When peasants live in complex agrarian societies with distinct hierarchies of power, how much are they able to shape their world? In this socio-economic, political, and anthropological history, Helen F. Siu explores this question by examining a rural community in Guangdong Province from the late nineteenth century to the present.

Tracing China’s journey began from exploring rural revolution and reconstitutions of community in South China. Spanning decades of rural-urban divide, it finally uncovers China’s global reach and Hong Kong’s cross-border dynamics. Helen Siu traverses physical and cultural landscapes to examine political tumults transforming into everyday lives, and fathom the depths of human drama amid China’s frenetic momentum toward modernity. Highlighting complicity, Siu portrays how villagers, urbanites, cadres, entrepreneurs, and intellectuals—laden with historical baggage—venture forward. But have they victimized themselves in the process? This essay collection, informed by critical social theories and shaped by careful scrutiny of fieldwork and archival texts, is woven by key historical/anthropological themes—culture, history, power, place-making, and identity formation. Siu stresses process and contingency and argues that culture and society are constructed through human actions with nuanced meanings, moral imagination, and contested interests. Challenging the notion that social/political changes are mere linear historical progressions, she traces layers of the past in present realities. “Helen Siu is one of the world’s leading specialists on Chinese rural and urban society. Her essays, collected here, cover a wide range of topics of interest to anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, economists, and political scientists. Siu focuses on the ‘underside’ of social life in South China, a quality so often missing in the work of others. She writes with great skill and empathy.” —James L. Watson, Fairbank Professor of Chinese Society and Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, Harvard University “No one has woven the threads of ethnography, social structure, and cultural performance so brilliantly together as Helen Siu has in Tracing China. This rich tapestry of her finest scholarship illuminates how culture, power, and history can be deployed to yield wholly original and convincing understandings of southern China.” —James C. Scott, Sterling Professor of Political Science and Anthropology, Yale University

This text focuses on the relationship of Hong Kong with the adjacent Chinese province Guangdong, the territories most directly involved in the 1997 transfer of Hong Kong to Chinese rule. The socio-economic, political and cultural impact of this crucial link and the implications for the future of both Hong Kong and China are studied. A multi-disciplinary approach is taken to examine the complexity of economic, political and cultural transformation of the Hong Kong-Guangdong link and this book presents a historical perspective to trace the long-term structural transformation. The dynamics of the integration process between the two territories is also explored.

This book explores how fieldwork has been used to research Chinese history in the past and new ways that others might use in it the future. It introduces the previous generations of scholars who ventured out of the archive to conduct local investigations in Chinese cities, villages, farms and temples. It goes on to present the techniques of historical fieldwork, providing guidance on how to integrate oral history into research plans and archival research, conduct interviews, and locate sources in the field. Chapters by established researchers relate these techniques to specific types of fieldwork, including religion, the imperial past, natural environments and agriculture. Combining the past and the future of the craft, the book provides a rich resource for scholars coming new to fieldwork in the history of China.

In this sumptuously illustrated history, now in its second edition, Patricia Buckley Ebrey traces the origins of Chinese culture from prehistoric times to the present.

This analysis of every facet of a national identity makes it less likely that the next great explosion in the Commmunist world - and its consequences - will come as a surprise. It investigates tendencies in China that might lead it down the same path as Russia and Yugoslavia.

An ethnographic study of how ethnic minorities negotiate Chinese nationalism in post-Mao China.

In this wide-ranging study, Sucheta Mazumdar offers a new answer to the fundamental question of why China, universally acknowledged one of the most developed economies in the world through the mid-eighteenth century, paused in this development process in the nineteenth. Focusing on cane-sugar production, domestic and international trade, technology, and the history of consumption for over a thousand years as a means of framing the larger questions, the author shows that the economy of late imperial China was not stagnant, nor was the state suppressing trade; indeed, China was integrated into the world market well before the Opium War. But clearly the trajectory of development did not transform the social organization of production or set in motion sustained economic growth.

This book charts the development of the First Vietnam War – the war between the Vietnamese Communists (the Viet Minh) and the French colonial power – considering especially how relations between the Viet Minh and the Chinese Communists had a profound impact on the course of the war. It shows how the Chinese provided finance, training and weapons to the Viet Minh, but how differences about strategy emerged, particularly when China became involved in the Korean War and the subsequent peace negotiations, when the need to placate the United States and to prevent US military involvement in Southeast Asia became a key concern for the Chinese. The book shows how the Viet Minh strategy of all-out war in the north and limited guerrilla warfare in the south developed from this situation, and how the war then unfolded.

An anthology of 40 Indian authors that parades various Indian perspectives on China, her civilization, history, society and development. It is a fruition of a project launched by the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) where Sino-Indian studies is a special window. A scholarly work.