Author:
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804766525
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Get Book Here

Book Description
Why do peasants rebel? In particular, why do some peasants rebel and not others? Starting from the fact that only in certain geographical areas does rebellion seem to recur persistently, the author examines three notable rebel movements in one such area in China: Huaipei, a region of poor soil and unstable weather bounded by the Huai and Yellow (Huang He) rivers. The Nien rebels of the 1850s and 1860s and the Red Spear Society of the Republican era are described as representing traditional forms of violent competition for scarce economic resources. The Nien were essentially "predatory," using violence as a way of obtaining food and other necessities; the Red Spears essentially "protective," concerned to defend peasant homes and property against bandits, warlord armies, and state efforts at taxation. The communist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, by contrast, looked beyond these traditional patterns to a national social revolution that would render local rebellions unnecessary. The author throws new light on the role of secret societies in peasant protest, and offers a new interpretation of the relationship between rebellion and revolution.

Author: H. J. Van Derven
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9789004117747
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 476

Get Book Here

Book Description
Based on original sources, and dealing with the subject from the earliest dynasty up to modernity, this book uniquely combines chapters on strategy and tactics. Both scope and approach make it a must not only for historians of China, but with a view to its conclusions on the place of China in the context of global military history, also for historians of (comparative) warfare in general.

Author: Peter Zarrow
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134219776
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 433

Get Book Here

Book Description
Providing historical insights, essential to the understanding of contemporary China, this book explores the events that led to the rise of communism and a strong central state during the early twentieth century.

Author: Frank W. Thackeray
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1598849026
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1908

Get Book Here

Book Description
This comprehensive five-volume set contains readable essays that describe and interpret the most important global events since the European Renaissance, some accompanied by related document excerpts and primary source materials. What were the effects of the Age of Exploration on today's ethnic groups and social structure? How did the development of moveable type pave the way for Facebook and Twitter? Why is the Reformation so critical for understanding today's religious controversies? This set will help readers answer these questions by exploring the most significant historical events of the modern world. This five-volume set covers times from the Renaissance to the present. Each volume focuses on a specific historic period and examines 12 events within those time frames that changed the world. Each entry provides an introduction that lays out factual material in a chronological manner, an in-depth essay interpreting the event's significance, and an annotated bibliography of the most important current works on the topic. Select entries are followed by primary sources pertaining to the event under consideration, such as diary entries. Targeted to both general readers as well as entry-level university students, this book also directly supports high school and undergraduate curricula, allowing students to identify and contextualize events in order to think critically about their causes, aftermath, and legacy.

Author: Helen Roberta Chauncey
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824814151
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Get Book Here

Book Description
Scholarly study of the Chinese republic (1911-1949) has traditionally viewed the period through its shortcomings - notably its failure to establish a secure political order - thus allowing the chaos and violence of national power politics to overshadow formative developments taking place at the local level. By focusing on the interaction of local politics and the central state, Helen Chauncey argues for the importance of local initiative in defining the post-imperial state and suggests a rethinking of our understanding of republican-period politics. Through the prism of educational circles in central Jiangsu province, Schoolhouse Politicians challenges assumptions about local elite conservatism by showing how actively politics were pursued in local municipalities well removed from traditional centers of wealth and power. It highlights the activism of political entrepreneurs in the arena of local schooling and interprets the apparent disorderly conduct of local republican politics in terms of the strategies activists used to test their right to public association with the central state and to determine what concerns could be addressed through such an association. Pursuing a comprehensive approach to the study of local politics, this interpretation is sensitive to political intent in a variety of cultural representations, from school journals to teachers' assemblies to the physical management of public space such as schoolhouses and exercise yards. Schoolhouse Politicians makes a compelling case for the central importance of its immediate subject - the growth of the elementary and secondary educational establishment - as well as illuminating larger questions of state-building. This carefully crafted local history, based on pioneering research, is of significance to the field of modern Chinese history. It is also a valuable addition to the recent comparative literature on state-making that seeks, by exploring a variety of occupations and social groups neglected by traditional histories, to give due importance to those little-studied experiences that helped shape the potential and limits of the modern state.

