Examines the images, hopes, and fears that were evoked during China’s century-long subservience to external powers.

This book provides a comprehensive history of the emergence and the formation of the concept of sovereignty in China from the year 1840 to the present. It contributes to broadening the history of modern China by looking at the way the notion of sovereignty was gradually articulated by key Chinese intellectuals, diplomats and political figures in the unfolding of the history of international law in China, rehabilitates Chinese agency, and shows how China challenged Western Eurocentric assumptions about the progress of international law. It puts the history of international law in a global perspective, interrogating the widely-held belief of international law as universal order and exploring the ways in which its history is closely anchored to a European experience that fails to take into account how the encounter with other non-European realities has influenced its formation.

What does the rise of China represent, and how should the international community respond? With a holistic rereading of Chinese longue durée history, Fei-Ling Wang provides a simple but powerful framework for understanding the nature of persistent and rising Chinese power and its implications for the current global order. He argues that the Chinese ideation and tradition of political governance and world order—the China Order—is based on an imperial state of Confucian-Legalism as historically exemplified by the Qin-Han polity. Claiming a Mandate of Heaven to unify and govern the whole known world or tianxia (all under heaven), the China Order dominated Eastern Eurasia as a world empire for more than two millennia, until the late nineteenth century. Since 1949, the People's Republic of China has been a reincarnated Qin-Han polity without the traditional China Order, finding itself stuck in the endless struggle against the current world order and the ever-changing Chinese society for its regime survival and security. Wang also offers new discoveries and assessments about the true golden eras of Chinese civilization, explains the great East-West divergence between China and Europe, and analyzes the China Dream that drives much of current Chinese foreign policy.

This book looks ahead to consider the most likely results of the encounter between China and the international system. Environmental, cultural and perceptual matters are considered as well as more traditional economic and military issues. Underpinning the book is the question will the 21st century be "China’s Century," for China and the world?

In Education in China, ca. 1840–present the authors offer a description of the Chinese education system. In doing so, they touch upon various debates such as on educational modernization and the role of female education. Relevant statistical data is provided as well.

The post-Mao commitment to modernization, coupled with a general revulsion against the lawlessness of the Cultural Revolution, has led to a significant law reform movement in the People’s Republic of China. China’s current leadership seeks to restore order and morale, to attract domestic support and external assistance for its modernization program, and to provide a secure, orderly environment for economic development. It has taken a number of steps to strengthen its laws and judicial system, among which are the PRC’s first substantive and procedural criminal codes. This is the first book-length study of the most important area of Chinese law—the development, organization, and functioning of the criminal justice system in China today. It examines both the formal aspects of the criminal justice system—such as the court, the procuracy, lawyers, and criminal procedure—and the extrajudicial organs and sanctions that play important roles in the Chinese system. Based on published Chinese materials and personal interviews, the book is essential reading for persons interested in human rights and laws in China, as well as for those concerned with China’s political system and economic development. The inclusion of selected documents and an extensive bibliography further enhance the value of the book.

Offers a new interpretation of the Chinese nationalists, placing their war of resistance against Japan in the context of their efforts to establish control over their own country and providing a critical reassessment of regional Allied Warfare.

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the imperial powers—principally Britain, the United States, Russia, France, Germany and Japan—signed treaties with China to secure trading, residence and other rights in cities on the coast, along important rivers, and in remote places further inland. The largest of them—the great treaty ports of Shanghai and Tientsin—became modern cities of international importance, centres of cultural exchange and safe havens for Chinese who sought to subvert the Qing government. They are also lasting symbols of the uninvited and often violent incursions by foreign powers during China’s century of weakness. The extraterritorial privileges that underpinned the treaty ports were abolished in 1943—a time when much of the treaty port world was under Japanese occupation. China’s Foreign Places provides a historical account of the hundred or more major foreign settlements that appeared in China during the period 1840 to 1943. Most of the entries are about treaty ports, large and small, but the book also includes colonies, leased territories, resorts and illicit centres of trade. Information has been drawn from a wide range of sources and entries are arranged alphabetically with extensive illustrations and maps. China’s Foreign Places is both a unique work of reference, essential for scholars of this period and travellers to modern China. It is also a fascinating account of the people, institutions and businesses that inhabited China’s treaty port world.

2007 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Song dynasty historian Hong Mai (1123–1202) spent a lifetime on a collection of supernatural accounts, contemporary incidents, poems, and riddles, among other genres, which he entitled Record of the Listener (Yijian zhi). His informants included a wide range of his contemporaries, from scholar-officials to concubines, Buddhist monks, and soldiers, who helped Hong Mai leave one of the most vivid portraits of life and the different classes in China during this period. Originally comprising a massive 420 chapters, only a fraction survived the Mongol ravaging of China in the thirteenth century. The present volume is the first book-length consideration of this important text, which has been an ongoing source of literary and social history. Alister D. Inglis explores fundamental questions surrounding the work and its making, such as theme, genre, authorial intent, the veracity of the accounts, and their circulation in both oral and written form. In addition to a brief outline of Hong Mai's life that incorporates Hong's autobiographical anecdotes, the book includes many intriguing stories translated into English for the first time, including Hong's legendary thirty-one prefaces. Record of the Listener fills the gaps left by official Chinese historians who, unlike Hong Mai, did not comment on women's affairs, ghosts and the paranormal, local crime, human sacrifice, little-known locales, and unofficial biographies.