Textbooks and general histories of modern China agree that the so-called Miao rebellion constituted one of the major rebellions of the nineteenth century. It lasted for twenty years, caused devastation of such severity that its effects were still obvious to travelers in Guizhou province decades later, and, by one account, resulted in the deaths of more than four million people. In an impressive presentation of material drawn from local histories, private writings, and official documents, Jenks argues that the Qing government sought to lay the blame for the turmoil squarely on an ethnic minority it regarded as obstreperous and inferior. As well as altering perceptions of the rebellion, Insurgency and Social Disorder in Guizhou enhances our understanding of the causes of the rebellion and its place in the crises that beset mid-nineteenth-century China. It contributes to the sociology of rebellion and peasant movements and is a valuable supplement to current anthropological work on Chinese minorities. Its treatment of Qing attitudes toward the Miao has implications for minority policies in the Peoples Republic of China today.

This book explores new directions in the study of China’s borderlands. In addition to assessing the influential perspectives of other historians, it engages innovative approaches in the author’s own research. These studies probe regional accommodations, the intersections of borderland management, martial fortification, and imperial culture, as well as the role of governmental discourse in defining and preserving restive boundary regions. As the issue of China’s management of its borderlands grows more pressing, the work presents key information and insights into how that nation’s contested fringes have been governed in the past.

Traditionally, political scientists and economists have seen China as a single entity and business people have seen China as a single market. This book challenges the notion of a centralised and unified China, and outlines how provinces are taking on new economic and political roles, forced upon them by decentralisation.It is the most thorough data on contemporary Chinese provinces available and will be of great interest to researchers and graduate students of politics, economics and business as well as Asian studies.

This volume gathers a collection of the most seminal essays written by leading experts in the field, which identify or signal many of the changing directions of regional research in geography during the past fifty years. Various forms of 'new regionalism' or 'new regional geography' have emerged over the last several decades, especially in political and economic geography, but in general the region has been a concept in declining use. Despite this, the region has gained new currency in sub-areas of political and economic geography and a so-called 'new regionalism' has emerged in studies of the changing nature of the nation-state in a globalizing economy. Taken together, the essays in this volume provide the reader with a comprehensive overview of academic developments in this area of geographical research.

Việt Nam is the home of more than fifty ethnic minorities--such as the Cham and Thai--many of which have distinctive clothing and weaving traditions linked to antiquity. The tight-fitting tunic called ao dai, widely recognized as a national symbol, has its roots in the country's 2,000-year history of textiles. Beginning with silk production in the Bronze Age cultures of the Red River, this book covers textiles in Việt Nam--including bark-cloth, kapok and hemp--through the centuries of Chinese rule in the north, a number of independent feudal societies and the brief period of French colonial rule.

This is the first completely up-to-date Hmong history book ever written by a member of the Hmong people. It describes the earliest civilizations of the Hmong and Miao in China, and why some of the Hmong migrated into Southeast Asia in the early 19th century, particularly to Vietnam, Laos and Thailand; and how the Hmong of Laos were involved with the Lao civil war, especially the secret war from 1962 to 1975 that caused almost a hundred thousand Hmong to flee to Thailand and Western countries as political refugees after the Communists takeover. This book includes the forcible repatriation of the Lao-Hmong asylum seekers at Nam Khao refugee camp in Thailand back to Laos in late 2009 and the arrest and discharge of former General Vang Pao by the U.S. authorities. "[It] is full of fascinating materials [and] a wonderful book. Congratulations," commented by Dr Nicholas C. T. Tapp, Senior Fellow in the Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, the Australian National University.

This insider's account is an unparalleled study of the culture in a Kam (Dong) village in Southwest China during the 1930s and 1940s, before Liberation in 1949. It describes the culture objectively and anecdotally, and is distinctive for its honesty and clarity.

