The Making of the Modern Chinese State
The Making of the Modern Chinese State

Author: Huaiyin Li

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-08-13

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0429777892

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The Making of the Modern Chinese State: 1600–1950 offers an historical analysis of the formation of the modern Chinese state from the seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth centuries, providing refreshing and provocative interpretations on almost every major issue regarding the rise of modern China. This book explores the question of why today’s China is unlike any other nation-state in size and structure. It inquires into the reasons behind the striking continuity in China's territorial and ethnic compositions over the past centuries, and explicates the genesis and tenacity of the Chinese state as a highly centralized and unified regime that has been able to survive into the twenty-first century. Its analysis centres on three key variables, namely geopolitical strategy, fiscal constitution, and identity building, and it demonstrates how they worked together to shape the outcome of state transformation in modern China. Enhanced by a selection of informative tables and illustrations, The Making of the Modern Chinese State: 1600–1950 is ideal for undergraduates and graduates studying East Asian history, Chinese history, empires in Asia, and state formation.

Righteous Revolutionaries
Righteous Revolutionaries

Author: Jeffrey Arshad Javed

Publisher:

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9780472220458

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Righteous Revolutionaries illustrates how states appeal to popular morality—shared understandings of right and wrong—to forge new group identities and mobilize violence against perceived threats to their authority. Jeffrey A. Javed examines the Chinese Communist Party’s mass mobilization of violence during its land reform campaign in the early 1950s, one of the most violent and successful state-building efforts in history. Using an array of novel archival, documentary, and quantitative historical data, this book illustrates that China’s land reform campaign was not just about economic redistribution but rather part of a larger, brutally violent state-building effort to delegitimize the new party-state’s internal rivals and establish its moral authority. Righteous Revolutionaries argues that the Chinese Party-state simultaneously removed perceived threats to its authority at the grassroots and bolstered its legitimacy through a process called moral mobilization. This mobilization process created a moral boundary that designated a virtuous ingroup of “the masses” and a demonized outgroup of “class enemies,” mobilized the masses to participate in violence against this broadly defined outgroup, and strengthened this symbolic boundary by making the masses complicit in state violence. Righteous Revolutionaries shows how we can find traces of moral mobilization in China today under Xi Jinping’s rule. In an era where states and politicians regularly weaponize moral emotions to foment intergroup conflict and violence, understanding the dynamics of violent mobilization and state authority are more relevant than ever before.

The Making of the Chinese State
The Making of the Chinese State

Author: Leo K. Shin

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2006-07-03

Total Pages: 18

ISBN-13: 0521853540

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In this study, Leo Shin traces the roots of China's modern ethnic configurations to the Ming Dynasty.

The Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace
The Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace

Author: Mark W. Frazier

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2002-01-24

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1139432230

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State workers in China have until recently enjoyed the 'iron rice bowl' of comprehensive cradle-to-grave benefits and lifetime employment. This central institution in Chinese politics emerged over the course of various crises that swept through China's industrial sector prior to and after revolution in 1949. Frazier explores critical phases in the expansion of the Chinese state during the middle third of the twentieth century to reveal how different labour institutions reflected state power. While the 'iron rice bowl' is usually seen as an outgrowth of Communist labour policy, Frazier's account shows that is has longer historical roots. As a product of the Chinese state, the iron rice bowl's dismantling in the 1990s has raised sensitive issues about the way in which the contemporary Chinese state exerts control over urban industrial society. This book sheds light on state and society relations in China under the Nationalist and Communist regimes.

China from Empire to Nation-State
China from Empire to Nation-State

Author: Hui Wang

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2014-10-14

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 0674966961

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This translation of the Introduction to Wang Hui’s Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (2004) makes part of his four-volume masterwork available to English readers for the first time. A leading public intellectual in China, Wang charts the historical currents that have shaped Chinese modernity from the Song Dynasty to the present day, and along the way challenges the West to rethink some of its most basic assumptions about what it means to be modern. China from Empire to Nation-State exposes oversimplifications and distortions implicit in Western critiques of Chinese history, which long held that China was culturally resistant to modernization, only able to join the community of modern nations when the Qing Empire finally collapsed in 1912. Noting that Western ideas have failed to take into account the diversity of Chinese experience, Wang recovers important strains of premodern thought. Chinese thinkers theorized politics in ways that do not line up neatly with political thought in the West—for example, the notion of a “Heavenly Principle” that governed everything from the ordering of the cosmos to the structure of society and rationality itself. Often dismissed as evidence of imperial China’s irredeemably backward culture, many Neo-Confucian concepts reemerged in twentieth-century Chinese political discourse, as thinkers and activists from across the ideological spectrum appealed to ancient precedents and principles in support of their political and cultural agendas. Wang thus enables us to see how many aspects of premodern thought contributed to a distinctly Chinese vision of modernity.

