Thomas Buoye examines the impact of large-scale economic change on social conflict in eighteenth-century China. He draws on a large number of documented cases of violent property disputes to recreate the social tensions fostered by the development of property rights, an unprecedented growing population, and the increasing strain on land and resources. This book challenges the "markets" and "moral economy" theories of economic behavior. Applying the theories of Douglass North for the first time to this subject, Buoye uses an institutional framework to understand seemingly irrational economic...

This work studies one of China's greatest poets, Tu Fu, as both cultural icon and literary genius.

This is the first comprehensive study in a Western language of Liu Tsung-yUan, one of the finest prose stylists China has ever produced. Liu was not only a leading writer of T'ang China (618-906) but also an important thinker of his time. Examining every major aspect of his life and thought, the book also discusses the relationship of his thought to mid-T'ang intellectual changes and offers a new interpretation of the origins of a key intellectual watershed, the rise of Neo-Confucianism in the eleventh century.

To win the approval of China's native elites, Qing China's new Manchu leaders developed an ambitious plan to return Confucianism to civil society by observing laborious and time-consuming mourning rituals, the touchstones of a well-ordered Confucian society. The first to do so in any language, Norman Kutcher's study of mourning looks beneath the rhetoric to demonstrate how the state--unwilling to make the sacrifices that a genuine commitment to proper mourning demanded--quietly but forcefully undermined, not reinvigorated, the Confucian mourning system.

Stone Lake is the first translation and study in a Western language of the poetry of Fan Chengda, one of the most famous Chinese poets of the twelfth century. For the nonspecialist reader the main attraction of the book will be the translations of Fan Chengda's poetry, which make up almost half of the text, and includes poems on such familiar themes as the Chinese countryside, peasant life, Buddhism, and growing old. The more technical part of the book contains a biography of the poet, a discussion of his affiliation with poets of the generation before him, a detailed analysis of his style,...

This study examines law enforcement within the context of Sung society. Professor McKnight shows that the group of criminals who were the core of the habitual criminal group in Sung China were young unattached males with few lifeskills. What became of the criminal after capture and conviction is also an important aspect of this study, which addresses basic questions in Chinese punishment. This work is the first comprehensive study of law enforcement in traditional China. The depth and rigour to which the subject is treated would make it most appropriate for scholars in legal history and East...

This is the second of two volumes in this major Cambridge history dealing with the gradual decline of the Ch'ing empire in China (the first was volume 10). Volume 11 surveys the persistence and deterioration of the old order in China during the late nineteenth century, and the profound stirring during that period, which led to China's great twentieth-century revolution. The contributors focus on commercial and technological growth, foreign relations, the stimulation of Chinese intellectual life by the outside world, and military triumphs and disasters. They show that the effects of the...

This is the first of two volumes of this authoritative Cambridge history which review the Republican period, between the demise of imperial China and the establishment of the People's Republic. These years from 1912 to 1949 were marked by civil war, revolution and invasion; but also by change and growth in the economic, social, intellectual and cultural spheres. The chapters examine economic trends in the period and the rise of the new middle class. Intellectual trends are surveyed to show the changes in traditional Chinese values and the foreign influences which played a major role in...

This volume of The Cambridge History of China considers the political, military, social, and economic developments of the Ch'ing empire to 1800. The period begins with the end of the resurgent Ming dynasty, covered in Volumes 7 and 8, and ends with the beginning of the collapse of the imperial system in the nineteenth century, described in Volume 10. Ten chapters elucidate the complexities of the dynamic interactions between emperors and their servitors, Manchus and non-Manchu populations, various elite groups, competing regional interests, merchant networks and agricultural producers, and...

This is the first of the two final volumes of The Cambridge History of China, which describe the efforts of the People's Republic of China to grapple with the problems of adaptation to modern times. Volume 14 deals with the achievements of the economic and human disasters of the new regime's first sixteen years (1949 65). Part I chronicles the attempt to adapt the Soviet model of development to China, and Part II covers the subsequent efforts of China's leaders to find native solutions that would provide more rapid and appropriate answers to China's problems. Each of the two parts of the...