China's policies towards Tibet and other ethnic border territories during the political reign of Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists are often understood as a deliberate exercise of power. In this groundbreaking study, Hsiao-ting Lin demonstrates that the frontier was the subject neither of concerted aggression on the part of a centralized and indoctrinated Chinese government, nor of an ideologically driven nationalist ethnopolitics.

Lin utilizes recently declassified Chinese official documents to reveal how the Nationalist sovereignty over Tibet and other border regions was more...

Teachers' Schools and the Making of the Modern Chinese Nation-State is an innovative account of educational and social transformations in politically tumultuous early twentieth-century China. It focuses on the unique nature of Chinese teachers' schools, which bridged Chinese and Western ideals, and the critical role that these schools played in the changes sweeping Chinese society. It also documents their role in the empowerment of women and the production of grassroots forces leading to the Communist Revolution.

Teachers' Schools and the Making of the Modern Chinese Nation-State...

The People's Republic of China claims 22,000 kilometres of land borders and 18,000 kilometres of coast line. How did this vast country come into being? The state credo describes an ancient process of cultural expansion, where border peoples gratefully accepted Chinese high culture. But why has the "centre" so often been compelled to maintain control over its border regions? The essays in this volume look at this relationship over a long time span, questioning whether the process of expansion was a benevolent civilizing mission.

When the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949, Mao Zedong declared that "not even one person shall die of hunger." Yet some 30 million peasants died of starvation and exhaustion during the Great Leap Forward. Eating Bitterness reveals how men and women in rural and urban settings experienced the changes brought on by the party leaders' attempts to modernize China. This landmark volume lifts the curtain of party propaganda to expose the suffering of citizens and the deeply-contested nature of state-society relations in Maoist China.

China was afflicted by a brutal succession of conflicts through much of the 19th and 20th centuries. In this examination of how wartime suffering defined the nation and shaped its people, a distinguished group of historians of modern China look beyond the geopolitical aspects of war to explore its social, institutional, and cultural dimensions, from child rearing and education to massacres and warlord mutinies. Though accounts of war-inflicted suffering are often fragmented or politically motivated, the authors show that they are crucial to understanding the multiple fronts on which wars...

Merry Laughter and Angry Curses reveals how the late-Qing-era tabloid press became the voice of the people. This book shows the tabloid community to be both a producer of meanings and a participant in the social and cultural dialogue that would shake the foundations of imperial China and lead to the 1911 Republican Revolution.

Chieftains into Ancestors describes the intersection of imperial administration and chieftain-dominated local culture in the culturally diverse southwestern region of China. Contemplating the rhetorical question of how one can begin to rewrite the story of a conquered people whose past was never transcribed in the first place, the authors combine anthropological fieldwork with historical textual analysis to build a new regional history.

In Milestones on a Golden Road, Richard King presents pivotal works of fiction published under the watchful eye of China's Communist regime between 1945 and 1980. Addressing questions of literary production, King looks at how writers dealt with shifting ideological demands, what indigenous and imported traditions inspired them, and how they were able to depict a utopian Communist future to their readers, even as the present took a very different turn. Early "red classics" were followed by works featuring increasingly lurid images of joyful socialism, and later by fiction exposing...

Sporting Gender is the first book to explore the rise to fame of female athletes in China in the early twentieth century. Gao shows how these women coped with the conflicting demands of nationalist causes, unwanted male attention, and modern fame, arguing that the athletic female form helped to create a new ideal of modern womanhood in China. This book brings vividly to life the histories of these women and demonstrates how intertwined they were with the aims of the state and the needs of society.