China’s War on Smuggling
China’s War on Smuggling

Author: Philip Thai

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2018-06-12

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 023154636X

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Smuggling along the Chinese coast has been a thorn in the side of many regimes. From opium and weapons concealed aboard foreign steamships in the Qing dynasty to nylon stockings and wristwatches trafficked in the People’s Republic, contests between state and smuggler have exerted a surprising but crucial influence on the political economy of modern China. Seeking to consolidate domestic authority and confront foreign challenges, states introduced tighter regulations, higher taxes, and harsher enforcement. These interventions sparked widespread defiance, triggering further coercive measures. Smuggling simultaneously threatened the state’s power while inviting repression that strengthened its authority. Philip Thai chronicles the vicissitudes of smuggling in modern China—its practice, suppression, and significance—to demonstrate the intimate link between illicit coastal trade and the amplification of state power. China’s War on Smuggling shows that the fight against smuggling was not a simple law enforcement problem but rather an impetus to centralize authority and expand economic controls. The smuggling epidemic gave Chinese states pretext to define legal and illegal behavior, and the resulting constraints on consumption and movement remade everyday life for individuals, merchants, and communities. Drawing from varied sources such as legal cases, customs records, and popular press reports and including diverse perspectives from political leaders, frontline enforcers, organized traffickers, and petty runners, Thai uncovers how different regimes policed maritime trade and the unintended consequences their campaigns unleashed. China’s War on Smuggling traces how defiance and repression redefined state power, offering new insights into modern Chinese social, legal, and economic history.

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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After three decades of reform and opening up, China is closing its doors, clamping down on Western influence in the economy, media, and civil society. At the same time, President Xi Jinping has positioned himself as a champion of globalization, projecting Chinese power abroad and seeking toreshape the global order. Herein lies the paradox of modern China - the rise of a more insular, yet more ambitious China that will have a profound impact on both the country's domestic politics and its international relations.In The Third Revolution, eminent China scholar Elizabeth Economy provides an incisive look at the world's most populous country. Inheriting a China burdened with slowing economic growth, rampant corruption, choking pollution, and a failing social welfare system, President Xi has reversed course,rejecting the liberalizing reforms of his predecessors. At home, the Chinese leadership has reasserted the role of the state into society and enhanced Party and state control. Beyond its borders, Beijing has recast itself as a great power and has maneuvered itself to be an arbiter - not just aplayer - on the world stage. Through an exploration of Xi Jinping's efforts to address top policy priorities - fighting corruption, controlling the internet, reforming state-owned enterprises, improving the country's innovation capacity, reducing the country's air pollution, and elevating itspresence on the global stage - Economy identifies the tensions, shortcomings, and successes of Xi's first five years in office. Xi's ambition, she argues, provides new opportunities for the United States and the rest of the world to encourage greater Chinese contribution to global public goods butalso necessitates a more proactive and coordinated effort to counter the rapidly expanding influence of an illiberal power within a liberal world order. This is essential reading for anyone interested in both China under Xi and how America and the world should deal with this vast nation in thecoming years.

Making Religion, Making the State
Making Religion, Making the State

Author: Yoshiko Ashiwa

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0804758417

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This volume combines the perspective of religion as a constructed category of modernity with the analytic focus and empirical grounding of institutional social science to develop a new approach to the study of state and religion in modern and contemporary China.

The Making of Chinese Foreign and Security Policy in the Era of Reform
The Making of Chinese Foreign and Security Policy in the Era of Reform

Author: David M. Lampton

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 528

ISBN-13: 0804740569

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This is the most comprehensive, in-depth account of how Chinese foreign and security policy is made and implemented during the reform era. It includes the contributions of more than a dozen scholars who undertook field research in the People's Republic of China, South Korea, and Taiwan.