This groundbreaking book by the eminent Peking University professor Hong Zicheng covers the literary scene in China during the 1949-1999 period, primarily focusing on fiction, poetry, drama, and prose writing. Reprinted sixteen times since its publication in the PRC in 1999, it is now available in English translation at last. The first section of the book deals with the 1949-1976 period. Often derided and ignored as an arid era for literature by both Chinese and overseas critics, Professor Hong describes the literature that was popular and officially acceptable at the time, and the cultural...

In Eighteen Lectures on Dunhuang, Rong Xinjiang provides an accessible overview of Dunhuang studies, an academic field that emerged following the discovery of a medieval monastic library at the Mogao caves near Dunhuang. The manuscripts were hidden in a cave at the beginning of the 11th century and remained unnoticed until 1900, when a Daoist monk accidentally found them and subsequently sold most of them to foreign explorers and scholars. The availability of this unprecedented amount of first-hand material from China's middle period provided a stimulus for a number of scholarly fields...

Winner of the 2014 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award In An Intellectual History of China, Professor Ge Zhaoguang presents a history of traditional Chinese knowledge, thought and belief to the late six century CE with a new approach offering a new perspective. It appropriates a wide range of source materials and emphasizes the necessity of understanding ideas and thought in their proper historical contexts. Its analytical narrative focuses on the dialectical interaction between historical background and intellectual thought. While discussing the complex dynamics of...

In Inheritance within Rupture, Luo Zhitian brings together ten essays to explore the themes of change and continuity, rupture and inheritance from the late Qing through the early Republic (1890s-1940s). Rejecting binaries such as tradition/modernity, conservative/liberal, Luo blurs the divisions between intellectual opponents and clarifies the divergences between scholarly friends. Centering these discussions around some of the most famous intellectual debates in the modern period, Luo challenges our understanding of ideological positions, political affiliation, and scholarly identity...

Rereading Modern Chinese History is a collection of short essays on aspects of the history of the Qing dynasty, a regime dominated by Manchus that ruled China from 1644 to 1911. Using sources from that period and earlier it addresses key themes on the nature of Qing rule. These include the defeat by the British in the Opium Wars, the twin-track administration of Manchus and Han Chinese, the rise of Chinese military leaders in southern China, the purchase of office and endemic corruption, the challenge of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and the failure of political reform. There are new...

Chen Guying, one of the leading scholars on Daoism in contemporary China, provides in his book The Philosophy of Life, A New Reading of the Zhuangzi a detailed analysis and a unique interpretation of Zhuangzi's Inner, Outer and Miscellaneous chapters. Unlike many other Chinese scholars Chen does not focus on a philological, but on a philosophical reading of the Zhuangzi highlighting the main topics of self-cultivation, aesthetics, and epistemology. Chen's perspectives on the Zhuangzi range from the historical background of the Warring States Period to his own personal (political)...

In Shifts of Power: Modern Chinese Thought and Society, Luo Zhitian brings together nine essays to explore the causes and consequences of various shifts of power in modern Chinese society, including the shift from scholars to intellectuals, from the traditional state to the modern state, and from the people to society. Adopting a microhistorical approach, Luo situates these shifts at the intersection of social change and intellectual evolution in the midst of modern China’s culture wars with the West. Those culture wars produced new problems for China, but also provided some new...

In Shifts of Power: Modern Chinese Thought and Society, Luo Zhitian brings together nine essays to explore the causes and consequences of various shifts of power in modern Chinese society, including the shift from scholars to intellectuals, from the traditional state to the modern state, and from the people to society. Adopting a microhistorical approach, Luo situates these shifts at the intersection of social change and intellectual evolution in the midst of modern China’s culture wars with the West. Those culture wars produced new problems for China, but also provided some new...

In The Cold War and the Origin of Diplomacy of People’s Republic of China, Niu Jun offers a new analytical framework for understanding the Cold War and PRC’s diplomacy from 1949 to 1955. He sees it as an interactive historical process between the Cold War, China’s domestic transition from revolution to nation-building, and the revolutionary ideology in the minds of Chinese leaders and Chinese people. Niu Jun’s analytical framework sheds fresh light on the widely studied events of PRC’s diplomacy such as China’s alliance with the Soviet Union and confrontation with the U.S.,...