Primary productivity of the biosphere

L'A. etudie le processus d'identification d'une majorite ethnique (ici les Han) par rapport a des minorites ethniques. Si les Han se percoivent comme des etres modernes, c'est que les minorites sont considerees comme des societes primitives en voie d'evolution. Ainsi, dans l'art chinois, une des thematiques favorites est celle des femmes thai, hani, et Li se baignant dans une riviere, symbole d'exotisme et d'erotisme interdits aux Han. Une ecole de peinture « Yunnan School » a ete cree pour que les peintres han peignent ces minorites sous forme de cliches (nu exotique et erotique). Il en va de meme pour les films. Des protestations se sont fait entendre notamment de la part des musulmans.

Representing Nationality in China: Refiguring Majority/Minority Identities

Blending fine-grained case studies with overarching theory, this book seeks both to integrate Southeast Asia into world history and to rethink much of Eurasia's premodern past. It argues that Southeast Asia, Europe, Japan, China, and South Asia all embodied idiosyncratic versions of a Eurasian-wide pattern whereby local isolates cohered to form ever larger, more stable, more complex political and cultural systems. With accelerating force, climatic, commercial, and military stimuli joined to produce patterns of linear-cum-cyclic construction that became remarkably synchronized even between regions that had no contact with one another. Yet this study also distinguishes between two zones of integration, one where indigenous groups remained in control and a second where agency gravitated to external conquest elites. Here, then, is a fundamentally original view of Eurasia during a 1,000-year period that speaks to both historians of individual regions and those interested in global trends.

Strange parallels : Southeast Asia in global context, c 800-1830

1. Introduction: the old order John K. Fairbank 2. Ch'ing Inner Asia c.1800 Joseph Fletcher 3. Dynastic decline and the roots of rebellion Susan Mann Jones and Philip A. Kuhn 4. The Canton trade and the Opium War Frederic Wakeman, Jr 5. The creation of the treaty system John K. Fairbank 6. The Taiping Rebellion Philip A. Kuhn 7. Sino-Russian relations, 1800-62 Joseph Fletcher 8. The heyday of the Ch'ing order in Mongolia, Sinkiang and Tibet Joseph Fletcher 9. The Ch'ing Restoration Kwang-Ching Liu 10. Self-strengthening: the pursuit of Western technology Ting-Yee Kuo and Kwang-Ching Liu 11. Christian missions and their impact to 1900 Paul A. Cohen Bibliographical essays Bibliography Glossary and index.

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The Cambridge History of China

China’s long-term economic dynamics pose a formidable challenge to economic historians. The Qing Empire (1644 –1911), the world’ s largest national economy before 1800, experienced a tripling of population during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with no signs of diminishing per capita income. While the timing remains in dispute, a vast gap emerged between newly rich industrial nations and China’s lagging economy in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Only with an unprecedented growth spurt beginning in the late 1970s did this great divergence separating China from the global leaders substantially diminish, allowing China to regain its former standing among the world’s largest economies. This essay develops an integrated framework for understanding that entire history, including both the divergence and the recent convergent trend. We explain how deeply embedded political and economic institutions that contributed to a long process of extensive growth before 1800 subsequently prevented China from capturing the benefits associated with the Industrial Revolution. During the twentieth century, the gradual erosion of these historic constraints and of new obstacles erected by socialist planning eventually opened the door to China’s current boom. Our analysis links China’s recent development to important elements of its past, while using recent success to provide fresh perspectives on the critical obstacles undermining earlier modernization efforts, and their eventual removal. (JEL N15, N45, O11, O47, P21, P24, P26)

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From Divergence to Convergence: Reevaluating the History behind China's Economic Boom

The last stand of Chinese conservatism

"Great themes run through this book: local differentiation and societal integration, reform and revolution, innovation and renewal, conservatism and radicalism, tradition and modernity. All relate to the fascinating dialectic of Chinese history." This comment by G. William Skinner aptly describes this pioneering volume in which twelve specialists in Chinese history discuss the great questions of history in the dramatic context of the "New China" of the early twentieth century. The work of young scholars from seven countries who have had access to Chinese, British, and French archives opened only in recent years, the book provides new findings that presage not only a reinterpretation of the Revolution of 1911 itself but also of the dynamic links between Imperial China and both the communist revolution of 1927-49 and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of today. "An outstanding example of historians' inquiries is this collection of essays by 12 authorities, brilliantly edited by Mary Wright of Yale. Brilliant because unlike most such cooperative endeavors, the studies in this volume focus on a single major topic, China in the years around the revolution of 1911. The papers vary in scope, from a general interpretation of the origins of the warlord armies, which were to dominate Chinese political life until the mid-twenties, to a fascinating reconstruction of events hour-by-hour during the first week of the revolution in the city where it began, Wuchang...This important work is bound to have a great impact on our understanding of modern China, and will surely stimulate further research in the period."-New York Times Book Review "Will set a style for ten to twenty years hence by all scholars of the subject."-John K. Fairbank.

China in Revolution: The First Phase, 1900-1913

Historians of the modern Far East have usually assumed that in spite of the founding of the Tsungli-yamen and the launching of the self-strengthening movement of the 1860's, Chinese foreign policy remained weak, inept, and uninformed. Typically, China's handling of the Korean problem is contrasted with the swift and sure diplomacy of the new Japan to show how little Chinese statesmen understood of changing world conditions or of the altered character of the threat from Japan. China's failure to prevent Korea from slipping out of the tributary system is held to offer such obvious proof of the inadaptability of Ch'ing diplomacy as to make the issue scarcely worth discussing.

Mary C. Wright

Papers

The last stand of Chinese conservatism

China in Revolution: The First Phase, 1900-1913

China in Revolution: The First Phase, 1900-1913

The Adaptability of Ch'ing Diplomacy

The Taiping Rebellion: History and Documents