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.

Part history, part biography, and part mystery story, Smokeless Sugar traces the formation of a national economy in China through an intriguing investigation of the 1936 execution of an allegedly corrupt Cantonese official. Feng Rui, a Western-educated agricultural expert, introduced modern sugar milling to China in the 1930s as a key component in a provincial investment program. Before long, however, he was accused of colluding with smugglers to pass foreign sugar off as a domestic product. Emily Hill makes the case that Feng was, in fact, a scapegoat in a multi-sided power...

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...

Keeping the Nation's House unsettles the assumption that home economics training lies far from the seats of power by revealing how elite Chinese women helped to build modern China one family at a time. Trained between the 1920s and the early 1950s, home economists did not believe that a clear line separated the private (nei) from the public (wai). They believed that the home economics courses taught in centres of higher learning would transform the most fundamental of political spaces -- the home -- by teaching women to nurture ideal families and manage projects of social reform for a...

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.