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It has been observed that since the Early Qing Dynasty, the eastward spread of Western classics has been in decline; this article aims to looks at how Protestant missionaries helped to revive it in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. First, this study examines the circumstances that Protestant missionaries faced upon arriving in China and describes the challenges, opportunities, and issues they encountered when attempting to spread Western classics as part of their missionary effort. Second, this article reveals the strategies Protestant missionaries employed to revive the Western classics, with a focus on the utilization of the translated literature, press, and academic institutions. Third, this article explores the ways the spread of Western classics by the missionaries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century outshone the achievements of their predecessors of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Unlike the missions through secular knowledge in China, the spread of Protestantism in Korea took place in a more direct manner. This comparative study in the last section highlights the importance of each country's endowment in terms of the method and effectiveness of missionary efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines four typologies of secularism in China from the sixteenth century onward, through an analysis of the triadic relationship between the secular, religious, and superstitious. These notions have been considered to be derived from the particular intellectual and political history of the West, but this fails to grasp the complexity of non-Western belief systems. This article proposes to instead examine how Chinese policymakers and intellectuals actively fabricated religion and produced secularization. It goes beyond a simple rebuttal of Eurocentrism, and arguments regarding the mutual incomparability of Western and Chinese experiences of secularization. It distinguishes four typologies of secularism that emerged successively in China: (1) the reduction of Christianity from the sixteenth century to the 1900s; (2) the Confucian secular and (3) atheist secular that were conceptualized, respectively, by royalist reformers and anti-Manchu revolutionaries during the final two decades of the Qing Dynasty; and (4) the interventionist secularism pursued by the Republican and the Communist regimes to strictly supervise and regulate religious beliefs and practices. The paper argues that, if secularization is indeed Christian in nature, secularism and religion were not imposed in China under Western cultural and political hegemony. Instead, the Christian secular model was produced in China mainly via pre-existing cultural norms and the state's ad hoc political needs, making the Christian secularism itself a multipolar phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The roots of the genealogy writing tradition of the Chinese Sibe go back to the Qing Dynasty. This tradition has played a crucial role to create a genealogical community of the Sibe: genealogies were the material carriers of knowledge preserved about their ancestors and their past. However, many of the genealogies were lost during the turbulent time of the twentieth century, and although numerous Sibe clans embark on reproducing their own family trees, it is only the memory of the elderly they can most often draw on. This study is intended to present and highlight the significance a specific collection of genealogies compiled by a self-taught Sibe historian, offering valuable sources for conduct research on the history of the Qing-dynasty and the Sibe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article tells the intertwined tales of two historical routes that testify to the extensive geographical distance and profound political connections between Tibet and China throughout the modern era. In much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Sichuan Route operated as the transportation artery upon which the Qing empire depended to maintain authority in Kham and Tibet. It was also the site of a rite of passage for frontier functionaries and a meeting ground between imperial agents and the indigenous population. Despite its destruction after the implosion of the Qing in 1911, the histories and memories of the Sichuan Route continued to influence decision-makers in both China and Tibet in the following decades. The Maritime Route, which emerged in the late nineteenth century with the proliferation of steam transportation in Asia, revolutionized the way in which Tibet connected to China and the rest of the world. It also competed with the Sichuan Route and encouraged the Qing to reconfigure its presence in its non-Chinese territories in the southwest. After the empire fell, political tensions continued to evolve around the Maritime Route, which functioned simultaneously as the reluctant choice of Chinese emissaries and a strategic tool that the Lhasa government wielded to curtail China's influence. Through an exploration of the Sichuan Route and the Maritime Route on the levels of experience and representation, this article sketches the two routes' troubled interconnections with each other and with every twist and turn in Sino-Tibetan relations from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two recent books illumine arenas of state practice in Qing and Republican China and/or in the People's Republic of China. One takes up state practice through the problem of the establishment of a national language in China's nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the other engages statecraft from the perspective of the 1950s efforts to collect data and account statistically for China's material conditions and its population. Each book contributes to narrower and broader areas of research and academic interest in China's and the world's modern history, and both could be of interest to scholars of nationalism, language, statistics, Chinese identity, and the Chinese state. This essay discusses the following works. Arunabh Ghosh. Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People's Republic of China. Histories of Economic Life Series. Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. 