Introduction: Ba Jin’s Fiction and Twentieth-Century Chinese History

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Chinese History

Recent Studies of Modern Chinese History

1996 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans van de Ven
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Modern Chinese History ◽  
Western Scholarship

Some time ago the Commonwealth and Overseas History Society of Cambridge University asked me to provide an overview of recent scholarship on modern Chinese history. What follows is a written version of this ‘public service’ lecture aimed at non-specialist historians. It discusses Western scholarship on China from the eighteenth until the twentieth century.

The Christian Imprint: The Shaping of Republican-Era Theology

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chloë Starr
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Responsibility ◽  
Christian Education ◽  
The State ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Chinese Christianity ◽  
Republican Era ◽  
Revival Movements ◽  
Chinese State ◽  
Prime Source

The 1920s and 1930s produced some of the most exciting and voluminous theology in Chinese history as Chinese leaders gained more prominence in churches, revival movements drew converts in, mission education began to provide a stream of theology graduates, and the Chinese Christian press expanded. The nature of “Chinese Christianity” was a prime source of reflection, but so too was the Chinese state itself and the nature of Christian duty to the nation. Chapter Two surveys the state of Chinese Christianity at the beginning of the twentieth century (considering the effects of internal church developments, anti-imperialism, Christian education, elite social responsibility, and the Anti-Christian movements), then explores the notion of theology as a collective publishing exercise, via a reading of Republican Christian journals.

The Qing Empire's Last Flowering: The expansion of China's Post Office at the turn of the twentieth century

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 895-930
Author(s):  
WEIPIN TSAI
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
General Public ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Postal Service ◽  
Post Office ◽  
Railway Network ◽  
Opium War ◽  
Great Rivers ◽  
History Of ◽  
Set Up

AbstractThe Great Qing Imperial Post Office was set up in 1896, soon after the First Sino-Japanese War. It provided the first national postal service for the general public in the whole of Chinese history, and was a symbol of China's increasing engagement with the rest of the globe. Much of the preparation for the launch was carried out by the high-ranking foreign staff of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, an influential institution established after the first Opium War.With a mission to promote modernization and project Qing power, the Imperial Post Office was established with a centrally controlled set of unified methods and procedures, and its success was rooted in integration with the new railway network, a strategy at the heart of its ambitious plans for expansion. This article explores the history of this postal expansion through railways, the use of which allowed its creators to plan networks in an integrated way—from urban centres on the coasts and great rivers through to China's interior.

Brief Sojourn in your Native Land: Sydney Links with South China

1999 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 11-23
Author(s):  
Michael Williams
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
South China ◽  
Settlement Patterns ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Chinese People ◽  
Immigration Restriction ◽  
Native Land ◽  
Chinese Migrants ◽  
The People ◽  
Australian City

The title of this paper is taken from a testimonial signed by a number of Gundagai residents on the departure for China in 1903 of Mark Loong after sixteen years in the district. That the notion of a person ‘sojourning’ in China is a contradiction of the prevailing ‘sojourner’ concept usually held about early Chinese migrants in Australia is the result the failure of Australian-Chinese research to fully appreciate the significance of family and district links between Australia and China and their impact upon the motivation, organisation and settlement patterns of Chinese people in Australia before the middle of the twentieth century. Without such an appreciation most research into Australian-Chinese history has focused only on those who established families in Australia or who ran successful businesses. This paper will focus on describing some features of these family and districts links with regard to that generation who arrived after the gold rushes of the 1850s to 1870s but before the Immigration Restriction Act 1901, who originated in one south China district, Zhongshan , and who lived primarily in one Australian city, Sydney. These restraints are partly due to reliance on sources such as the administrative files of the Immigration Restriction Act which begin only in 1901, and partly to the fact that this research represents a first step in the investigation of the significance of district of origin and the people of Zhongshan district in Sydney are the first to be investigated.

Twentieth‐Century China

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Uradyn E. Bulag
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Ethnic Relations ◽  
The Political ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Contemporary China ◽  
Acculturation Process ◽  
Political Concept

This article invokes a Chinese political concept of ‘sinicization’, aiming to capture the nature of ethnic relations in China historically, and the political fate of ethnic groups in contemporary China. Sinicization has powerful genealogical and governmental dimensions; it is not primarily an ‘acculturation’ process as it is understood generally. Sinicization may not kill people directly, but it murders the non- Chinese sense of genealogical differences and their polities. The discussion concludes that sinicization has made a remarkable success in the PRC more than at any other time in Chinese history. Chinese policies have been directed at destroying the possibility that non-Chinese national identity might have any political meaning, at destroying the minorities' capacity to think and engage in politics independently as sovereign ethnic groups.

