China's Revolutions in the Modern World

China's Revolutions in the Modern World

Author: Rebecca E. Karl

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2020-01-28

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1788735595

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A concise account of how revolutions made modern China and helped shape the modern world China’s emergence as a twenty-first-century global economic, cultural, and political power is often presented as a story of what Chinese leader Xi Jinping calls the nation’s “great rejuvenation,” a story narrated as the return of China to its “rightful” place at the center of the world. In China’s Revolutions in the Modern World, historian Rebecca E. Karl argues that China’s contemporary emergence is best seen not as a “return,” but rather as the product of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary activity and imaginings. From the Taipings in the mid-nineteenth century through nationalist, anti-imperialist, cultural, and socialist revolutions to today’s capitalist-inflected Communist State, modern China has been made in intellectual dissonance and class struggle, in mass democratic movements and global war, in socialism and anti-socialism, in repression and conflict by multiple generations of Chinese people mobilized to seize history and make the future in their own name. Through China’s successive revolutions, the contours of our contemporary world have taken shape. This brief interpretive history shows how.


Rebellions and Revolutions

Rebellions and Revolutions

Author: Jack Gray

Publisher:

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 572

ISBN-13: 0198700695

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This is a study of China from the 1800s to the present day. It focuses on China's problems of development - the decay and collapse of the Chinese Empire, its failure to recover in the first half of the twentieth century, and its rapid emergence in world affairs since the Communist Party Revolution of 1949. This new edition examines economic growth, updates Chinese foreign policy, provides a revised account of the Tiananmen Incident, and brings the chronology completely up to date.


Women and China's Revolutions

Women and China's Revolutions

Author: Gail Hershatter

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2018-09-04

Total Pages: 421

ISBN-13: 1442215704

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If we place women at the center of our account of China’s last two centuries, how does this change our understanding of what happened? This deeply knowledgeable book illuminates the places where the Big History of recognizable events intersects with the daily lives of ordinary people, using gender as its analytic lens. Leading scholar Gail Hershatter asks how these events affected women in particular, and how women affected the course of these events. For instance, did women have a 1911 revolution? A socialist revolution? If so, what did those revolutions look like? Which women had them? Hershatter uses two key themes to frame her analysis. The first is the importance of women’s visible and invisible labor. The labor of women in domestic and public spaces shaped China’s move from empire to republic to socialist nation to rising capitalist power. The second is the symbolic work performed by gender itself. What women should do and be was a constant topic of debate during China’s transformation from empire to weak state to partially occupied territory to nascent socialist republic to reform-era powerhouse. What sorts of concerns did people express through the language of gender? How did that language work, and why was it so powerful? Drawing on decades of Hershatter’s groundbreaking scholarship and mastery of a range of literatures, this beautifully written book will be essential reading for all students of China’s modern history.


A Bitter Revolution

A Bitter Revolution

Author: Rana Mitter

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 9780192806055

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China is now poised to take a key role on the world stage, but in the early twentieth century the situation could not have been more different. Rana Mitter goes back to this pivotal moment in Chinese history to uncover the origins of the painful transition from a premodern past into a modern world. By the 1920s the seemingly civilized world shaped over the last two thousand years by the legacy of the great philosopher Confucius was falling apart in the face of western imperialism and internal warfare. Chinese cities still bore the imprints of its ancient past with narrow, lanes and temples to long-worshipped gods, but these were starting to change with the influx of foreign traders, teachers, and missionaries, all eager to shape China's ancient past into a modern present. Mitter takes us through the resulting social turmoil and political promise, the devastating war against Japan in the 1940s, Communism and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, and the new era of hope in the 1980s ended by the Tian'anmen uprising. He reveals the impetus behind the dramatic changes in Chinese culture and politics as being China's "New Culture" - a strain of thought which celebrated youth, individualism, and the heady mixture of strange and seductive new cultures from places as far apart as America, India, and Japan.


Social Revolutions in the Modern World

Social Revolutions in the Modern World

Author: Theda Skocpol

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1994-09-30

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 9780521409384

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Theda Skocpol, author of the award-winning 1979 book States and Social Revolutions, updates her arguments about social revolutions.


Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World

Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World

Author: Jack A. Goldstone

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1991-04-02

Total Pages: 644

ISBN-13: 9780520913752

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What can the great crises of the past teach us about contemporary revolutions? Arguing from an exciting and original perspective, Goldstone suggests that great revolutions were the product of 'ecological crises' that occurred when inflexible political, economic, and social institutions were overwhelmed by the cumulative pressure of population growth on limited available resources. Moreover, he contends that the causes of the great revolutions of Europe—the English and French revolutions—were similar to those of the great rebellions of Asia, which shattered dynasties in Ottoman Turkey, China, and Japan. The author observes that revolutions and rebellions have more often produced a crushing state orthodoxy than liberal institutions, leading to the conclusion that perhaps it is vain to expect revolution to bring democracy and economic progress. Instead, contends Goldstone, the path to these goals must begin with respect for individual liberty rather than authoritarian movements of 'national liberation.' Arguing that the threat of revolution is still with us, Goldstone urges us to heed the lessons of the past. He sees in the United States a repetition of the behavior patterns that have led to internal decay and international decline in the past, a situation calling for new leadership and careful attention to the balance between our consumption and our resources. Meticulously researched, forcefully argued, and strikingly original, Revolutions and Rebellions in the Early Modern World is a tour de force by a brilliant young scholar. It is a book that will surely engender much discussion and debate.


The Third Revolution

The Third Revolution

Author: Elizabeth Economy

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 0190866071

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In The Third Revolution, Elizabeth Economy, one of America's leading China scholars, provides an authoritative overview of contemporary China that makes sense of all of the seeming inconsistencies and ambiguities in its policies and actions.


States and Social Revolutions

States and Social Revolutions

Author: Theda Skocpol

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-09-29

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 1316453944

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State structures, international forces, and class relations: Theda Skocpol shows how all three combine to explain the origins and accomplishments of social-revolutionary transformations. Social revolutions have been rare but undeniably of enormous importance in modern world history. States and Social Revolutions provides a new frame of reference for analyzing the causes, the conflicts, and the outcomes of such revolutions. It develops a rigorous, comparative historical analysis of three major cases: the French Revolution of 1787 through the early 1800s, the Russian Revolution of 1917 through the 1930s, and the Chinese Revolution of 1911 through the 1960s. Believing that existing theories of revolution, both Marxist and non-Marxist, are inadequate to explain the actual historical patterns of revolutions, Skocpol urges us to adopt fresh perspectives. Above all, she maintains that states conceived as administrative and coercive organizations potentially autonomous from class controls and interests must be made central to explanations of revolutions.


Making China Modern

Making China Modern

Author: Klaus Mühlhahn

Publisher: Belknap Press

Published: 2019-01-14

Total Pages: 737

ISBN-13: 0674737350

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“Thoughtful, probing...a worthy successor to the famous histories of Fairbank and Spence [that] will be read by all students and scholars of modern China.” —William C. Kirby, coauthor of Can China Lead? It is tempting to attribute the rise of China to Deng Xiaoping and to recent changes in economic policy. But China has a long history of creative adaptation. In the eighteenth century, the Qing Empire dominated a third of the world’s population. Then, as the Opium Wars and the Taiping Rebellion ripped the country apart, China found itself verging on free fall. More recently, after Mao, China managed a surprising recovery, rapidly undergoing profound economic and social change. A dynamic story of crisis and recovery, failure and triumph, Making China Modern explores the versatility and resourcefulness that guaranteed China’s survival, powered its rise, and will determine its future. “Chronicles reforms, revolutions, and wars through the lens of institutions, often rebutting Western impressions.” —New Yorker “A remarkable accomplishment. Unlike an earlier generation of scholarship, Making China Modern does not treat China’s contemporary transformation as a postscript. It accepts China as a major and active player in the world, places China at the center of an interconnected and global network of engagement, links domestic politics to international dynamics, and seeks to approach China on its own terms.” —Wen-hsin Yeh, author of Shanghai Splendor


China’s Revolutions and Intergenerational Relations

China’s Revolutions and Intergenerational Relations

Author: Martin Whyte

Publisher: U OF M CENTER FOR CHINESE STUDIES

Published: 2021-01-19

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0472038095

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China’s Revolutions and Intergenerational Relations counters the widely accepted notion that traditional family patterns are weakened by forces such as economic development and social revolutions. China has experienced wrenching changes on both the economic and the political fronts, yet from the evidence presented here the tradition of filial respect and support for aging parents remains alive and well. Using collaborative surveys carried out in 1994 in the middle-sized industrial city of Baoding and comparative data from urban Taiwan, the authors examine issues shaping the relationships between adult Chinese children and their elderly parents. The continued vitality of intergenerational support and filial obligations in these samples is not simply an instance of strong Confucian tradition trumping powerful forces of change. Instead, and somewhat paradoxically, the continued strength of filial obligations can be attributed largely to the institutions of Chinese socialism forged in the era of Mao Zedong. With socialist institutions now under assault in the People’s Republic of China, the future of intergenerational relations in the twenty-first century is once again uncertain.