Pirates and Publishers: A Social History of Copyright in Modern China. By Fei-Hsien Wang. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. xiii + 350 pp. Glossary, bibliography, index. Hardcover, $39.95. ISBN: 978-0-691-17182-1.

2021 ◽  
Vol 95 (4) ◽  
pp. 885-887
Author(s):  
Puck Engman
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
History Of

scholarly journals THE SILENT HALF SPEAKS

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 203-210
Author(s):  
Shellen Wu
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Chinese Revolution ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
Liang Qichao ◽  
History Of ◽  
Kang Youwei ◽  
History Of Modern China ◽  
Qiu Jin

It wasn't so long ago that histories of China's rocky transition to modernity featured a small and entirely male cast of characters. In the works of the first generation of American Sinologists, from John King Fairbank to his most famous students such as Joseph Levenson, a few men, from late Qing statesman Li Hongzhang 李鴻章 to reformers and revolutionaries like Kang Youwei 康有為, Sun Yatsen 孫中山, and Liang Qichao 梁啟超, loomed large over the narrative of the Chinese revolution. Into this lacuna Mary Rankin's rediscovery of the late Qing female martyr Qiu Jin 秋瑾 came as a thunderbolt. Her work opened up the possibility that perhaps the problem wasn't the absence of women in China's revolution but the failure of scholars to look for their contribution. Rankin's 1968 article on “The Tenacity of Tradition,” and her subsequent bookEarly Chinese Revolutionariespaved the way for a far more nuanced and complicated new social history of modern China.

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