First published in 1969. The historical civilization of China is, with the Indian and European-Semitic, one of the three greatest in the world, yet only relatively recently has any enquiry been begun into its achievements in science and technology. Between the first and fifteenth centuries the Chinese were generally far in advance of Europe and it was not until the scientific revolution of the Renaissance that Europe drew ahead. Throughout those fifteen centuries, and ever since, the West has been profoundly affected by the discoveries and invention emanating from China and East Asia. In this series of essays and lectures, Joseph Needham explores the mystery of China's early lead and Europe's later overtaking.

Established in 221 BCE, the Chinese empire lasted for 2,132 years before being replaced by the Republic of China in 1912. During its two millennia, the empire endured internal wars, foreign incursions, alien occupations, and devastating rebellions--yet fundamental institutional, sociopolitical, and cultural features of the empire remained intact. The Everlasting Empire traces the roots of the Chinese empire's exceptional longevity and unparalleled political durability, and shows how lessons from the imperial past are relevant for China today. Yuri Pines demonstrates that the empire survived and adjusted to a variety of domestic and external challenges through a peculiar combination of rigid ideological premises and their flexible implementation. The empire's major political actors and neighbors shared its fundamental ideological principles, such as unity under a single monarch--hence, even the empire's strongest domestic and foreign foes adopted the system of imperial rule. Yet details of this rule were constantly negotiated and adjusted. Pines shows how deep tensions between political actors including the emperor, the literati, local elites, and rebellious commoners actually enabled the empire's basic institutional framework to remain critically vital and adaptable to ever-changing sociopolitical circumstances. As contemporary China moves toward a new period of prosperity and power in the twenty-first century, Pines argues that the legacy of the empire may become an increasingly important force in shaping the nation's future trajectory.

In The Representation of External Threats, Eberhard Crailsheim and María Dolores Elizalde present a collection of articles that trace the phenomenon of external threats in a multitude of settings across Asia, America, and Europe. The scope ranges from military threats against the Byzantine rulers of the 7th century to the perception of cultural and economic threats in the late 19th century Atlantic, and includes conceptual threats to the construction of national histories. Focussing on the different ways in which such threats were socially constructed, the articles offer a variety of perspectives and interdisciplinary methods to understand the development and representations of external threats, concentrating on the effect of 'threat communication' for societies and political actors. Contributors are Anna Abalian, Vladimir Belous, Eberhard Crailsheim, María Dolores Elizalde, Rodrigo Escribano Roca, Simon C. Kemper, Irena Kozmanová, David Manzano Cosano, Federico Niglia, Derek Kane O’Leary, Alexandr Osipian, Pedro Ponte e Sousa, Theresia Raum, Jean-Noël Sanchez, Marie Schreier, Stephan Steiner, Srikanth Thaliyakkattil, Ionut Untea and Qiong Yu.

This second volume on Christianity in China covers the period from 1800 onwards up to the present, divided into three main periods, and dealing with the complexities of both Catholic and Protestant aspects. Also in this volume the reader will be guided to and through the Chinese and Western primary and secondary sources by carefully selected major scholars in the field. Produced with financial support from the Ricci Institute at the University of San Francisco Center for the Pacific Rim.

This monograph provides an innovative methodology for investigating how China has been conceptualised historically by tracing the development of four key cultural terms (filial piety, face, fengshui, and guanxi) between English and Chinese. It addresses how specific ideas about what constitutes the uniqueness of Chinese culture influence the ways users of these concepts think about China and themselves. Adopting a combination of archival research and mining of electronic databases, it documents how the translation process has been bound up in the production of new meaning. In uncovering how both sides of the translation process stand to be transformed by it, the study demonstrates the dialogic nature of translation and its potential contribution to cross-cultural understanding. It also aims to develop a foundation on which other area studies might build broader scholarship about global knowledge production and exchange.

From 1807, when the first Protestant missionary arrived in China, to the 1920s, when a new phase of growth began, thousands of missionaries and Chinese Christians labored, often under very adverse conditions, to lay the groundwork for a solid, healthy, and self-sustaining Chinese church. Following an Introduction that sets the scene and surveys the entire period, Builders of the Chinese Church contains the stories of nine leading pioneers--seven missionaries and two Chinese. Here we meet Robert Morrison, the heroic translator; Liang Fa, the first Chinese evangelist; missionary-scholar James Legge; J. Hudson Taylor, founder of the China Inland Mission; converted opium addict Pastor Hsi ("Overcomer of Demons"); Griffith John and Jonathan Goforth, both indefatigable preachers; and the idealistic advocates of education and reform, W. A. P. Martin and Timothy Richard. Readers will be inspired by their courage, devotion, and sheer perseverance in arduous work, and will gain an understanding of the roots of the two "branches" of today's Chinese Protestantism.