340 pp. Hardcover ($45.00), softcover ($32.95), or e-book. | Gina Anne Tam. Dialect and Nationalism in China: 1860–1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 261 pp. Hardcover ($99.99), softcover ($29.99), or e-book. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries Qing officials in China periodically instructed their Mongolian subordinates to make maps of the regions they governed. The Qing were aiming thereby to gain information about the Empire, but the Mongols had other concerns. This article focuses on Mongolian map-making practice and argues that it differed from that prevalent at the time in both China and Russia. Concerned less with conveying practical information than with locating the domain in a cosmological understanding of the world, the Mongol maps were holistic. They were also both 'participatory', involving several different actors in their compilation, and 'relational', concerned to demonstrate the stance of the map-making subject in relation to the map's receiver (the office of the Lifanyuan and ultimately, the Qing Emperor). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For most of Qing domination over China, the Manchu rulers strictly controlled or even prohibited migration of Chinese people to the dynasty's Motherland (long xing zhi di 龍興之地). Only two brief phases are an exception, namely the mid Shunzhi to early Kangxi and Yongzheng periods. During the former, in 1653, a "Regulation for the repopulation and land reclamation of Liaodong" was promulgated, establishing alluring incentives for whoever managed to move a hundred or more people to the region east of the Liao river. Only fifteen years later, when the maneuver had just started to produce some results, the Qing court abolished it. In the long term, such a change of direction appears perfectly normal, considering that later on most of the lands would be assigned to the Eight Banners and the state would have striven to keep the Chinese out. Nevertheless, in the short term, the decision seemed to come out of the blue. An interesting debate on what might have determined the turnabout began in the early twentieth century, and some most recent contributions have been published in the 2000s; yet none of the thesis proposed so far is fully convincing. On the basis of sources that have not yet been taken into account, this paper further investigates into the matter and aims at demonstrating that the concerns which compelled the rulers to officially oppose immigration in the following decades already existed in the very first years of Kangxi reign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on how young Chinese students, sent overseas to study mainly science and technology by the late Qing Dynasty government with intentions to save feudal China, turned out to be pathways to new republican China. These youths studying in England, France, and the United States later became political, social, and cultural leaders playing crucial roles in shaping China's future. The students not only learned technical knowledge, but also became aware of their mission to save, strengthen, and modernize their country, and to disseminate and develop what they learned overseas to future generations of Chinese youths. When these students returned to China, they rose quickly up the echelons because of their elitist foreign education. Some of them became famous educators, professionals, politicians, diplomats, and scientists who occupied top positions in China politically and culturally. The whole experience of studying abroad affected how they envisioned modern China and its position in the world [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article excavates some of the core intellectual elements underlying the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 and their historical genealogies. Rather than focusing on the modern nature of the revolution, Mizoguchi locates the revolution within the context of traditional Chinese culture and thought. A central focus of the article is the notion of “self-governance” (zizhi), which played a central role in determining the shape the revolution was to ultimately take. It analyzes the social thought of key figures of the Qing period, showing how in modified guise, core Confucian ethical concepts such as the dichotomy between the private (si) and public (gong) as well as utopian concepts such asdatong(great harmony) determined the deep structure of revolutionary thought at the end of the Qing and into the Republican and Communist periods. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This is a study of the impact of cultural exile on modern Chinese historiography and the rise of Chinese nationalism. It looks into historian Ping-ti Ho's emotional response to the New Qing History in the late 1990s and explains why he was so passionate about this seemingly purely academic issue. Applying critical theory to examine this event, it argues that Ho was a cultural exile in a double sense. Being a Chinese patriot teaching in North America, he was away from his home country, and, at the same time, he never fully embraced the local identity in his host culture. This state of marginalization paradoxically heightened his sense of nationalistic pride. This article contends that Ho’s anger at the New Qing History had less to do with his personality than with his traumatic memory of the Sino-Japanese War. The real source of his anger was the speculation that this new approach of studying Qing history based on Manchu-language archives be a reincarnation of the Japanese wartime imperialistic project of Manchuristic studies. This case study of the academic debate on historiography explores the extraterritorial nature of modem Chinese nationalism, and reminds us of the intricate dynamics of cultural politics at the age of globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As evolutionary theories were introduced into China, and the principle of evolution was established in the last years of the Qing dynasty, it became a pressing problem to fix the position of China in an evolutionary sequence. Many kinds of evolutionary orders emerged around the year 1900, among which the order from savage society to patriarchal society to militant society proposed by Yan Fu’s Shehui tongquan, translated from Edward Jenks's A Short History of Politics, was the most influential. To explain Yan Fu’s purpose