This groundbreaking study explores this underappreciated aspect of Chinese political life by investigating rainmaking activities organized or conducted by local officials in the Qing dynasty; using a wide variety of primary sources, this study explains how and why state rainmaking became a prominent feature of the late imperial religious landscape.
This is a study of visuality in early modern and modern China. Its focus, however, is not so much on imagery per se but rather on how vision itself has been conceived, imagined, and deployed in a variety of discursive contexts. The goal of this volume is to use a focus on tropes of visuality and gender to reflect on shifting understandings of the significance of Chineseness, modernity, and Chinese modernity.
This book explores the Daoist encounter with modernity through the activities of Chen Yingning (1880–1969), a famous lay Daoist master, and his group in early twentieth-century Shanghai.
This book charts the vicissitudes of a rural community of papermakers in Sichuan, tracing the changes in the distribution of knowledge that led to a massive transfer of technical control from villages to cities, from primary producers to managerial elites, and from women to men.
This ethnography presents a thick description of life in the Uyghur suburbs of Yining, a city near the border with Kazakhstan, and situates that account in a broader examination of Uyghur culture.
Based on the author’s fieldwork in Zhejiang, this book explores the emergence and success of rural enterprises, and examines how rural residents have made sense of and participated in them.
This study maps the complex processes of state-making, moral regulation, and social control during three critical reform periods: the Yongzheng reign (1723–1735), the Guomindang’s Nanjing decade (1927–1937), and the Communist Party’s Socialist Education Campaign (1962–1966).
This book examines how China’s three late imperial dynasties conquered, colonized, and assumed control of the southwest and highlights the indigenous response to this process.
This book reconstructs civic education and citizenship training in secondary schools in the lower Yangzi region during the Republican era.
Man-houng Lin shows how the disruption in the world’s silver supply caused by the turmoil in Latin America and subsequent changes in global markets led to the massive outflow of silver from China and the crisis of the Qing empire.
