all time. In the first book of its kind, Susan Greenhalgh draws on twenty years of research into China's population politics to explain how the leaders of a nation of one billion decided to limit all couples to one child. Focusing on the historic period 1978-80, when China was just reentering the global capitalist system after decades of self-imposed isolation, Greenhalgh documents the extraordinary manner in which a handful of leading aerospace engineers hijacked the population policymaking process and formulated a strategy that treated people like missiles. Just One Child situates these science- and policymaking practices in their broader contexts--the scientization and statisticalization of sociopolitical life--and provides the most detailed and incisive account yet of the origins of the one-child policy.

In a public square in Beijing in 1904, multiple murderer Wang Weiqin was executed before a crowd of onlookers. He was among the last to suffer the extreme punishment known as lingchi. Called by Western observers "death by a thousand cuts" or "death by slicing," this penalty was reserved for the very worst crimes in imperial China.A unique interdisciplinary history, "Death by a Thousand Cuts" is the first book to explore the history, iconography, and legal contexts of Chinese tortures and executions from the tenth century until lingchi's abolition in 1905. The authors then turn their attention to an in-depth investigation of "oriental" tortures in the Western imagination. While early modern Europeans often depicted Chinese institutions as rational, nineteenth- and twentieth-century readers consumed pictures of lingchi executions as titillating curiosities and evidence of moral inferiority. By examining these works in light of European conventions associated with despotic government, Christian martyrdom, and ecstatic suffering, the authors unpack the stereotype of innate Chinese cruelty and explore the mixture of fascination and revulsion that has long characterized the West's encounter with "other" civilizations.Compelling and thought-provoking, "Death by a Thousand Cuts" questions the logic by which states justify tormenting individuals and the varied ways by which human beings have exploited the symbolism of bodily degradation for political aims.

In clear and compelling prose, Judith Shapiro relates the great, untold story of the devastating impact of Chinese politics on China's environment during the Mao years. Maoist China provides an example of extreme human interference in the natural world in an era in which human relationships were also unusually distorted. Under Mao, the traditional Chinese ideal of "harmony between heaven and humans" was abrogated in favor of Mao's insistence that "Man Must Conquer Nature." Mao and the Chinese Communist Party's "war" to bend the physical world to human will often had disastrous consequences both for human beings and the natural environment. Mao's War Against Nature argues that the abuse of people and the abuse of nature are often linked. Shapiro's account, told in part through the voices of average Chinese citizens and officials who lived through and participated in some of the destructive campaigns, is both eye-opening and heartbreaking. Judith Shapiro teaches environmental politics at American University in Washington, DC. She is co-author, with Liang Heng, of several well known books on China, including Son of the Revolution (Random House, 1984) and After the Nightmare (Knopf, 1986). She was one of the first Americans to work in China after the normalization of U.S.-China relations in 1979.

This monumental work provides a new perspective on the historical significance of famines in China over the past three hundred years. It examines the relationship between the interventionist state policies of the eighteenth-century Qing emperors (0;the golden age of famine relief1;), the environmental and political crises of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (when China was called 0;the Land of Famine1;), and the ambitions of the Mao era (which tragically led to the greatest famine in human history). In addition to a wide array of documentary sources, the book employs quantitative analysis to measure the economic impact of natural crises, state policies, and markets. In this way, the theories of Qing statesmen that have received much attention in recent scholarship are linked to actual practices and outcomes. Using the Zhili-Hebei region as its focus, the book also reveals the unusual role played by the institutions and policies designed to ensure food security for the capital, Beijing.

"A strong antidote to the growing sinophobia in the U.S."—Wall Street Journal Many see China and the United States on the path to confrontation. The Chinese leadership violates human rights norms. It maintains a harsh rule in Tibet, spars aggressively with Taiwan, and is clamping down on Hong Kong. A rising power with enormous assets, China increasingly considers American interests an obstacle to its own. But, the authors argue, the United States is the least of China's problems. Despite its sheer size, economic vitality, and drive to upgrade its military forces, China remains a vulnerable power, crowded on all sides by powerful rivals and potential foes. As it has throughout its history, China faces immense security challenges, and their sources are at and within China's own borders. China's foreign policy is calibrated to defend its territorial integrity against antagonists who are numerous, near, and strong. The authors trace the implications of this central point for China's relations with the United States and the rest of the world. http://www.wwnorton.com/catalog/spring98/greatwall.htm There is no country with which the United States has had a more complex and unpredictable relationship than China. With great intelligence and insight, Nathan and Ross provide us with the context of this difficult if "special relathinship." - Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Bekerley A challenging view of a vulnerable, uncertain, often weak China, seeking status and securtiy....[The book is]espeically good on Peking's attitude toward human rights. - Jonathan Mirsky Indispensable for anyone seeking a deeper, more nuanced understanding of one of the worlds' more enigmatic nations. - Gordon H. Chang Los Angeles Times Book Review

Economic modernity is so closely associated with nationhood that it is impossible to imagine a modern state without an equally modern economy. Even so, most people would have difficulty defining a modern economy and its connection to nationhood. In Saving the Nation, Margherita Zanasi explores this connection by examining the first nation-building attempt in China after the fall of the empire in 1911. Challenging the assumption that nations are products of technological and socioeconomic forces, Zanasi argues that it was notions of what constituted a modern nation that led the Nationalist nation-builders to shape China’s institutions and economy. In their reform effort, they confronted several questions: What characterized a modern economy? What role would a modern economy play in the overall nation-building effort? And how could China pursue economic modernization while maintaining its distinctive identity? Zanasi expertly shows how these questions were negotiated and contested within the Nationalist Party. Silenced in the Mao years, these dilemmas are reemerging today as a new leadership once again redefines the economic foundation of the nation.