The first treaty ports in China were opened in 1843. Here, for nearly a century, foreign traders ruled their own settlements, administered their own laws, controlled their own police forces and ran the customs service. Despite typhoons, disease, banditry and riots, merchants and missionary families in the treaty ports led as far as possible a foreign life. In 1943 the treaty ports were returned to China and most of their inhabitants interned by the Japanese. Yet the record of their residency remains in Shanghai's solid office buildings, in Tientsin's mock Tudor facades, and in the Edwardian villas of Peitaiho and Amoy. The last inhabitants of the treaty ports are also still alive: through their reminiscences and the accounts of their predecessors Frances Wood recalls a foreign life lived in a foreign land.
Banner-carrying Salvation Army marchers, stone-silent Quakers, jumpy Midwestern revivalists, and Prayer-book Anglicans all made up the mixed multitude sent to the Middle Kingdom by the China Inland Mission (CIM) in the nineteenth century. In China's Millions veteran historian Alvyn Austin crafts a compelling narrative of the sprawling history of the China Inland Mission. This book introduces readers to a remarkable array of sights, from the visionary, charismatic sect-leader Pastor Hsi, to the "wordless book," a missionary teaching device that fit perfectly with Chinese color cosmology, to the opium-soaked aftermath of the North China Famine of 187779. Clear, readable, and well researched, China's Millions digs deeply into the Chinese and Western past to tell a story of the strange yet hopeful result of two cultures colliding. - Publisher.
This is the first history of the bicycle to trace not only the technical background to its invention, but also to contrast its social and cultural impact in different parts of the world, and assess its future as a continuing global phenomenon.
While volumes have been written about the Protestant missionary movement in China, scant attention has been paid to the role of nursing and nurses in these missions. Set against a backdrop of war and revolution, Healing Henan brings sixty years of missionary nursing out of the shadows by examining how Canadian nurses shaped health care in the province of Henan and how China, in turn, influenced the nature of missionary nursing. From the time Presbyterian (later United Church) missionaries arrived in China in 1888 until the abrupt closure of the North China Mission in 1947, Canadian nurses were ubiquitous in Henan. As China underwent a tumultuous transition from dynastic kingdom to independent republic, Canadian nurses advanced a version of hospital-based nursing education and practice that rivalled modern nursing care in Canada. In Healing Henan, Sonya Grypma offers a highly readable and fresh perspective on China missions and the global expansion of professional nursing. As the first comprehensive study of missionary nursing in China, it will be of particular interest to nurses and missionaries, and to historians of Canada, China, nursing, medicine, women's work, and missions.
The book examines the lives of six different groups of Westerners: ‘foreign comrades’ who made their home in Mao’s China, twenty-two former Korean War POWs who controversially chose China ahead of repatriation, diplomats of Western countries that recognized the People’s Republic, the few foreign correspondents permitted to work in China, ‘foreign experts’, and language students. Each of these groups led distinct lives under Mao, while sharing the experience of a highly politicized society and of official measures to isolate them from everyday China. ‘This book is enjoyable and engaging. The author introduces a small but dynamic collection of enthusiastic international participants in post-1949 China showing unquestioned loyalty to Mao’s ideals. Equally intriguing are the alternate stories of diplomats and reporters existing far outside the mainstream of Chinese life and trusted by neither the Chinese nor the international supporters.’ —Edgar A. Porter, Professor Emeritus, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University; author of The People’s Doctor: George Hatem and China’s Revolution ‘A well-written survey about the variety of Westerners who lived and worked in the People’s Republic of China between 1949 and 1976. This is a welcome addition to the “sojourner” literature about foreigners who lived in twentieth-century socialist countries. The scholarship, which includes the review of memoirs, archival materials, and secondary works, is impressive and comprehensive.’ —Stephen R. MacKinnon, Arizona State University; co-author of China Reporting: An Oral History of American Journalism in the 1930s and 1940s
This delightfully eclectic book, part comedy, part travelogue, and part cultural history, uncovers the story of the British delegations that were invited to China in 1954 - a full eighteen years before President Nixon's more famous 1972 mission.
The story of an Englishman who lived through the last years of the Qing dynasty, was trapped in the British Legation during the Boxer uprising and went on to occupy a number of senior positions in the Imperial Customs as Commissioner of Customs in various ports, Shanghai Postmaster and first Director of the important Customs College.
There's a folk memory of China in which numberless yellow hordes pour out of the 'mysterious East' to overwhelm the vulnerable West, accompanied by a stereotype of the Chinese as cruel, cunning and depraved. Hollywood films played their part in perpetuating these myths and stereotypes that constituted 'The Yellow Peril'. Jeffrey Richards examines in detail how and why they did it. He shows how the negative image was embodied in recurrent cinematic depictions of opium dens, tong wars, sadistic dragon ladies and corrupt warlords and how, in the 1930s and 1940s, a countervailing positive image involved the heroic peasants of The Good Earth and Dragon Seed fighting against Japanese invasion in wartime tributes to the West's ally, Nationalist China. The cinema's split level response is also traced through the images of the ultimate Oriental villain, the sinister Dr. Fu Manchu and the timeless Chinese hero, the intelligent and benevolent detective Charlie Chan.Filling a longstanding gap in Cinema and Cultural History, the book is founded in fresh research into Hollywood's shifting representations of China and its people.
This is a multi-author work which examines the cultural dimensions of the relations between East Asia’s two great powers, China and Japan, in a period of change and turmoil, from the late nineteenth century to the end of the Second World War. This period saw Japanese invasion of China, the occupation of China’s North-east (Manchuria) and Taiwan, and war between the two nations from 1937-1945; the scars of that war are still evident in relations between the two countries today. In their quest for modernity, the rulers and leading thinkers of China and Japan defined themselves in contradisctinction to the other, influenced both by traditional bonds of classical culture and by the influx of new Western ideas that flowed through Japan to China. The experiences of intellectual and cultural awakening in the two countries were inextricably linked, as our studies of poetry, fiction, philosophy, theatre, and popular culture demonstrate. The chapters explore this process of “transculturation” – the sharing and exchange of ideas and artistic expression – not only in Japan and China, but in the larger region which Joshua Fogel has called the “Sinosphere,” an area including Korea and parts of Southeast Asia with a shared heritage of Confucian statecraft and values underpinned by the classical Chinese language. The authors of the chapters, who include established senior academics and younger scholars, and employ a range of disciplines and methodologies, were selected by the editors for their expertise in particular aspects of this rich and complex cultural relationship. As for the editors: Richard King and Cody Poulton are scholars and translators of Chinese literature and Japanese theatre respectively, each taking a historical and comparative perspective to the study of their subject; Katsuhiko Endo is an intellectual historian dealing with both Japan and China.
This study, based on primary sources, deals with the linguistic development and polemical uses of the expression Unequal Treaties, which refers to the treaties China signed between 1842 and 1946. Although this expression has occupied a central position in both Chinese collective memory and Chinese and English historiographies, this is the first book to offer an in-depth examination of China's encounters with the outside world as manifested in the rhetoric surrounding the Unequal Treaties. Author Dong Wang argues that competing forces within China have narrated and renarrated the history of the treaties in an effort to consolidate national unity, international independence, and political legitimacy and authority. In the twentieth century, she shows, China's experience with these treaties helped to determine their use of international law. Of great relevance for students of contemporary China and Chinese history, as well as Chinese international law and politics, this book illuminates how various Chinese political actors have defined and redefined the past using the framework of the Unequal Treaties.