in translating this work, the political and intellectual situation of China and the works he had read but had not translated should also be taken into consideration, besides his expositions through the preface, comments and translation of this work. In Shehui tongquan, Yan Fu labelled China as “patriarchal as well as militant,” and on many occasions expressed the wish for China to rise above patriarchal society and enter militant society. His label of Confucius as “Sage of patriarchal society” shook the position of Confucianism in China. Meanwhile, Yan Fu criticized the tendencies of conservatism, xenophobia and anti- Manchuism in contemporary China. His criticism of conservatism and xenophobia was widely accepted and occasioned no debate, while his criticism of anti- Manchuism became involved in the debate between the revolutionary party and the constitutional party. Zhang Taiyan refuted Yan from the aspect of understanding “nationalism” correctly. There were also some faults in Zhang's refutation. However, his opinions that there are differences between social science and natural science, and that the particularity of China should be taken into consideration in studying Chinese society, were very insightful. Yan Fu’s introduction of a social evolutionary sequence, and his location of Chinese society therein, were influential among intellectuals until the 1920s and 1930s, around which time it was replaced by a five stage theory. But the pattern of analysing Chinese society from general truth or general rules did not change. Actually, Herbert Spencer had once refuted Auguste Comte’s practice of taking different forms of society as different stages in the evolutionary series, but he himself also accepted the existence of a principle of evolution, and used “universal,” “general,” and “special” to differentiate them, in a way that is not completely clear. Yan Fu’s works were often aimed at specific occasions rather than something unchanging. It should be noted that, in his late years, especially after the breakout of the First World War, Yan experienced a re-valuation of eastern and western cultures, as well as of “militant society,” and reaffirmed the value of traditional Chinese culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1911-1927 period represented a window of opportunity for the creation of a Chinese military structure with a professional officer corps. After the fall of the Qing dynasty, Jiang Baili emerged as a rare military theorist who had intellectual status, a nuanced understanding of civil-military affairs, and both domestic and foreign military training. The failure of Jiang Baili to influence China's military development was mainly due to his individual difficulties in focusing his intellectual talents on real-world issues. After producing two seminal works in the 1910s, Jiang lived for another twenty years as a marginalized, increasingly eccentric military analyst. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contextualizes the rise of "early religious studies in China" with its apex in the 1920s within the heated debates on the role of religion in a modern Chinese society. While the most recent development of religious studies (zongjiaoxue) in China (including Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan) is well known, its early emergence in the late Qing and Republican periods (ca. 1890-1949) has been a neglected topic. The author demonstrates first how antagonistic anti-religious and affirmative positions, received from Western modernization discourse and informed by the contested character of the concept of religion itself, led to the emergence of this new discipline in Republican China as a product of broader discourses on modernization. Secondly, the article evaluates the limited institutionalization of religious studies as a distinct " full" discipline in relation to the broader interdisciplinary " field" of research and public debates on religion. While the interdisciplinary character is typical of the field in general (also in the West), the limited degree of "full disciplinarity" depended on specific, local discursive and political factors of its time. As "religion" appears as an important modern discourse in East Asia, the early emergence of religious studies in China thereby reflects social, political, and intellectual transitions from Imperial to Republican China, and offers a unique perspective on Asian discourses on religious and secular modernities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay links and analyzes the South Society of late Qing China with the May Fourth Movement of the modern period. It shows that when the founders of the South Society were first contemplating its establishment, they emphasized two points: first, nationalism and patriotism; and second, democracy and antifeudalism. The patriotic May Fourth Movement of the modern era was an extension of the patriotic and democratic sentiment developed in the late Qing period. The May Fourth Movement was both a "natural development" and an active refining of the ideas of pre-1911 student movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chen Qubin was an activist during the 1911 Revolution and an important essayist, thinker, and poet. This article details the highlights of his life and career in that era, offering a comprehensive discussion and analysis of how Chen changed from a traditional member of the literati to a committed revolutionary against the Qing dynasty. Though not so atypical of the time, the author argues, Chen's career path was par excellence for his generation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the period from 1906 to 1949, the local education administration system in China underwent the following changes; from establishing education promotion department (EPD); to replacing EPD with education department (ED); to restoring EPD; to establishing education bureau (EB); to reorganizing EB; to replacing EB with ED; and to restoring EB. The whole process shows modem China's efforts to establish a standardized, democratic, independent, professional and open administration system of education. At the same time, it also reveals that the education administration at that period was chaotic in organization, idealistic in goal-setting, westernized in content, and radical in manner. A review of this