The Jianghan plain in central China is shaped by its relationship with water. Once a prolific rice-growing region that drew immigrants to its fertile paddy fields, since the eighteenth century it has become prone to devastating flooding and waterlogging. Over time, population pressures and dike building left more and more people in the region vulnerable to its frequent water calamities. The first environmental and socioeconomic history of the region, Coping with Calamity considers the Jianghan plain's volatile environment, the constant challenges it presented to peasants, and the...

In late 1995, the drama Heaven Above (Cangtian zaishang) debuted on Chinese TV. The series featured a villainous high-ranked government official and was the first of the wildly popular corruption dramas that have riveted the nation ever since. Staging Corruption looks at the rise, fall, and reincarnation of corruption dramas, and their articulation of the collective dreams, and nightmares, of China in the market reform era. It also considers how these dramas, as products of the interplay between television stations, production companies, media regulation, and political...

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...

In Intoxicating Manchuria, Norman Smith reveals how huge intoxicant industries were altered by warlord rule, Japanese occupation, and war. Powering the spread of alcohol and opium -- initially heralded as markers of class or modernity and whose use was well documented -- these industries flourished throughout the early twentieth century even as a vigorous anti-intoxicant movement raged.

Accountability and redress for Imperial Japan's wartime "comfort women" have provoked international debate in the past two decades. Yet there has been a dearth of first-hand accounts available in English from the women abducted and enslaved by the Japanese military in Mainland China - the major theatre of the Asia-Pacific War.

Chinese Comfort Women features the personal stories of the survivors of this devastating system of sexual enslavement. Offering insight into the conditions of these women's lives prior to and after the war, it points to the social, cultural, and...