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This book studies a burgeoning middlebrow culture championed and sustained by a group of women writers, editors, and publishers who began their careers in Shanghai in the early 1940s when the city entered into an era of total occupation by the Japanese.

No detailed description available for \"Resisting Manchukuo\".

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295804811 This historical investigation describes the Qing imperial authorities’ attempts to consolidate control over the Zhongjia, a non-Han population, in eighteenth-century Guizhou, a poor, remote, and environmentally harsh province in Southwest China. Far from submitting peaceably to the state’s quest for hegemony, the locals clung steadfastly to livelihood choices—chiefly illegal activities such as robbery, raiding, and banditry—that had played an integral role in their cultural and economic survival. Using archival materials, indigenous folk narratives, and ethnographic research, Jodi Weinstein shows how these seemingly subordinate populations challenged state power.

Heroines of the Qingintroduces an array of Chinese women from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who were powerful, active subjects of their own lives and who wrote themselves as the heroines of their exemplary stories. Traditionally, \"exemplary women\" (lienu)-heroic martyrs, chaste widows, and faithful maidens, for example-were written into official dynastic histories for their unrelenting adherence to female virtue by Confucian family standards. However, despite the rich writing traditions about these women, their lives were often distorted by moral and cultural agendas. Binbin Yang, drawing on interdisciplinary sources, shows how they were able to cross boundaries that were typically closed to women-boundaries not only of gender, but also of knowledge, economic power, political engagement, and ritual and cultural authority. Yang closely examines the rhetorical strategies these \"exemplary women\" exploited for self-representation in various writing genres and highlights their skillful negotiation with, and appropriation of, the values of female exemplarity for self-empowerment.

A Change in Worlds explores the environmental, economic, and political history of the Sino-Tibetan Songpan region of northern Sichuan from the late imperial Qing Dynasty to the early 21st century. A historically Tibetan region on the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau, with significant Han and Muslim Chinese populations, Songpan played important roles in the development of western and modern China’s ethnic relations policies, forestry sector, grasslands and environmental conservation, and recent developments in eco- and ethnic tourism as part of various Chinese states. However, in spite of close associations with various Tibetan and Chinese regimes, the region also has a rich history of local independence and resilient nomadic, semi-nomadic and agricultural populations and identities. The Sino-Tibetan diversity in Songpan, partly formed by unique ecological conditions, conditioned all attempts to incorporate the region into larger and more centralized state homogenizing structures. This historical study analyzes the social force of markets and nature in the Songpan region in concert with the political and social conflicts and compromise at the heart of changing political regimes and the area’s ethnic groups. It presents new perspectives on the social transformation and economies of Tibetans and Han Chinese from the late Qing Dynasty to Mao era and contemporary western China. It not only allows for a new understanding of how the natural environment and landscapes fit into the imagination of the Sino-Tibetan borderlands, it also figures in the challenges of negotiating ethnic and market relations among societies. The mix of complicated relations over natural environment, resources, politics and markets was at the heart of the region’s social and political infrastructures, with far-reaching implications for both historical and contemporary China.

In this book, Li Li reveals complex connections between memory about the Chinese Cultural Revolution and representations of memory as a means of identity remapping, ideological reconfiguration, and artistic negotiation in a context of cross-cultural environment.

This study of poetry by women in late imperial China examines the metamorphosis of the trope of the \"inner chambers\" (gui), to which women were confined in traditional Chinese households, and which in literature were both a real and an imaginary place. Originally popularized in sixth-century \"palace style\" poetry, the inner chambers were used by male writers as a setting in which to celebrate female beauty, to lament the loneliness of abandoned women, and by extension, to serve as a political allegory for the exile of loyal and upright male ministers spurned by the imperial court. Female writers of lyric poetry (ci) soon adopted the theme, beginning its transition from male fantasy to multidimensional representation of women and their place in society, and eventually its manifestation in other poetic genres as well. Emerging from the role of sexual objects within poetry, late imperial women were agents of literary change in their expansion and complication of the boudoir theme. While some take ownership and de-eroticizing its imagery for their own purposes, adding voices of children and older women, and filling the inner chambers with purposeful activity such as conversation, teaching, religious ritual, music, sewing, childcare, and chess-playing, some simply want to escape from their confinement and protest gender restrictions imposed on women.Women's Poetry of Late Imperial Chinatraces this evolution across centuries, providing and analyzing examples of poetic themes, motifs, and imagery associated with the inner chambers, and demonstrating the complication and nuancing of the gui theme by increasingly aware and sophisticated women writers.

Life in Shanghai played out against a backdrop of shifting political maneuvers until World War II burned off the patina that had made 'Old Shanghai' a world unto itself. In this personal history we follow one man through Japan’s conquest of Shanghai in 1937 to the Chinese civil war and Communist takeover, Mao’s desperate attempts to modernize a medieval country and Deng Xiaoping’s opening the economy but not social freedoms. The protagonist lees burgeoning corruption and makes it to the United States to see for himself what the tales of freedom and democracy might offer.

A young man arrives in England in the 1930s, knowing few words of the English language. Yet, two years later he writes a successful English book on Chinese art, and within the following decade publishes more than a dozen others. This is the true story of Chiang Yee, a renowned writer, artist, and worldwide traveler, best known for theSilent Travellerseries--stories of England, the United States, Ireland, France, Japan, and Australia--all written in his humorous, delightfully refreshing, and enlightening literary style. This biography is more than a recounting of extraordinary accomplishments. It also embraces the transatlantic life experience of Yee who traveled from China to England and then on to the United States, where he taught at Columbia University, to his return to China in 1975, after a forty-two year absence. Interwoven is the history of the communist revolution in China; the battle to save England during World War II; the United States during the McCarthy red scare era; and, eventually, thawing Sino-American relations in the 1970s. Da Zheng uncovers Yee's encounters with racial exclusion and immigration laws, displacement, exile, and the pain and losses he endured hidden behind a popular public image.

The chapters in this ground-breaking volume examine the complex practices of biographical writing in Ming and Qing China. The authors draw on a rich variety of sources to answer some basic questions: Who were the writers of these texts and the subjects of their biographical constructions? What motivated these textual productions and sustained the routes from (re)creations to (re)publications? The informed and fascinating readings illuminate the enduring appeal of representing and represented lives in Chinese history.