Journal ArticleDOI
The search for modern China
TLDR
The authors explored the history of early-modern and modern China, from the seventeenth century to the present, examining the rise and fall of China's last empire, the emergence of a modern nation-state, the sources and development of revolution, and the implications of complex social, political, cultural, and economic transformations in the People's Republic of China.Abstract:
This course explores the history of early-modern and modern China, from the seventeenth century to the present. We will examine the rise and fall of China’s last empire, the emergence of a modern nation-state, the sources and development of revolution, and the implications of complex social, political, cultural, and economic transformations in the People’s Republic of China. Course materials include scholarly monographs, a memoir, primary sources, and visual and material artifacts that offer diverse perspectives. We will meet twice a week for a combination of lectures, discussion, and viewing of visual texts.read more
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Case study: Diagnosing China's prevailing urban flooding—Causes, challenges, and solutions
TL;DR: Wang et al. as discussed by the authors identified that a lack of surface water runoff management considerations (i.e., missing a major drainage system in urban stormwater system) and inadequate local mitigation are the primary causes of urban flooding problems in China.
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US economic statecraft and great power competition
TL;DR: The authors developed a conceptual framework for explaining variation in the United States' economic statecraft in the Cold War and the present day, focusing on how US officials perceived the type of geoeconomic capability that its rivals possessed and the kind of national security challenge that they posed.
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Holding up Half the Heavens: The Effect of Communist Rule on China's Women
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore what women's lives were like in China before Communism, during Communism, and what they are like now, and analyze Chairman Mao's philosophy towards women, how and why he changed the status of women in China, and whether or not the changes he attempted to instate survived after his lifetime.
IN PLEASANT PLACES: A STORY OF A NEW ZEALAND MISSIONARY FAMILY IN CHINA IN THE 1940s
TL;DR: In my own lifetime, China has gone from being a closed country, known only through myth, metaphor, and stereotype, to one that is on the cusp of being one of the most powerful countries in the twenty-first century, known through magazine covers, international scholarship, Free Trade Agreements, and the Olympic Games as mentioned in this paper.
New Additions to the Search Party: Using the Search for Modern China: A Documentary Collection
Abstract: F irst published more than ten years ago, Jonathan Spence’s The Search for Modern China has become a popular text for many courses in Chinese history since 1600. Promised in the acknowledgments to the first edition was “a companion volume of primary sources,” being compiled by Cheng Pei-kai and Michael Lestz. This companion, The Search for Modern China: A Documentary Collection appeared in January 1999, along with the second edition of Spence’s textbook. The Documentary Collection presents teachers with a tremendous new resource for teaching about modern China, either as a companion to Search, as a companion to another text, or by itself. As with many documents collections, it is an extremely malleable source that can be adapted to a large variety of classroom settings. Time spent planning and preparing how to use the sources will be well rewarded in the classroom. The Documentary Collection presents 521 pages of documents and brief contextual introductions. The earliest document, an account of riots in Suzhou, describes events of 1601, while the latest, Jiang Zemin’s New Year’s Greeting to the people of Taiwan, was delivered in 1995. Cheng and Lestz trace the intervening four centuries with 153 documents drawn from virtually all aspects of human society. Political platforms and polemics, journalism, poetry and fiction, treaties, formal declarations, speeches, court depositions, and letters all combine to form a primary source history of China’s last 400 years. The selections are sound and broad. All document collections must compromise the desire to represent all the important trends in history while limiting the number of excerpts to a manageable size. This has been done well. The essential standards are here, like Qianlong’s rejection of Macartney; Kangxi’s “Sacred Edict”; the Twenty-one Demands; “How to be a Good Communist,” by Liu Shaoqi; Mao’s “Bombard the Headquarters”; the Shanghai communiqué; Joint Declaration on Hong Kong; and the “Oppose Turmoil” editorial of May, 1989. Others, less well known and some translated for the first time, serve well to illuminate important trends. Among these are Qing court cases, accounts of Qing popular religion on the eve of the Taiping Rebellion, Jiang Zemin’s New Year’s Greeting, and a generous helping of poetry and fiction. One especially productive selection was the pairing of two Qing biographies of chaste women with Lu Xun’s 1918 essay on chastity. Two surprising and significant omissions from the collection are Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, who are nowhere present. Although writings from these two essential figures are easily available elsewhere, one of the attractions of using a reader is the ability to dispense with selecting and photocopying documents on one’s own. An excerpt from Kang’s “Confucius as Reformer” seemed especially glaring by its absence, and other instructors will feel similarly puzzled by other omissions. Yet, selection inevitably creates such controversies, and Cheng and Lestz have done a fine job balancing inclusion with brevity. The discussion that follows is based on my experience using the Documentary Collection to accompany Search for Modern China as a core textbook. The parallel structure of the two books makes this a strong pairing. I believe, though, that it could be well used in coordination with another text, or without a “textbook” at all. This is primarily because Cheng and Lestz eschewed long, detailed explanations of the documents, which might have tied the documents more closely to the narrative of Search. Instead, the minimal introductions, which contextualize the documents without interpreting them for students, make the Documentary Collectionmuch more flexible, and the book can stand on its own, not merely as an appendage to Search. New Additions to the Search Party Using THE SEARCH FOR MODERN CHINA A Documentary Collection
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On the Road: Access to Transportation Infrastructure and Economic Growth in China
TL;DR: In this paper, the effect of access to transportation networks on regional economic outcomes in China over a twenty-period of rapid income growth was investigated, and it was shown that proximity to a transportation network has a moderate positive causal effect on per capita GDP levels across sectors, but no effect on overall GDP growth.
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Primitive accumulation, accumulation by dispossession, accumulation by ‘extra-economic’ means
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International Migration as a Tool in Development Policy: A Passing Phase?
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The Intellectual Origins of Modern Economic Growth
TL;DR: The intellectual origins of the Industrial Revolution are traced back to the Baconian program of the seventeenth century, which aimed at expanding the set of useful knowledge and applying natural philosophy to solve technological problems and bring about economic growth as mentioned in this paper.