Using the concept of boundaries, physical and cultural, to understand the development of China’s maritime southeast in late Imperial times, and its interactions across maritime East Asia and the broader Asian Seas, these linked essays by a senior scholar in the field challenge the usual readings of Chinese history from the centre. After an opening essay which positions China’s southeastern coast within a broader view of maritime Asia, the first section of the book looks at boundaries, between “us” and “them”, Chinese and other, during this period. The second section looks at the challenges to such rigid demarcations posed by the state and existed in the status quo. The third section discusses movements of people, goods and ideas across national borders and cultural boundaries, seeing tradition and innovation as two contesting forces in a constant state of interaction, compromise and reconciliation. This approach underpins a fresh understanding of China’s boundaries and the distinctions that separate China from the rest of the world. In developing this theme, Ng Chin-keong draws on many years of writing and research in Chinese and European archives. Of interest to students of migration, of Chinese history, and of the long term perspective on relations between China and its region, Ng’s analysis provides a crucial background to the historical shared experience of the people in Asian maritime zones. The result is a novel way of approaching Chinese history, argued from the perspective of a fresh understanding of China’s relations with neighbouring territories and the populations residing there, and of the nature of tradition and its persistence in the face of changing circumstances.

Boundary making, a crucial element in human cultural creativity, links these essays exploring Chinese art and society. Traversing time and cultural category, individual expression and social construct, the authors demonstrate how a 'boundary' may exist simultaneously as barrier, threshold and interface. The essays range from the creation of the first political and bureaucratic boundaries in early China, to the dismantling of discursive boundaries in the post-Mao era. Spanning diverse subjects, moving between ancient funerary art and the tension between self and image in modern Peking Opera, they deftly explore the psychodynamics of Chinese society. All the authors in this book are established Sinologists. Boundaries in China will be stimulating reading for anyone interested to see how the seemingly tangential or peripheral can turn out to be of central concern in non-Western (and perhaps also Western) art and culture.

China shares borders and asserts vast maritime claims with over a dozen countries, and it has had boundary disputes with nearly all of them. Yet in the 1960s, when tensions were escalating with the Soviet Union, India, and the United States, China moved to conclude boundary agreements with these neighbours peacefully. In this wide-ranging study of China's boundary disputes and settlements, Eric Hyer finds China's behaviour was strategic and even demonstrated willingness to compromise. This behaviour in earlier periods is pertinent to the ongoing territorial disputes in the East and South China Seas. The Pragmatic Dragon analyzes these disputes and the strategic rationale behind China's behaviour, providing important insights into the foreign policy of a nation whose presence on the world stage continues to grow.

Based on the author’s own six years’ fieldwork, this book looks at critical features of China’s current social change, recounting how, against the odds, a group of migrants created their own major community outside of the State system and looking at that communities’ interaction with the State.

A systematic and in-depth analysis and explanation of China's rapid increase in inequality in the last two decades.

Beginning with a concise and well-illustrated history of the evolution of the tradition, this new study reveals how these images were deployed in the Manchu (Qing) imperial court to define political, social, or cultural boundaries. Characterized by grand conception and regal splendor, the paintings served to enhance the imperial authority of rulers and, to a segment of the elite, to advertise social status.

Explores how sovereign space in early China was imagined and negotiated in the ancient world.

Honorable Mention, 2022 Sharon Harris Book Award presented by the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute Focusing on four key Chinese intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century, Abolishing Boundaries offers new perspectives on modern Chinese political thought. These four intellectuals—Kang Youwei, Cai Yuanpei, Chen Duxiu, and Hu Shi—were deeply familiar with the Confucian and Buddhist classical texts, while also interested in the West's utopian literature of the late nineteenth century as well as Kant and the neo-Kantians, Marxists, and John Dewey and new liberalism, respectively. Although none of these four intellectuals can simply be labeled utopian thinkers, this book highlights how their thinking was intertwined with utopian ideals to produce theories of secular transcendence, liberalism, and communism, and how, in explicit and implicit ways, their ideas required some utopian impulse in order to escape the boundaries they identified as imprisoning the Chinese people and all humanity. To abolish these boundaries was to imagine alternatives to the unbearable present. This was not a matter of armchair philosophizing but of thinking through new ways to commit to action. These men did not hold a totalistic picture of some perfect society, but in distinctly different ways they all displayed a utopian impulse that fueled radical visions of change. Their work reveals much about the underlying forces shaping modern thought in China—and the world. Reacting to China's problems, they sought a better future for all humanity.

Shao-yun Yang challenges assumptions that the cultural and socioeconomic watershed of the Tang-Song transition (800–1127 CE) was marked by a xenophobic or nationalist hardening of ethnocultural boundaries in response to growing foreign threats. In that period, reinterpretations of Chineseness and its supposed antithesis, “barbarism,” were not straightforward products of political change but had their own developmental logic based in two interrelated intellectual shifts among the literati elite: the emergence of Confucian ideological and intellectual orthodoxy and the rise of neo-Confucian (daoxue) philosophy. New discourses emphasized the fluidity of the Chinese-barbarian dichotomy, subverting the centrality of cultural or ritual practices to Chinese identity and redefining the essence of Chinese civilization and its purported superiority. The key issues at stake concerned the acceptability of intellectual pluralism in a Chinese society and the importance of Confucian moral values to the integrity and continuity of the Chinese state. Through close reading of the contexts and changing geopolitical realities in which new interpretations of identity emerged, this intellectual history engages with ongoing debates over relevance of the concepts of culture, nation, and ethnicity to premodern China.

A free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Ginseng and Borderland explores the territorial boundaries and political relations between Qing China and Choson Korea during the period from the early seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries. By examining a unique body of materials written in Chinese, Manchu, and Korean, and building on recent studies in New Qing History, Seonmin Kim adds new perspectives to current understandings of the remarkable transformation of the Manchu Qing dynasty (1636–1912) from a tribal state to a universal empire. This book discusses early Manchu history and explores the Qing Empire’s policy of controlling Manchuria and Choson Korea. Kim also contributes to theKorean history of the Choson dynasty (1392–1910) by challenging conventional accounts that embrace a China-centered interpretation of the tributary relationship between the two polities, stressing instead the agency of Choson Korea in the formation of the Qing Empire. This study demonstrates how Koreans interpreted and employed this relationship in order to preserve the boundary—and peace—with the suzerain power. By focusing on the historical significance of the China-Korea boundary, this book defines the nature of the Qing Empire through the dynamics of contacts and conflicts under both the cultural and material frameworks of its tributary relationship with Choson Korea.