Author: Micah S. Muscolino
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107071569
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book explores the interplay between war and the environment in Henan Province, a hotly contested frontline territory that endured massive environmental destruction and human disruption during the conflict between China and Japan that raged during World War II. In a desperate attempt to block Japan's military advance, Chinese Nationalist armies under Chiang Kai-shek broke the Yellow River's dikes in Henan in June 1938, resulting in devastating floods that persisted until after the war's end. Greater catastrophe struck Henan in 1942-1943, when famine took some two million lives and displaced millions more. Focusing on these war-induced disasters and their aftermath, this book conceptualizes the ecology of war in terms of energy flows through and between militaries, societies, and environments. Ultimately, Micah Muscolino argues that efforts to procure and exploit nature's energy in various forms shaped the choices of generals, the fates of communities, and the trajectory of environmental change in North China.

Author: Woei Lien Chong
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742518742
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 438

Get Book Here

Book Description
Treating China's Cultural Revolution as much more than a political event, this innovative volume explores its ideological dimensions. The contributors focus especially on the CR's discourse of heroism and messianism and its demonization of the enemy as reflected in political practice, official literature, and propaganda art, arguing that these characteristics can be traced back to hitherto-neglected undercurrents of Chinese tradition. Moreover, while most studies of the Cultural Revolution are content to point to the discredited cult of heroism and messianism, this book also explores the alternative discourses that have flourished to fill the resulting vacuum. The contributors analyze the intense intellectual and artistic ferment in post-Mao China that embody resistance to CR ideology, as well as the urgent quest for authentic individuality, new forms of social cohesion, and historical truth. Contributions by: Anne-Marie Brady, Woei Lien Chong, Lowell Dittmer, Monika Gaenssbauer, Nick Knight, Stefan R. Landsberger, Nora Sausmikat, Barend J. ter Haar, Natascha Vittinghoff, and Lan Yang.

Author: Ralph A. Thaxton, Jr
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316483355
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 493

Get Book Here

Book Description
Why is contemporary China such a politically contentious place? Relying on the memories of the survivors of the worst catastrophe of Maoist rule and documenting the rise of resistance and protest at the grassroots level, this book explains how the terror, hunger, and loss of the socialist past influences the way in which people in the deep countryside see and resist state power in the reform era up to the present-day repression of the People's Republic of China central government. Ralph A. Thaxton, Jr provides us with a worm's-eye view of an 'unknown China' - a China that cannot easily or fully be understood through made-in-the-academy theories and frameworks of why and how rural people have engaged in contentious politics. This book is a truly unique and disturbing look at how rural people relate to an authoritarian political system in a country that aspires to become a stable world power.

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004271368
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 520

Get Book Here

Book Description
Globalizing Migration History is a major step forward in comparative global migration history. Looking at the period 1500-2000 it presents a new universal method to quantify and qualify cross-cultural migrations, which makes it possible to detect regional trends and explain differences in migration patterns across the globe in the last half millennium. The contributions in this volume, written by specialists on Russia, China, Japan, India, Indonesia and South East Asia, show that such a method offers a fruitful starting point for rigorous comparisons. Furthermore the volume is an explicit invitation to other (economic, cultural, social and political) historians to include migration more explicitly and systematically in their analyses, and thus reach a deeper understanding of the impact of cross-cultural migrations on social change. Contributors are: Sunil Amrith, Ulbe Bosma, Gijs Kessler, Jelle van Lottum, Jan Lucassen, Leo Lucassen, Mireille Mazard, Adam McKeown, Atsushi Ota, Vijaya Ramaswamy,Osamu Saito, Jianfa Shen, Ryuto Shimada, Willard Sunderland, and Yuki Umeno.

Author: Mark Selden
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315286394
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 351

Get Book Here

Book Description
Originally published in the early 1970s, The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China has proved to be one of the most significant and enduring books published in the field. In this new critical edition of that seminal work, Mark Selden revisits the central themes therein and reconsiders them in light of major new theoretical and documentary understandings of the Chinese communist revolution.