This study examines the changing effects of labor migration on the countryside of post-Mao China. Most of the changes are occurring because the migrants send money home and return to their villages for visits or to resettle. The return flows of money, people and information affects rural inequalities, rural spending patterns, agriculture, family relationships, the position of women, and the interactions between villagers and officials. Importantly, some returned migrants even create businesses at home. The book is based on in-depth fieldwork in the Chinese countryside, and it draws...

Edmund Fung examines an important phase of development in China's long quest for democracy. The momentum for democracy, he contends, grew strongest between 1929 and 1949 through civil opposition to the one-party rule of the Guomindang. The Nationalist era contained the germs of a reformist, liberal order, the legacy of which can be seen in the pro-democracy movement of the post-Mao period. This book fills an important gap in the historical literature on Chinese intellectuals between May Fourth radicalism and the Chinese Communists' accession to power.

Yung-chen Chiang tells the story of the origins, visions, and achievements of the social sciences in China during the first half of the twentieth century. He focuses on the efforts of social scientists at three institutions to relate their disciplines to the needs of Chinese society. As all three groups received funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, their stories offer a window onto Sino-American interactions, revealing how the social sciences became a lingua franca of the cultural frontier. This study advances our understanding of the transfer, indigenization, and international patronage...

Xiaoqun Xu makes a compelling and original contribution to the study of China's modernization with this study of the rise of professional associations in Republican China, in their birthplace of Shanghai, and of their political and socio-cultural milieus. Xu addresses a central issue in China studies, the relationship between state and society, and proposes an alternative to the Western-derived concept of civil society. This book illuminates the multidimensional complexity of modernization and nationalism in twentieth-century China, and provides a concrete case for comparative studies of...

This book focuses on China's rural industries, offering an innovative, theoretical framework to explain insitutional change. Susan Whiting explores the complex interactions of individuals, institutions, and the broader political economy to examine variation and change in property rights and extractive institutions in China's rural industrial sector. Whiting explains why public ownership predominated during the early years of reform and why privatization is now taking place. This book will be of interest not only to students and scholars of Chinese economic development, but also of comparative...

The origins of the "iron rice bowl" of comprehensive cradle-to-grave benefits and lifetime employment in Chinese factories is traced in this book. It suggests that, in some ways, the Chinese revolution in 1949 was not as revolutionary as most have thought. This is one of a very few books to look comparatively at the Chinese industrial workplace in pre-1949 China and post-1949 China. Frazier has mined sources that were unavailable to previous generations of researchers on China.

This book documents the evolution of modern Chinese banking, from the establishment in 1897 of the first Chinese bank (along a Western model), to the abrupt interruption in 1937 of professional banking by the Japanese invasion. Drawing from original documents of major Chinese banks, Linsun Cheng explains how the banks were able to grow into viable and self-sustaining institutions in China, despite a succession of foreign and domestic crises. Rich with historical details, this book presents a comprehensive narrative of the origins and growth of professional banks.

Andrew Scobell examines the use of Chinese military force abroad as in Korea (1950), Vietnam (1979), and the Taiwan Strait (1995-1996) and domestically, as during the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and in the 1989 military crackdown in Tiananmen square. Scobell warns that a "Cult of Defense" disposes Chinese leaders to rationalize all military deployment as defensive. However, changes in the People's Liberation Army's doctrine and capabilities over the past two decades suggest that China's 21st Century leaders may use military force more readily than their predecessors.

This book provides the most comprehensive analysis of one of the most important issues in contemporary China: the tensions between the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese state institutions. Taking the "neo-institutionalist" approach, Zheng suggests that the Party faces an institutional dilemma: it cannot live with the state, and it cannot live without the state. It is not only conceptually constructive, but analytically imperative to distinguish the Chinese state from the Communist Party. Zheng makes efforts to overcome the tendency toward specialized scholarship at the expense of...

Since 1978, reform policies introduced in rural China have had a profound impact on women's work and gender divisions of labor. This book provides detailed information on the shifts in women's work patterns that have occurred. It explains how and why these shifts have come about, and how they relate to other aspects of women's position in society. While other aspects of reform in rural China have been analyzed extensively, this is one of very few, and to date the most comprehensive, studies of the effects of reform on rural women.