China, Empire to People's Republic. By Moseley George. [London: Batsford, 1968. 192 pp. 25s.] (original) (raw)
Related papers
Journal of Modern Chinese History, 2016
Among the most promising developments in the study of contemporary China has been the booming migration of historians across the 1949 divide to pioneer the new and dynamic field of the history of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Only a few years ago post-1949 China was regarded as the exclusive terrain of social scientists (political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, economists, and psychologists). Now, lured by an array of previously inaccessible primary sources, a growing number of historians have embarked on the study of the PRC. 1 To date, the main focus of their research has been on grassroots society in the pre-Great Leap Forward period, but we can anticipate both temporal and sectoral expansion as the field matures. 2 An outstanding example of work being produced by historians of the PRC with the aid of heretofore untapped archival and other sources is Zhang Jishun's Yuanqu de dushi (A city displaced: Shanghai in the 1950s). 3 The core chapters of Professor Zhang's book are case studies of (1) the transformation of Shanghai neighborhoods, (2) the role of the urban underclass in the PRC's first general election, (3) the conversion of newspapers from private to public media, (4) the accommodation of educated elites to the new political order, and (5) the influence of cinema on the formation of a mass urban culture. While the Shanghai Municipal Archives provide the bulk of Professor Zhang's primary sources, she supplements these official materials with interviews, newspaper accounts, visual media, and other sources. The result is a more personal and human view of the effects of the Communist revolution on China's largest and most cosmopolitan city than previous scholarship had afforded. Understood from the vantage point of Shanghai residents who lived through the initial years of the PRC, including workers and shantytown dwellers as well as journalists and intellectuals, Professor Zhang's illuminating account demonstrates that 1949 marked not only a moment of rupture and new beginnings but also a continuation of many earlier practices. Moreover, different members of Shanghai society-even two brothers with virtually identical family and educational backgrounds such as Huang Jiade and Huang Jiayin-could interpret and respond to revolutionary initiatives in surprisingly different ways. 1 See http://prchistory.org/ for evidence of this trend. 2 Kirby, "Continuity and Change in Modern China," was a seminal work, stressing similarities between the PRC and the Republic of China prior to the mainland's departure from the German/Soviet model of economic planning with Mao's launch of the Great Leap Forward. While Kirby examined state industrial policy, more recent work has focused on local society.
Reinventing Chinese Political History. Inaugural lecture. Leiden University, 2014
2014
What was “China” before the twentieth century? This is not as simple a question as it might seem. Whereas nowadays Chinese textbooks propose that China is a sovereign country with a continuous history of 5000 years, historical textbooks from a thousand years ago were far less confident about the coherence of the Chinese territories and noted that periods of multi-state rule had been dominant over the course of time. In her inaugural lecture Professor Hilde De Weerdt explores different explanations for the finding that large unified empires dominated in Chinese history during the last 700 years. Based on her first two monographs, she revisits the history of two major institutions in Chinese political history that have been credited with holding successive Chinese empires together, the civil service examinations and the state. She discusses how the growing numbers of students preparing for the examinations created the most precocious information culture in the history of humanity. State archives, court gazettes, maps and treaties were shared among the cultured elite who saw political literacy as their prerogative. She proposes that the effect of the partial disclosure of court documents and decisions was not, as in European history, the arrival of a public sphere and a growing gap between state and civil society but rather the consolidation of imperial rule. Publicity became as important as censorship in the balancing of power between court and provincial elites. Looking towards the future of Chinese and comparative political history, Professor De Weerdt also calls for the adaptation of digital methods in the study of subjects that require access to large amounts of texts such as party politics, student mobilization, and collective action.
The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1999
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