process will shed much light on the current reform in local education administration system in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a study of the Inner Mongolian land reform undertaken by the Qing government in the last decade of its rule. Instead of portraying land reform as a state process of taming and transforming nomads, I examine the metamorphosis of the multi-ethnic governing relationships enabled by the reform. The frontier governance system on which I focus consisted of coalitions and conflicts among four key players: Mongol banners, neighboring Han Chinese provinces, the Court of Dependencies, and frontier military governors. By elucidating the changing relationships that bound these players together, I pinpoint the most significant agendas of land reform, how the Mongols' position vis-à-vis state agencies changed throughout the reform process, and to what extent these changes resulted in state centralization. My study illuminates a variety of topics, including nomad sedentarization, frontier politics, and modern state expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper attempts to revise aspects of the existing interpretations of Nie Hai Hua (A Flower in a Sinful Sea) by applying perspectives from post-colonial studies to the study of this late Qing Chinese novel. Here the novel is read as a national narrative that portrays the emergence of China as a modern nation state from a decaying empire, with its intelligentsia caught between their desire to embrace modernity and nostalgia for cultural traditions. From the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, traditional Chinese scholars were faced with a predicament: they were lured by the modernity represented by Western learning, on the one hand, but were tied by an emotional link to Chinese tradition, on the other. In a disintegrating society, they struggled both to preserve their own cultural identity and construct a new identity. The opposing groups of Chinese literati portrayed in the novel in fact reflect the schizophrenic state of the Chinese consciousness on the threshold of modernity.To write the story of the nation demands that we articulate that archaic ambivalence that informs modernity.1 [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

China's long-term economic dynamics pose a formidable challenge to economic historians. The Qing Empire (1644-1911), the world's largest national economy before 1800, experienced a tripling of population during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with no signs of diminishing per capita income. While the timing remains in dispute, a vast gap emerged between newly rich industrial nations and China's lagging economy in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Only with an unprecedented growth spurt beginning in the late 1970s did this great divergence separating China from the global leaders substantially diminish, allowing China to regain its former standing among the world's largest economies. This essay develops an integrated framework for understanding that entire history, including both the divergence and the recent convergent trend. We explain how deeply embedded political and economic institutions that contributed to a long process of extensive growth before 1800 subsequently prevented China from capturing the benefits associated with the Industrial Revolution. During the twentieth century, the gradual erosion of these historic constraints and of new obstacles erected by socialist planning eventually opened the door to China's current boom. Our analysis links China's recent development to important elements of its past, while using recent success to provide fresh perspectives on the critical obstacles undermining earlier modernization efforts, and their eventual removal. (JEL N15, N45, O11, O47, P21, P24, P26) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking as its setting the great Manchurian pneumonic plague epidemic of 1910–1911, this article examines the construction of epidemiological blame that targeted migrant labourers from the peninsula of Shandong employed in the hunting of the Siberian marmot (Marmota sibirica), a natural reservoir of the disease. The article demonstrates how Chinese epidemiologists sought to pathologize marmot-hunting migrants from Shandong as unskilled pestilent “coolies”, while at the same time valorizing Mongol and Buryat marmot hunters as a “native” counter-paradigm; a binary anthropology of skill and sanitation, which instituted “coolies” as an anthropological type essential to the construction of hygienic modernity in China. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The 20th century witnessed a strong cultural enlightenment th movement in China, starting with the industrialization movement in the late 19th century Qing dynasty (1616-1912) and continuing in the May Fourth movement in 1919. The cultural enlightenment movement was strongly influenced by Western ideas such as democracy and the primacy of science. The Chinese modern cultural enlightenment can be compared with the European enlightenment that began with the Renaissance. One typical characteristic of this Chinese enlightenment that I wish to emphasize is the determining function of ideas and cultures, especially in light of the many criticisms of traditional Confucianism by intellectuals who blamed it for all the failures of Westernization in the 20th century. This is what I call the "Confucian Cultural Fallacy." This fallacy has influenced many famous intellectuals, such as Tu Wei-ming. In this paper, I set out to analyze how this fallacy influenced Tu in two of his major arguments: the third stage of the Confucian revival movement, and the idea of "cultural China." Throughout my analysis of different versions of the Confucian cultural fallacy in modern China, I also discuss how best to understand the Chinese cultural enlightenment movement in relation to Western Enlightenment movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between the intellectual elite and Buddhism has undergone a profound shift in response to tremendous changes in modern society. The intellectual elite created a connection between modern Buddhist studies and Western learning, transforming Buddhist studies to reflect the radical cultural and ideological changes to Chinese society and Buddhist