China Revealed presents the history of the relationships between Europe and the Celestial Empire of classical antiquity, from the time when the caravans began to bring a divine fabric known as silk to the shores of the Mediterranean from the far-off, mysterious East, up to the fall of the Manchu dynasty in 1911. Through beautifully illustrated maps, ancient engravings, the first black-and-white pictures and color plates, this book describes the incredible experiences of those who ventured into distant Cathay, crossing the endless deserts of Asia and the treacherous oceans-the Franciscan monks who were the first to penetrate the Mongolian steppes, the merchants such as Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, the Portuguese sailors and Jesuit missionaries who became counsellors to the Son of the Heavens, and many more.
This book discusses the ways in which Westerners, from the earliest times until the late 1980s, have perceived China--both the China of their own time and the China of the past. Examining sources from all media, the author demonstrates the enormous variety in Western images of China over the centuries--at certain times China has constituted a model for schools of thought in the West, while at others the country has been viewed as a threat.
Cultural understanding between the United States and China has been a long and complex process. The period from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century is not only a critical era in modern Chinese history, but also the peak time of illustrated news reporting in the United States. Besides images from newspapers and journals, this collection also contains pictures about China and the Chinese published in books, brochures, commercial advertisements, campaign posters, postcards, etc. Together, they have documented colourful portrayals of the Chinese and their culture by the U.S. print media and their evolution from ethnic curiosity, stereotyping, and racial prejudice to social awareness, reluctant understanding, and eventual acceptance. Since these publications represent different positions in American politics, they can help contemporary readers develop a more comprehensive understanding of major events in modern American and Chinese histories, such as the cause and effect of the Chinese Exclusion Act and the power struggles behind the development of the Open Door Policy at the turn of the twentieth century. This collection of images has essentially formed a rich visual resource that is both diverse and intriguing; and as primary source documents, they carry significant historical and cultural values that could stimulate further academic research.
This book intends to make sense of how Chinese leaders perceive China’s rise in the world through the eyes of China’s international relations (IR) scholars. Drawing on a unique, four-year opinion survey of these scholars at the annual conference of the Chinese Community of Political Science and International Studies (CCPSIS) in Beijing from 2014–2017, the authors examine Chinese IR scholars’ perceptions of and views on key issues related to China’s power, its relationship with the United States and other major countries, and China’s position in the international system and track their changes over time. Furthermore, the authors complement the surveys with a textual analysis of the academic publications in China’s top five IR journals. By comparing and contrasting the opinion surveys and textual analyses, this book sheds new light on how Chinese IR scholars view the world as well as how they might influence China’s foreign policy.
In Heaven Has Eyes, Xiaoqun Xu provides a comprehensive yet concise history of Chinese law and justice from the imperial era to the post-Mao era. Xu addresses the evolution and function of law codes and judicial practices throughout China's long history, and examines the transition from traditional laws and practices to modern ones in the twentieth century.
As China navigates the murky waters of a 'third way' with liberal economic policies under a strict political regime, the surprising battleground for China's future emerges in the country's highest rated television network - China Central Television, or CCTV. With 16 internationally broadcast channels and over 1.2 billion viewers, CCTV is a powerhouse in conveying Chinese news and entertainment. The hybrid nature of the network has also transformed it into an unexpected site of discourse in a country that has little official space for negotiation.
China Through European Eyes provides a reader's perspective on the conceptualisation of China by Europeans over the last 800 years. With annotated excerpts of their key China related writings by influential figures such as Voltaire, Ricci, Leibniz, Montesquieu, Marx, Weber, Hegel, Barthes and Kristeva, this collection brings together the visions and ideas of individuals who had a unique impact upon European culture. The views within range wildly as the authors wrestle with what sense to make of China's cultural and social difference to their lives in the West, conceptualising China as a place of threat, otherness, exoticism, but also inspiration.This important selection allows for comparison of perspectives across different times in Europe, allowing readers to map out continuities and evolutions of attitudes towards China. It shows that contemporary European attitudes towards China have deep roots. With an extensive introduction, full bibliography and widespread annotations on original texts, this book will be of interest to anyone engaged with the role of China in the world today, particularly those interested in how the crucial relationship between China and Europe developed over time.Related Link(s)
A map of the mutual influence of Bloomsbury, the Crescent Moon Society, and modernism in English and Chinese culture Lily Briscoe's Chinese Eyes traces the romance of Julian Bell, nephew of Virginia Woolf, and Ling Shuhua, a writer and painter Bell met while teaching at Wuhan University in China in 1935. Relying on a wide selection of previously unpublished writings, Patricia Laurence places Ling, often referred to as the Chinese Katherine Mansfield, squarely in the Bloomsbury constellation. In doing so, she counters East-West polarities and suggests forms of understanding to inaugurate a new kind of cultural criticism and literary description. Laurence expands her examination of Bell and Ling's relationship into a study of parallel literary communities—Bloomsbury in England and the Crescent Moon group in China. Underscoring their reciprocal influences in the early part of the twentieth century, Laurence presents conversations among well-known British and Chinese writers, artists, and historians, including Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, G. L. Dickinson, Xu Zhimo, E. M. Forster, and Xiao Qian. In addition, Laurence's study includes rarely seen photographs of Julian Bell, Ling, and their associates as well as a reproduction of Ling's scroll commemorating moments in the exchange between Bloomsbury and the Crescent Moon group. While many critics agree that modernism is a movement that crosses national boundaries, literary studies rarely reflect such a view. In this volume Laurence links unpublished letters and documents, cultural artifacts, art, literature, and people in ways that provide illumination from a comparative cultural and aesthetic perspective. In so doing she addresses the geographical and critical imbalances—and thus the architecture of modernist, postcolonial, Bloomsbury, and Asian studies—by placing China in an aesthetic matrix of a developing international modernism.
This fundamentally new interpretation of the Qing reveals how Sino-Western engagements transformed traditions, institutions, and networks of communications.
