Contemporary Chinese Studies

Chiang Kai-shek’s Critical Years analyzes an enigmatic figure at the peak of his influence, revealing an improvisational approach to political problems that brought remarkable successes alongside ultimate defeat.

Not Just a Man’s War uncovers the extraordinary stories of ordinary Chinese women during the horrific fourteen-year War of Resistance against Japan, from 1931 to 1945.

The YWCA in China traces the history of this Christian organization – and the social philosophies of the Chinese women who led it – through the tumultuous first half of the twentieth century.

China’s Asymmetric Statecraft uncovers the different narratives and paradigms that constitute Chinese foreign policy toward its weaker neighbours, alerting us to a dramatically changing international environment.

Frontier Fieldwork exposes the transformative power that early-twentieth-century fieldwork had in placing the Sino-Tibetan borderlands at the centre of China’s nation-making process and race to modernity.

Saving the Nation through Culture tells the little-known story of how a group of Chinese scholars attempted to use “low culture” to promote national unity during a long period of crisis.

This first major comprehensive study of Yuan Shikai in more than half a century explores the controversial life of one of the most important figures in China’s transition from empire to republic.

In the first Western language history of Liangshan, Joseph Lawson argues that the region was not inherently violent but made violent by turmoil elsewhere in China.

Beyond the Amur charts the pivotal role that an overlooked frontier river region and its environment played in Qing China’s politics and Sino-Russian relations.

This unique analysis of Manchuria’s environmental history provides an overview of the climatic and imperialist forces that have shaped an area of ongoing geopolitical importance.

This exploration of the interactive relationship between Chinese NGOs and the Chinese state provides fresh insights into how the Chinese government operates and why it needs non-governmental organizations to survive.

Presenting a historical survey of China’s boundary disputes and settlements, Hyer demonstrates that its approach to territorial disputes has been pragmatic and strategic.

A history of the convergence of Western and Chinese medical practices in modern China.

The first critical analysis of Chinese “cultural entrepreneurs,” businesspeople whose entrepreneurial endeavours in China and Southeast Asia the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries transformed the cultural sphere.

A study of the television dramas about government corruption that became hugely popular in the mid-1990s and their reflection of China’s post-Socialist anxieties.

The voices of Chinese immigrants who settled in the pre-1950s Canadian prairies come alive in this extraordinary record of migration, settlement, and community life.

The first environmental and socioeconomic history of the Jianghan plain in central China, focusing on the peasants’ relationship with a volatile environment.

A study of the Samsui women who migrated from China to Singapore, where they have been commemorated as nation-builders.

Leading international scholars examine the production of culture during China’s rise to global superpower in the last quarter of a century.

This is the first English-language book to record the experiences and testimonies of Chinese women abducted and detained as sex slaves in Japanese military “comfort stations” during Japan’s 1931-45 invasion of China.

This book explores the casting of China’s earliest female Olympians as celebrities within the context of a national crisis, born of internal conflicts and external attack by Japan.

An in-depth examination of how the Chinese imperial state impacted the social order of southwestern China’s minority peoples and redefined their histories and culture.

Milestones on a Golden Road examines works of fiction written in China between 1945 and 1980, when the arts were required to reflect a Maoist vision of history and society.

Merry Laughter and Angry Curses investigates the proliferation of late-Qing-era tabloid journalism and the tabloids’ role in subverting the political and intellectual establishment.

Examines how alcohol, opium, and addiction were portrayed in the culture of China’s Northeast during the first half of the twentieth century.

Engaging with topics central to scholarly debates on modern China, this book shows that China’s early twentieth-century school system, a product of negotiation and compromise, was more successful than previous scholarship has allowed.

This collection moves beyond the geopolitical sphere to examine the multiple fronts – personal, social, and institutional – on which wars in modern China have been fought, experienced, and remembered.

Explores the vision and aspirations of elite Chinese women – home economists – who believed that the birth of modern China should begin in the home.

Eating Bitterness reveals what the Great Leap Forward meant for ordinary men and women in Maoist China.

A revisionist history of a unique administrative experiment – the Chinese administration of Manchuria’s Russians in the 1920s – that supports a more nuanced view of Chinese nationalism and China’s relationship with minority cultures.

An investigation into the 1936 execution of a Cantonese official leads to a reassessment of regional and national politics and state-led industrialization in Republican China.

This book decodes the rhetoric of China’s turbulent decade, a time of both brutal iconoclasm and radical experimentation in the arts, to offer new insights into works that have transcended their times.

The New Silk Road Diplomacy traces how China, faced with internal and external challenges to its authority following the collapse of the Soviet Union, constructed a gradualist approach to Central Asia that prioritized multilateral diplomacy.

Norman Smith reveals the literary world of Japanese-occupied Manchuria (Manchukuo, 1932-45) and examines the lives, careers, and literary legacies of seven prolific Chinese women writers during the period. Smith shows how a complex blend of fear and freedom produced an environment in which Chinese women writers could articulate dissatisfaction with the overtly patriarchal and imperialist nature of the Japanese cultural agenda while working in close association with colonial institutions.

The first book in English on women’s history in twentieth-century Manchuria, Resisting Manchukuo adds to a growing literature that challenges traditional understandings of Japanese colonialism.

The essays in this volume look at China's relationships with border peoples over a long span of time, questioning whether the process of expansion was a benevolent civilizing mission.

This sophisticated collection of essays provides an innovative analysis of gender relations at the nexus of globalization, Chinese patriarchy, and post-colonialism in Hong Kong.

This anthropological study of Chinese archaeologists shows how the discipline works within a Chinese social structure, and uncovers the complex underpinnings of that context.

In 1989, most observers believed that China’s political reform process had been violently short-circuited, but few would now dispute that China is in a very important transition. Central to this transition has been an extraordinary change in the formal intellectual conception of ‘democracy.’ In this book, Yijiang Ding presents a multi-dimensional picture of China at the political crossroads. Chinese Democracy looks at the significant change in the state-society relationship in contemporary China in three interrelated areas: intellectual, social, and cultural. Drawing heavily on recent Chinese scholarship, Ding shows that the emergent theory on the dualism of state and society is contemporaneous with a new cognitive and cultural appreciation of the people’s independence from state authority. Is China moving toward liberal democracy? Does Western engagement with China contribute economically and politically to this shift? These are the questions at the heart of the book. Which are especially timely, given the recent reconstruction of political regimes worldwide.

Gutenberg in Shanghai demonstrates how Western technology and evolving traditional values resulted in the birth of a unique form of print capitalism whose influence on Chinese culture was far-reaching and irreversible.

A forceful look at the long-term social and psychological impact of warfare on modern China’s civilian population.

Wing Chung Ng captures the fascinating story of the city's Chinese in their search for identity.

This social and political history of the struggle for literacy in rural China shows how China's revolutionary leaders conceived and promoted literacy in the countryside and how villagers made use of the literacy education they were offered.

This innovative account examines the social and political impacts of Chinese teacher's schools in the early 20th century, their role in a society in transition, and their production of grassroots forces that lead to the Communist Revolution.

A counterpoint to erroneous historical assumptions, this book argues that Nationalist sovereignty over Tibet and China's other border regions was the result of rhetorical grandstanding by Chiang Kai-shek and his regime.

The Cult of Happiness is among the first studies in any field to treat folk art and folk print as historical text. As such, this richly illustrated volume will appeal to a wide range of scholars in Asian studies, history, art history, folklore and print, as well as anyone having a passion for the creativity and culture of rural society.