philosophy. They "used their ideas to advance or suppress Buddhist theories," remolding Buddhism into a new modern religion characterized by engagement with the world to save humankind, with the purpose of rescuing the national destiny, enlightening the people, and delivering the nation from extinction. They mastered Confucianism and Buddhism using a discourse infused with the spirit of the era. They thus reformed feudal Buddhism and injected traditional Buddhist teachings with the spirit of bourgeois democracy and nationalist revolution, launching the modern Chinese Buddhist movement of revival and reform and causing Chinese Buddhism to shift from "crisis" to "opportunity" in a single bound, leaping across the threshold into modern society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Significant grassland degradation in Inner Mongolia is generally attributed by Chinese officials and scholars to overgrazing, whereas the effects of opening up grassland for farming, or what might be considered as 'over-cropping', are overlooked. We explore this issue from a historical perspective, and focus on ploughing-up and cultivation activities promoted by the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) during its last years, from 1902 to 1908. Crop expansion during that short period created profound social and ecological transformations in Inner Mongolia, and can be considered as marking the start of (a) agricultural dominance over herding, and (b) large-scale grassland degradation in the region during the twentieth century. This study indicates that over-cropping was a significant factor in reported grassland degradation in Inner Mongolia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes historical Chinese and Tibetan documents in order to assess various perspectives and consequences of the British invasion of Tibet in 1904 under colonel Francis Younghusband, focusing on the invasion's effect on Chinese attitudes towards Tibet. The documents illustrate the Tibetan government's communication with China and Tibet's disregard of Chinese authority due to a lack of support during the invasion. The Buddhist structure of the Tibetan government is discussed and Tibet's motivation to defend Buddhism from foreign religion is described. Relations between China's Qing dynasty and Tibet are highlighted and it is concluded that the documents analyzed suggest China's lack of resistance to the invasion was used to strategically assert power in Tibet.

This essay argues that to adequately answer the question its title poses, anthropological approaches to national and transnational China(s) must be grounded in the history of Qing imperial expansion. To this end, it compares and explores the connections between three examples of the “sojourn work” that has gone into making mobile, multiethnic populations abroad into Overseas Chinese. The first example deals with recent official attempts to project the People's Republic of China's multiethnic vision of Chinese-ness beyond its national borders. The second highlights the importance of the early Chinese nation-state in the making of Overseas Chinese community in Southeast Asia in the first decades of the twentieth century. The final case foregrounds the late imperial routes of nascent Chinese nationalism to argue that, in contrast to much of the current rhetoric on the Chinese “diaspora,” national and transnational modes of Chinese community emerged together from the ruins of the Qing empire. Together the three examples point to the need to question the usual ways scholars have conceptualized (Overseas) Chinese-ness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Xinhai Revolution, which opened the road to the modernization process of China, overthrew the alien Manchurian dynasty that ruled the country from 1644 and offered a new model of political structure and governance on the basis of a Constitution and within the framework of a parliamentary republic. It radically differed from a traditional model of governance. The activity of the revolutionary Nanking Government (1912-1913), especially in the period of the interim presidential rule of Sun Yat-sen, laid down the "channel" along which the movement to modernization in the political sphere began. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the basis of newly discovered archival materials and the work of mainland scholars interested in the current Confucian revival, Fan Cunwu offers a new appraisal of Duan Zhengyuan and his Morality Society. While providing an overview of the organization and history of the group, Fan emphasizes the importance of Duan's effort to found a Confucian-based religion and connects this undertaking with the long-term evolution of Confucianism in the Ming-Qing period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines why and how persistent political fragmentation existed alongside continued centralization in late Qing and early Republican China. By analyzing new archival material and existing scholarship, the piece argues that external intervention helped preserve the viability of a single Chinese state even as the same phenomenon also spurred ongoing fractionalization. Because major powers' governments generally saw China as an area of secondary strategic import, they tried to avoid armed conflict over the polity and seek accommodation. Since outside powers diverged in their objectives, they settled on sponsoring indigenous partners, notably various militarists as well as the Chinese Nationalists, to sustain a degree of central government rule alongside substantial regional autonomy. In reconsidering the effects of foreign intervention, this article engages the discussion on political consolidation in the late Qing and early Republic, and suggests that overly stressing integration or division tends to present incomplete accounts of the issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines fee-taking and salary reform in the context of financial centralization efforts between 1909 and 1911 in China's Qing dynasty. How a study of salary reform can aid in understanding the nature of the Qing financial reforms and their results; Revealing fundamental characteristics of the late imperial state on the eve of its demise; Why fee-taking and salary reform posed obstacles to the creation of a modern, centralized state.