Cynthia J. Brokaw is Associate Professor of History at Ohio State University and author of "The Ledgers of Merit and Demerit: Social Change and Moral Order in Late Imperial China "(1991). Kai-wing Chow is Professor of History and of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, and author of "The Rise of Confucian Ritualism in Late Imperial China: Ethics, Classics, and Lineage Discourse "(1994) and "Publishing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern China "(2004).