Written by leading scholars, this collection provides a comprehensive and authoritative overview of modern empires. Spanning the era of modern imperial history from the early sixteenth century to the present, it challenges both the rather insular focuses on specific experiences, and gives due attention to imperial formations outside the West including the Russian, Japanese, Mughal, Ottoman and Chinese. The companion is divided into three broad sections. Part I - Times - surveys the three main eras of modern imperialism. The first was that dominated by the settlement impulse, with migrants - many voluntarily and many more by force - making new lives in the colonies. This impulse gave way, most especially in the nineteenth century, to a period of busy and rapid expansion which was less likely to promote new settlement, and in which colonists more frequently saw their sojourn in colonial lands as temporary and related to the business mostly of governance and trade. Lastly, in the twentieth century in particular, empires began to fail and to fall. Part II - Spaces - studies the principal imperial formations of the modern world. Each chapter charts the experience of a specific empire while at the same time placing it within the complex patterns of wider imperial constellations. The individual chapters thus survey the broad dynamics of change within the empires themselves and their relationships with other imperial formations, and reflect critically on the ways in which these topics have been approached in the literature. In Part III - Themes - scholars think critically about some of the key features of imperial expansion and decline. These chapters are brief and many are provocative. They reflect the current state of the field, and suggest new lines of inquiry which may follow from more comparative perspectives on empire. The broad range of themes captures the vitality and diversity of contemporary scholarship on questions of empire and colonialism, encompassing political, economic and cultural processes central to the formation and maintenance of empires as well as institutions, ideologies and social categories that shaped the lives both of those implementing and those experiencing the force of empire. In these pages the reader will find the slave and the criminal, the merchant and the maid, the scientist and the artist alongside the structures which sustained their lives and their livelihoods. Overall, the companion emphasises the diversity of imperial experience and process. Comprehensive in its scope, it draws attention to the particularities of individual empires, rather than over-generalising as if all empires, at all times, and in all places, behaved in a similar manner. It is this contingent and historical specificity that enables us to explore in expansive ways precisely what constituted the modern empire.

Scattered across the South-East Asian massif, a few dozen ethnic groups (numbering around 50 million) maintain highly original cultural identities and political and economic traditions, against pressure from national majorities. They face the same challenges. The means by which social change has been imposed by the lowlanders are similar from country to country, and the results are comparable. The originality of this book lies in the combination of multi-disciplinary mixing of social anthropology, history and human geography; multi-culturality grouping together several cultural contexts; trans-nationality straddling five countries and bridging the traditional divide between South China and Mainland South-East Asia; and history reaching back 300 years.

The papers in this volume go back to a conference held September 14-15, 2002, at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, B.C., in honour of Prof. Daniel L. Overmyer on his retirement. The contributions pay tribute to this renowned scholar of Chinese religious traditions, whose work is a constant reminder to look beyond text to context, beyond idea to practice, to study religion as it was and is lived by real people rather than as an abstract system of ideas and doctrines. Contents PHILIP CLART: Introduction RANDALL L. NADEAU: A Critical Review of Daniel L. Overmyer’s Contribution to the Study of Chinese Religions. I. Popular Sects and Religious Movements HUBERT SEIWERT: The Transformation of Popular Religious Movements of the Ming and Qing Dynasties: A Rational Choice Interpretation SHIN-YI CHAO: The Precious Volume of Bodhisattva Zhenwu Attaining the Way. A Case Study of the Worship of Zhenwu (Perfected Warrior) in Ming-Qing Sectarian Groups CHRISTIAN JOCHIM: Popular Lay Sects and Confucianism: A Study Based on the Way of Unity in Postwar Taiwan SOO KHIN WAH: The Recent Development of the Yiguan Dao Fayi Chongde Sub-Branch in Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand PHILIP CLART: Merit beyond Measure. Notes on the Moral (and Real) Economy of Religious Publishing in Taiwan JEAN DEBERNARDI: "Ascend to Heaven and Stand on a Cloud." Daoist Teaching and Practice at Penang’s Taishang Laojun Temple. II. Historical and Ethnographic Studies of Chinese Popular Religion JOHN LAGERWEY: The History and Sociology of Religion in Changting County, Fujian KENNETH DEAN: The Growth of Local Control over Cultural and Environmental Resources in Ming and Qing Coastal Fujian PAUL R. KATZ: Religion, Recruiting and Resistance in Colonial Taiwan: A Case Study of the Xilai An Incident, 1915 WANG CHIEN-CH’UAN. Transl. PHILIP CLART: The White Dragon Hermitage and the Spread of the Eight Generals Procession Troupe in Taiwan TUEN WAI MARY YEUNG: Rituals and Beliefs of Female Performers in Cantonese Opera JORDAN PAPER: The Role of Possession Trance in Chinese Culture and Religion: A Comparative Overview from the Neolithic to the Present. III. The Religious Life of Clerics, Literati, and Emperors JUDITH BOLTZ: On the Legacy of Zigu and a Manual on Spirit-writing in Her Name STEPHEN ESKILDSEN: Death, Immortality, and Spirit Liberation in Northern Song Daoism. The Hagiographical Accounts of Zhao Daoyi ROBERTO K. ONG: Chen Shiyuan and Chinese Dream Theory BAREND J. TER HAAR: Yongzheng and His Buddhist Abbots. Glossary – Index