As if under the satirical magnifying glass, the Xingshi Yinyuan Zhuan, an anonymous traditional Chinese novel, portrays local society and provincial life in seventeenth-century China in comic and grotesque close-up. A dystopian satire, the novel provides fascinating insights into the popular culture and wild imagination of men and women in late imperial China. Using an array of sources--fiction, poetry, texts on medical ethics, religious thought, political and philosophical treatises, morality books and local gazetteers--Carnival in China develops a style of reading that...

In December 1941, the fifth year in an all-scale cataclysmic Sino-Japanese war that devoured much of Eastern China, the city of Shanghai entered into an era of full occupation. This was the moment when a group of young women authors began writing and soon took over the cultural scene of the besieged metropolis. Women, War, Domesticity reconstructs cultures of reading, writing, and publishing in the city of Shanghai during the three years and eight months of Japanese occupation. It specifically depicts the formation of a new cultural arena initiated by a group of women who not only...

This socio-political analysis of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) sheds new light on the link between China's educational reforms and the ideological control exerted by the Party-state. It explores the dynamics of the ways in which the academic community has carved out and utilised the spaces between the academic and Party leadership and the free will of the individual. By differentiating between various forms of power, the author shows how knowledge produced at CASS is influenced not only as a direct result of top-down decisions-making but also unintentionally through...

During the late Qing reform era (1895-1912), women for the first time in Chinese history emerged in public space in collective groups. They assumed new social and educational roles and engaged in intense debates about the place of women in China's present and future. These debates found expression in new media, including periodicals and pictorials, which not only harnessed the power of existing cultural forms but also encouraged experimentation with a variety of new literary genres and styles - works increasingly produced by and for Chinese women. Different Worlds of Discourse explores...

Twentieth century China has seen local societies undergo unprecedented transformations accompanied by a remarkable continuity in state practice. In this path-breaking study of two ethnically different communities, the matrilineal Mosuo and the patrilineal Han, in northwest Yunnan province, the author traces cultural change from a historical perspective in relation to ecology and politics. The treatment of state penetration into local society challenges the conventional binary narrative of state-society and Han-non-Han relations. With its interdisciplinary approach, this book enriches the...

Generations of Chinese scholars have made China synonymous with the Great Wall and presented its civilization as fundamentally land-bound. This volume challenges this perspective, demonstrating that China was not a "Walled Kingdom," certainly not since the Yongjia Disturbance in 311. China reached out to the maritime world far more actively than historians have acknowledged, while the seas and what came from the seas--from Islam, fragrances and Jesuits to maize, opium and clocks--significantly changed the course of history, and have been of inestimable importance to China since the Ming. This...