This book, resulting from extensive research on the land tax in China during the Ch'ing Dynasty (1644-1911), is based on the multivolume Ts'ai-cheng shuo-ming-shu (Financial reports) produced from a nationwide survey of public finance, 1908-1910, and numerous local gazetteers. It reveals in detail the complexity of surcharges levied with tax quotas, and so provides the first realistic estimate of the land tax actually collected in different provinces and districts.

China's Last Imperial Frontier explores imperial China's frontier expansion in the Tibetan borderlands during the last decades of the Qing. The empire mounted a series of military attacks against indigenous chieftaincies and Buddhist monasteries in the east Tibetan region seeking to replace native authorities with state bureaucrats by redrawing the politically diverse frontier into a system of Chinese-style counties. Historically, at all the strategic frontier locations, the state had been for the most part outstripped by local institutions in political, military, and ideological strengths. With perceived threats from the Anglo-Russian "Great Game" accentuating Qing vulnerability in Tibet, the Sichuan government took advantage of the frontier crisis by encroaching upon local and Lhasa domains in Kham. Even though the Kham campaign was portrayed in Qing official discourse as a part of the nationwide reforms of "New Policies" (xinzheng) and administrative regularization (gaitu guiliu), its progress on the ground was influenced by the dynamics of interregional relations, including Sichuan's competition with central Tibet, power struggles among Qing frontier officials, and varied Khampa responses to the new regime. The growing regionalism intensified the resistance of local forces to imperial authority. Despite the uneven results of the late Qing campaign, it had come to serve as an important source of sovereignty claims and policy inspirations for the subsequent governments.

This biographical study of one of China's leading social scientists follows his life history, and includes a bibliography of his books and articles. Trained in London under Malinowski, Fei Xiaotong achieved eminence in the 1930s and 1940s for his pioneering studies of Chinese peasant life and for his popular articles, which stirred a wide audience in China to an awareness of social and political problems. A non-Marxist who came to sympathize with the Communists, Fei was gradually constrained in his activities after the Revolution until, in the 1950s, a massive propaganda campaign vilified him as a bourgeois rightist intellectual. Almost twenty years of silence and disgrace followed. Following the death of Mao, Fei suddenly reemerged as a leader in the effort to revitalize the social sciences in China. The story of Fei's life told here is, in a sense, the story of Westernized intellectuals in China at a time of peasant revolution. His writings enunciate the views of a sensitive observer of Chinese and Western society during that period of dramatic change.

This book attempts to describe, analyze, and interpret the structure and functioning of local government at the chou and hsien levels in the Ch'ing dynasty. It contains an introduction, ten chapters, conclusion, notes, index, bibliography, and glossary.

"Why did the Vietnamese accept certain Chinese institutions and yet explicitly reject others? How did Vietnamese cultural borrowings from China alter the dynamics of traditional relations between Vietnam, Siam, Laos, and Cambodia? How did Vietnam’s smaller Southeast Asian environment modify and distort classical East Asian institutions? Woodside has answered these questions in this well-received political and cultural study. This first real comparison of the civil governments of two traditional East Asian societies on an institution-by-institution basis is now reissued with a new preface."

This book revises earlier views of statecraft reformer Wei Yuan and of Chinese foreign relations during the nineteenth century. Approaching the history of nineteenth-century China from the perspective of Southeast Asian history, the author demonstrates the interaction, from Ch'in times onwards, between China and the Southern ocean or Nan-yang.

Perdue illuminates how China came to rule Central Eurasia and how it justifies that control, what holds the Chinese nation together, and how its relations with the Islamic world and Mongolia developed. He offers valuable comparisons to other colonial empires and discusses the legacy left by China's frontier expansion.

A comprehensive bibliographical guide to Japanese research published between 1953 and 1969 on the topic of Modern China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The twelve essays in this volume underscore the similarities between Chinese and American approaches to bilateral diplomacy and between their perceptions of each other’s policy-making motivations. Much of the literature on U.S.–China relations posits that each side was motivated either by ideologically informed interests or by ideological assumptions about its counterpart. But as these contributors emphasize, newly accessible archives suggest rather that both Beijing and Washington developed a responsive and tactically adaptable foreign policy. Each then adjusted this policy in response to changing international circumstances and changing assessments of its counterpart’s policies. Motivated less by ideology than by pragmatic national security concerns, each assumed that the other faced similar considerations.

An analysis of Ying huan chih lueh, a work on world geography written by the Chinese official Hsu Chi-yü and published in 1848. Provides an account of Hsu's life and career and includes a translation of much of Ying huan chih lueh as well.