Contemporary Chinese Buddhist Traditions

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mario Poceski
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Chinese Buddhism ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Female Participation ◽  
Republican Era ◽  
Historical Developments ◽  
Contemporary Chinese ◽  
Governmental Control ◽  
Mao Era

The chapter presents an overview of contemporary Chinese Buddhism, broadly conceived, along with a survey of the major historical developments and defining responses to modernity articulated in the course of the turbulent twentieth century. After situating the growth and adaptation of Buddhism within the broad sweep of Chinese history, it highlights the ways in which the Buddhist community tried to revive and to reform its tradition during the Republican era. The central part of the chapter describes the institutional revival and renewed interest in Buddhism during the post-Mao era, along with a discussion of the mechanisms of governmental control over Buddhism. Also covered are the remarkable Buddhist resurgence that over the last several decades has been taking place in Taiwan, the scope of female participation in the development of contemporary Buddhism, and the ongoing globalization of Buddhist organizations and practices.

scholarly journals Naitō Konan (1866-1934) and Chinese Historiography

2003 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua A. Fogel
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Large Volume ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
Proper Sense ◽  
Period Style ◽  
History Of ◽  
Chinese Historiography

Abstract Naitō Konan (1866-1934) was one of towering figures of twentieth-century Sinology, in Japan, China, and elsewhere. His theories concerning Chinese history continue to influence us all, often through secondary or tertiary means. Among his many books and articles is a large volume entitled Shina shigaku shi (History of Chinese historiography), arguably the first such comprehensive work in any language and still unsurpassed to this day, roughly eighty years after the chapters which comprise it were first delivered as lectures in Kyoto. Naitō argued that Chinese historical writing was divided, as we all know now, into two traditions: the comprehensive style (tongshi) launched by Sima Qian and the single-period style (duandai shi) begun somewhat later by Ban Gu. Naitō himself always favored the former, and he showed a marked predilection for the major historical works over the centuries by Chinese with the character tong in their titles: such as Liu Zhiji's Tong shi, Du You's Tong zhi (about which he lectured before the Japanese emperor in 1931), Ma Duanlin's Wenxian tongkao, and most notably Zhang Xuecheng's Wenshi tongyi. He did not disragrd or disrespect the duandai shi approach, but he did believe that by cutting off chunks of history one could not get a proper sense of the long-term forces at work in the historical process, what the great French historians later would call la longue durée.

Twentieth-Century China: New Approaches. Edited by Jeffrey Wasserstrom. [London and New York: Routledge, 2003. xv+273 pp. $25.95. ISBN 0-415-19504-7.]

2004 ◽  
Vol 177 ◽  
pp. 221-223
Author(s):  
Antonia Finnane
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Natural Product ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Important Change ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
Chinese Revolution ◽  
Communist Revolution

This useful volume brings together a number of articles showing recent shifts in the English-language historiography of 20th-century China. Historians tend to talk in terms of centuries, and a book about historical approaches to the century just finished is timely. Wasserstrom's introduction establishes the grounds for thinking about China's 20th century as a discrete period of historical time, at the same time explaining the logic of the book and integrating its disparate elements.The chapters show considerable diversity. Joseph Esherick's “Ten theses on the Chinese revolution,” already well known in the field, rebuts some received wisdom about the (Communist) revolution and offers a series of alternative conclusions. Among these is “the need to break the 1949 barrier,” (p. 41) a point discussed at greater length in Paul Cohen's essay on “The 1949 divide in Chinese history.” The diminished significance of 1949 in recent studies is a natural product, as Cohen notes, of political and social change in China since the death of Mao, and he poses the problem of how to “probe the ways in which 1949 did indeed signal abrupt and important change, as well as the ways it did not” (p. 35).

A documentary Study of Chinese landlordism in late Ch'ing and early Republican Kiangnan

1966 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 566-599 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuji Mueamatsu
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Early Republican ◽  
Contemporary Chinese

In current studies of the problem of landlorḍism in twentieth-century China there is a fundamental conflict and contradiction between the interpretations of the socio-economic historians, whose major thesis is often the inevitable process of progressive weakening and eventual decline of the control of ‘feudal’ landlords over land and peasants, and the actual conditions and facts of contemporary Chinese history, in which the decay of landlord power seems to have been far from inevitable, and where such persons as P'eng Pai and Mao Tse-tung have had to exert great revolutionary efforts to forcibly destroy the landlords' dominance.

The Spatial Approach to Chinese History: A Test

1986 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 721-743 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Sands ◽  
Ramon H. Myers
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Discriminant Analysis ◽  
Statistical Tests ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Statistical Technique ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Spatial Framework ◽  
Spatial Approach ◽  
Economic Regions

This article presents a series of statistical tests of the spatial framework offered by G. W. Skinner for use in analyzing Chinese history. Skinner argues that China is best viewed as a collection of nine distinct economic regions, each composed of a core and periphery. The authors use discriminant analysis, a multivariant statistical technique, and a twentieth-century Chinese data set to test the relevance of this view empirically. Their tests show that the Skinner framework is not supported by the data, and therefore they conclude that the model's contribution to the historical analysis of China is questionable.

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