The Politics of the Past in Early China

The Politics of the Past in Early China PDF Author: Vincent S. Leung
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781108443241
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 214

Get Book Here

Book Description
Why did the past matter so greatly in ancient China? How did it matter and to whom? This is an innovative study of how the past was implicated in the long transition of power in early China, as embodied by the decline of the late Bronze Age aristocracy and the rise of empires over the first millenium BCE. Engaging with a wide array of historical materials, including inscriptional records, excavated manuscripts, and transmitted texts, Vincent S. Leung moves beyond the historiographical canon and explores how the past was mobilized as powerful ideological capital in diverse political debate and ethical dialogue. Appeals to the past in early China were more than a matter of cultural attitude, Leung argues, but were rather deliberate ways of articulating political thought and challenging ethical debates during periods of crisis. Significant power lies in the retelling of the past.

The Politics of the Past in Early China

The Politics of the Past in Early China PDF Author: Vincent S. Leung
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781108443241
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 214

Get Book Here

Book Description
Why did the past matter so greatly in ancient China? How did it matter and to whom? This is an innovative study of how the past was implicated in the long transition of power in early China, as embodied by the decline of the late Bronze Age aristocracy and the rise of empires over the first millenium BCE. Engaging with a wide array of historical materials, including inscriptional records, excavated manuscripts, and transmitted texts, Vincent S. Leung moves beyond the historiographical canon and explores how the past was mobilized as powerful ideological capital in diverse political debate and ethical dialogue. Appeals to the past in early China were more than a matter of cultural attitude, Leung argues, but were rather deliberate ways of articulating political thought and challenging ethical debates during periods of crisis. Significant power lies in the retelling of the past.

Exhibiting the Past

Exhibiting the Past PDF Author: Kirk A. Denton
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824840062
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362

Get Book Here

Book Description
During the Mao era, China’s museums served an explicit and uniform propaganda function, underlining official Party history, eulogizing revolutionary heroes, and contributing to nation building and socialist construction. With the implementation of the post-Mao modernization program in the late 1970s and 1980s and the advent of globalization and market reforms in the 1990s, China underwent a radical social and economic transformation that has led to a vastly more heterogeneous culture and polity. Yet China is dominated by a single Leninist party that continues to rely heavily on its revolutionary heritage to generate political legitimacy. With its messages of collectivism, self-sacrifice, and class struggle, that heritage is increasingly at odds with Chinese society and with the state’s own neoliberal ideology of rapid-paced development, glorification of the market, and entrepreneurship. In this ambiguous political environment, museums and their curators must negotiate between revolutionary ideology and new kinds of historical narratives that reflect and highlight a neoliberal present. In Exhibiting the Past, Kirk Denton analyzes types of museums and exhibitionary spaces, from revolutionary history museums, military museums, and memorials to martyrs to museums dedicated to literature, ethnic minorities, and local history. He discusses red tourism—a state sponsored program developed in 2003 as a new form of patriotic education designed to make revolutionary history come alive—and urban planning exhibition halls, which project utopian visions of China’s future that are rooted in new conceptions of the past. Denton’s method is narratological in the sense that he analyzes the stories museums tell about the past and the political and ideological implications of those stories. Focusing on “official” exhibitionary culture rather than alternative or counter memory, Denton reinserts the state back into the discussion of postsocialist culture because of its centrality to that culture and to show that state discourse in China is neither monolithic nor unchanging. The book considers the variety of ways state museums are responding to the dramatic social, technological, and cultural changes China has experienced over the past three decades.

Early China

Early China PDF Author: Li Feng
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521895529
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Get Book Here

Book Description
A critical new interpretation of the early history of Chinese civilization based on the most recent scholarship and archaeological discoveries.

