This Element explores the changing landscape of eBook businesses and cultures in China in the past two decades and examines how disruptive innovation and the platform economy have transformed one of the world's largest book markets. Through an evolutionary perspective, this Element documents and analyses the emergence, growth, and refinement of disruptive models in three areas of trade publishing, including free eBook developments, digital self-publishing, and platformed social reading. It offers a critical account of the complex interplay between emerging technologies, business innovations, and book cultures and conceptualises China's eBook evolution as both a part of global digital publishing transformation in the platform age and an embodiment of local dynamics in a transitional society. This Element is essential for scholars, students, publishers, and the interested publics to understand China's digital publishing innovations and their global implications.

This unique book brings a fresh interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of ancient Chinese history, creating a historical model for the emergence of cultural mainstays by applying recent dramatic findings in the fields of neuroscience and cultural evolution. The centrality in Chinese culture of a deep reverence for the lives of preceding generations, filial piety, is conventionally attributed to Confucius (551-479 B.C.), who viewed hierarchical family relations as foundational for social order. Here, Porter argues that Confucian conceptions of filiality themselves evolved from a systemized set of behaviors and thoughts, a mental structure, which descended from a specific Neolithic mindset, and that this psychological structure was contoured by particular emotional conditions experienced by China’s earliest farmers. Using case study analysis from Neolithic sky observers to the dynastic cultures of the Shang and Western Zhou, the book shows how filial piety evolved as a structure of feeling, a legacy of a cultural predisposition toward particular moods and emotions that were inherited from the ancestral past. Porter also brings new urgency to the topic of ecological grief, linking the distress central to the evolution of the filial structure to its catalyst in an environmental crisis. With a blended multidisciplinary approach combining social neuroscience, cultural evolution, cognitive archaeology, and historical analysis, this book is ideal for students and researchers in neuropsychology, religion, and Chinese culture and history.

This book continues the "creative involvement" proposition put forward in Creative Involvement: A New Direction in China's Diplomacy with new cases and stories to enrich its content. It discusses China's global role, and explores its root cause of formation, development stages, and future direction. The main conclusion is that this role is preliminary and incomplete and needs continuous learning and improvement; China standing on the global high ground needs not only hard power but also wisdom and creativity. On research methods and writing approach, firstly, this book follows the philosophy of "practice first", namely, starting from historical experiences, focusing on practical issues, and exploring objectives and clues through case studies. Secondly, the three parts in the book have different sub-themes, but they are subject to the same thinking, that is, how does China advance toward a central role from the marginal edge of contemporary international system, how to develop doctrines or practices for China’s involvement in world affairs, and how to borrow the experiences of others to help China move forward on the global high ground. Combing innovative theoretical idea with practical investigation, this book will not only contribute to contemporary China Diplomatic studies but also appeal to scholars and students of International Relation studies. People who are interested in the rise of China and global governance will also benefit from this book.

This book presents the most comprehensive synthesis and analysis of major developments in reforming programs in modernizing the Chinese writing system. It traces the language policy and planning related developments for Chinese characters, with particular emphasis on post-1950 period in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the more recent challenges that technology, and particularly the World Wide Web, have posed for the language.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of the crucial second stage in the evolution of Chinese medicine by examining the changes during the pivotal era of the Song dynasty.

An in-depth examination of the regulatory, entrepreneurial, and organizational factors contributing to the expansion and transformation of China’s supplemental education industry. Like many parents in the United States, parents in China, increasingly concerned with their children’s academic performance, are turning to for-profit tutoring businesses to help their children get ahead in school. China’s supplemental education industry is now the world’s largest and most vibrant for-profit education market, and we can see its influence on the US higher education system: more than 70% of Chinese students studying in American universities have taken test preparation classes for overseas standardized tests. The Fruits of Opportunism offers a much-needed thorough investigation into this industry. This book examines how opportunistic organizations thrived in an ambiguous policy environment and how they catalyzed organizational and institutional changes in this industry. A former insider in China’s Education Industry, sociologist Le Lin shows how and why this industry evolved to become a for-profit one dominated by private, formal, nationally operating, and globally financed corporations, despite restrictions the Chinese state placed on the industry. Looking closely at the opportunistic organizations that were founded by marginal entrepreneurs and quickly came to dominate the market, Lin finds that as their non-compliant practices spread across the industry, these opportunistic organizations pushed privatization and marketization from below. The case of China’s Education Industry laid out in The Fruits of Opportunism illustrates that while opportunism leaves destruction in its wake, it can also drive the formation and evolution of a market.

China's Security State describes the creation, evolution, and development of Chinese security and intelligence agencies as well as their role in influencing Chinese Communist Party politics throughout the party's history. Xuezhi Guo investigates patterns of leadership politics from the vantage point of security and intelligence organization and operation by providing new evidence and offering alternative interpretations of major events throughout Chinese Communist Party history. This analysis promotes a better understanding of the CCP's mechanisms for control over both Party members and the general population. This study specifies some of the broader implications for theory and research that can help clarify the nature of Chinese politics and potential future developments in the country's security and intelligence services.

In the 1920s an international team of scientists and miners unearthed the richest evidence of human evolution the world had ever seen: Peking Man. After the communist revolution of 1949, Peking Man became a prominent figure in the movement to bring science to the people. In a new state with twin goals of crushing “superstition” and establishing a socialist society, the story of human evolution was the first lesson in Marxist philosophy offered to the masses. At the same time, even Mao’s populist commitment to mass participation in science failed to account for the power of popular culture—represented most strikingly in legends about the Bigfoot-like Wild Man—to reshape ideas about human nature. The People’s Peking Man is a skilled social history of twentieth-century Chinese paleoanthropology and a compelling cultural—and at times comparative—history of assumptions and debates about what it means to be human. By focusing on issues that push against the boundaries of science and politics, The People’s Peking Man offers an innovative approach to modern Chinese history and the history of science.

This volume contains a number of articles on modern Chinese history and historiography written by one of the leading academic experts on the subject. The author provides a critique of older approaches to nineteenth-century history and offers powerful reinterpretations of such key events in the recent history of China as the boxer rebellion, Mao's ascension to power in 1949, and the process of political and economic reform in the post-Mao era. This is a strong collection which will be of enormous interest to scholars of East Asian history.