The tax burden imposed upon the farmer has become a major source of discontent in the Chinese countryside and a worrisome source of political and social instability. Thomas P. Bernstein and Xiabo LU examine the heavy, informal taxation, revealing how peasants defend their interests by adopting peaceful and violent strategies of collective resistance. Bernstein and LU explain why the central government, often siding with the peasants, has been unable to resolve the tax burden issue by instituting a sound, reliable financial system.

An Intellectual History of Modern China is the only comprehensive book on modern China's intellectual development from the nineteenth to the end of the twentieth century.While existing studies tend to focus on individual Chinese thinkers, this book includes all the major Chinese thinkers, as well as political figures who have influenced China's modern history. Merle Goldman and Leo Ou-fan Lee introduce this this collection of essays, drawn from the later volumes (Volumes 12, 13, 14, 15) of The Cambridge History of China. The chapters, authored by eminent historians and social scientists in...

What should we make of claims by members of other groups to have moralities different from our own? Human Rights in Chinese Thought gives an extended answer to this question in the first study of its kind. It integrates a full account of the development of Chinese rights discourse with philosophical consideration of how various communities should respond to contemporary Chinese claims about the uniqueness of their human rights concepts. The book elaborates a plausible kind of moral pluralism and demonstrates that Chinese ideas of human rights do indeed have distinctive characteristics, but it...

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...

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...

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.

Viewing the evolving relationship between the Chinese Communist Party and private entrepreneurs, this book examines the implications of recruiting entrepreneurs into the communist party. It has given rise to the label of "red capitalists." Although many foreign observers expect economic change to lead inevitably to political change in China, this book reveals that China's entrepreneurs are willing partners with the state; not an autonomous force in opposition to the state.

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.

Thomas G. Moore examines the role of the outside world as a source of change in post-Mao China. Based on extensive documentary and interview material, the book adds the Chinese case to a long tradition of country-based studies by political economists, historians, and area specialists that have chronicled the experiences of developing countries as they enter specific industrial markets in the world economy. This book will be timely and provocative reading for anyone concerned with the nature of China's deepening participation in the world economy and its consequences for the country's...

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.