War, Politics and Society in Early Modern China, 900–1795

War, Politics and Society in Early Modern China, 900–1795 PDF Author: Peter Lorge
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134372868
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 201

Get Book Here

Book Description
The first book in English to study this period of Chinese history, this comprehensive survey sets out the major military events in chapters and argues that war was the most important tool used by the Chinese in building and maintaining their empire.

The Politics of Historical Production in Late Qing and Republican China

The Politics of Historical Production in Late Qing and Republican China PDF Author: Tze-Ki Hon
Publisher: Brill Academic Publishers
ISBN: 9789004226746
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Get Book Here

Book Description
By examining various forms of historical production happening outside the mainstream of academic history in early 20th century China, this book shows how historical writings were central to the Chinese debate on the nation, elite authority, and active citizenry.

Cosmology and Political Culture in Early China

Cosmology and Political Culture in Early China PDF Author: Aihe Wang
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521624206
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book offers a radical reinterpretation of the formative stages of Chinese culture and history, tracing the central role played by cosmology in the formation of China's early empires. It crosses the disciplines of history, social anthropology, archaeology, and philosophy to illustrate how cosmological systems, particularly the Five Elements, shaped political culture. By focusing on dynamic change in early cosmology, the book undermines the notion that Chinese cosmology was homogenous and unchanging. By arguing that cosmology was intrinsic to power relations, it also challenges prevailing theories of political and intellectual history.

The Politics of Mourning in Early China

The Politics of Mourning in Early China PDF Author: Miranda Brown
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791479803
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 222

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Politics of Mourning in Early China reevaluates the longstanding assumptions about early imperial political culture. According to most explanations, filial piety served as the linchpin of the social and political order, as all political relations were a seamless extension of the relationship between father and son—a relationship that was hierarchical, paternalistic, and personal. Offering a new perspective on the mourning practices and funerary monuments of the Han dynasty, Miranda Brown asks whether the early imperial elite did in fact imagine political participation solely along the lines of the father-son relationship or whether there were alternative visions of political association. The early imperial elite held remarkably varied and contradictory beliefs about political life, and they had multiple templates and changing scripts for political action. This book documents and explains such diversity and variation and shows that the Han dynasty practice of mourning expressed many visions of political life, visions that left lasting legacies.

Origins of Moral-political Philosophy in Early China

Origins of Moral-political Philosophy in Early China PDF Author: Tao Jiang
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197603475
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 537

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book offers a new narrative and interpretative framework about the origins of moral-political philosophy that tracks how the three core normative values, humaneness, justice, and personal freedom, were formulated, reformulated, and contested by early Chinese philosophers in their effort to negotiate the relationship among three distinct domains, the personal, the familial, and the political. Such efforts took place as those thinkers were reimagining a new moral-political order, debating its guiding norms, and exploring possible sources within the context of an evolving understanding of He

Music, Cosmology, and the Politics of Harmony in Early China

Music, Cosmology, and the Politics of Harmony in Early China PDF Author: Erica Fox Brindley
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438443137
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Get Book Here

Book Description
Explores the religious, political, and cultural significance attributed to music in early China. In early China, conceptions of music became important culturally and politically. This fascinating book examines a wide range of texts and discourse on music during this period (ca. 500100 BCE) in light of the rise of religious, protoscientific beliefs on the intrinsic harmony of the cosmos. By tracking how music began to take on cosmic and religious significance, Erica Fox Brindley shows how music was used as a tool for such enterprises as state unification and cultural imperialism. She also outlines how musical discourse accompanied the growth of an explicit psychology of the emotions, served as a fundamental medium for spiritual attunement with the cosmos, and was thought to have utility and potency in medicine. While discussions of music in state ritual or as an aesthetic and cultural practice abound, this book is unique in linking music to religious belief and demonstrating its convergences with key religious, political, and intellectual transformations in early China.

Power and Politics in Tenth-century China

Power and Politics in Tenth-century China PDF Author:
Publisher: Cambria Press
ISBN: 1621968472
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 277

Get Book Here

Book Description