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Ten Lessons tells the story of modern China from the eve of the First Opium War to the Xi Jinping era. This was a most turbulent period of time as the Middle Kingdom was torn apart by opium, Christianity, modernisation, imperialists, nationalists, warlords and the Japanese, and as China reinvented and reasserted itself on the world stage in the post-Mao era. Unlike the handful of existing textbooks, which narrate without primary sources and without engaging with academic debate, Ten Lessons is devoted to students, from university to high school, as it uses extensive primary sources to tell the story of modern China and introduces them to scholarship and debates in the field of Chinese history and beyond. This will help students understand the real issues involved, navigate their way through the maze of existing literature and undertake independent research for essays and dissertations. The book also points out gaps and inadequacies in the existing scholarship, to encourage postgraduate studies. It is ‘mental furniture’ for the increasing army of journalists, NGO workers, diplomats, government officials, businesspeople and travellers of all kinds, who often need a good source of background information before they head to China.
main political platforms centred on anti-imperialist and anti-Manchu sentiments; Rhoads examined Manchu–Han relations, whereas Theodore Huters examined how early Republican China appropriated what the West had to offer. 35 Some of the national institutions were supported and staffed by foreigners, and some of their lives and careers have received attention. 36 Michael Murdock has looked at the complexities of the Nationalist Revolution. 37 Looking from the perspective of old scholars, Jon Eugene von Kowallis has called it the ‘subtle revolution’. 38 ‘Mr Science
of famine’. War-ravaged and disaster-stricken Republican China generated international headlines; it also generated sympathy from not just missionaries and charities, but also Western women. Pearl Buck, Louise Jordan Miln, Alice Tisdale Hobart, Nora Waln, Emily Hahn, Lady Dorothea Hosie, Florence Ayscough, Nym Wales and many more all wrote about the country and its disasters. Daniel Sanderson has called these women ‘sentimental educators’. 22 They exposed China to a much larger audience, even inspiring Hollywood, and gave China a new identity aside from
PRINT (MUP).indd 22 1 Man with rooster walking past the statue of Mao in Kashgar, January 1990. 22 11/06/2020 14:12 Colonialism, 1759–2001 Jacobs, who studies the rule of Republican China in the region, has argued that using the discourse of colonialism to discuss the relationship between modern China and Uyghurs has been problematized by the broad and incendiary political associations that this term evokes.2 Nonetheless, both Millward and Jacobs acknowledge that modern China’s control over this region is a legacy of imperial conquest and rule, whether it is
Republican China (Stanford CA, Stanford University Press, 1984 ), 17–101. 9 Kirby, Germany and Republican China , 17–18, 23–4. 10 Françoise Kreissler, ‘Nationalsozialisten in China. Ein verdrängtes Kapitel der Geschichte der deutsch-chinesischen Beziehungen?’ (National Socialists in China: An Overlooked Chapter in the History of German–Chinese Relations?), in Bettina Gransow and Mechthild Leutner, eds, China. Nähe und Ferne. Deutsch-chinesische Beziehungen in
This book explores the reasons and justifications for the Chinese state’s campaign to erase Uyghur identity, focusing, in particular, on how China’s manipulation of the US-led Global War on Terror (GWOT) has facilitated this cultural genocide. It is the first book to address this issue in depth, and serves as an important rebuttal to Chinese state claims that this campaign is a benign effort to combat an existential extremist threat. While the book suggests that the motivation for this state-led campaign is primarily China’s gradual settler colonization of the Uyghur homeland, the text focuses on the narrative of the Uyghur terrorist threat that has provided international cover and justification for the campaign and has shaped its ‘biopolitical’ nature. It describes how the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was able to successfully implicate Uyghurs in GWOT and, despite a lack of evidence, brand them internationally as a serious terrorist threat within the first year of the war. In recounting these developments, the book offers a critique of existing literature on the Uyghur terrorist threat and questions the extent of this threat to the PRC. Finding no evidence for the existence of such a threat when the Chinese state first declared its existence in 2001, the book argues that a nominal Uyghur militant threat only emerged after over a decade of PRC suppression of Uyghur dissent in the name of counterterrorism, facilitating a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ that has served to justify further state repression and ultimately cultural genocide.
. Shen , G. Y. ( 2014 ) Unearthing the Nation: Modern Geology and Nationalism in Republican China . Chicago : University of Chicago Press . Tuck , E. and Yang , K. ( 2012 ) ‘ Decolonization is not a metaphor ’. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1 ( 1 ): 1–40 . Note
tendency continued during Communism. Officially, the Communists strived to renounce anything that they associated with the ‘bourgeois’ capitalist class of the Republican era, including urban merchants and semi-colonised urban culture (Whyte and Parish, 1984 : 10–16; Yeh, 1997 : 378). The rejection of the Republican Chinese urban values opened a way to ‘ruralise’ city culture and organisation. For instance, with the gradual introduction of ‘work units’ ( danwei ) in the cities after 1949, the entire life-work of an individual or a collective was organised around a
usual. The confusion was characteristic of these early months of Republican China – a country stuck, in manifest different ways both practical and philosophical, between the old and the new. And, as with the issue of who would lead China, the uncertainty and conflict around the new calendar would rumble on for some decades. Compromises were made, and in the subsequent years the country would effectively run on two systems, the new Republican calendar used officially and by adherents to the cause, and the old Chinese calendar by everyone
Over more than thirty years of reform and opening, the Chinese Communist Party has pursued the gradual marketization of China’s economy alongside the preservation of a resiliently authoritarian political system, defying long-standing predictions that ‘transition’ to a market economy would catalyse deeper political transformation. In an era of deepening synergy between authoritarian politics and finance capitalism, Communists constructing capitalism offers a novel and important perspective on this central dilemma of contemporary Chinese development. This book challenges existing state–market paradigms of political economy and reveals the Eurocentric assumptions of liberal scepticism towards Chinese authoritarian resilience. It works with an alternative conceptual vocabulary for analysing the political economy of financial development as both the management and exploitation of socio-economic uncertainty. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork and over sixty interviews with policymakers, bankers, and former party and state officials, the book delves into the role of China’s state-owned banking system since 1989. It shows how political control over capital has been central to China’s experience of capitalist development, enabling both rapid economic growth whilst preserving macroeconomic and political stability. Communists constructing capitalism will be of academic interest to scholars and graduate students in the fields of Chinese studies, social studies of finance, and international and comparative political economy. Beyond academia, it will be essential reading for anyone interested in the evolution of Chinese capitalism and its implications for an increasingly central issue in contemporary global politics: the financial foundations of illiberal capitalism.