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Empire, Nation, and Beyond

Chinese History in Late Imperial and Modern Times—A Festschrift in Honor of Frederic Wakeman
by Joseph W. Esherick (Editor), Madeleine Zelin (Editor), Wen-hsin Yeh (Editor)
Paperback eBook
Price: $32.00 / £27.00
Publication Date: Jan 2006
Publisher:
Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California Berkeley
Imprint: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California Berkeley
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 334
ISBN: 9781557292193
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Series:
  • China Research Monograph
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About the Book

The essays in this collection, all by Frederic Wakeman's former students, approach the past with sensitivities to the dynamics of politics, the power of cultural or ideological norms, the complexities of local infrastructures and the significance of human choices. Part 1 sheds light on the inner workings of late imperial society. Part 2 addresses local patterns of profit-making and the role of the state. Part 3 looks at China's response to the West. Part 4 is about social history and the networks of patronage, community service, and family that characterized Chinese society. Part 5 examines the contested narratives of China's twentieth-century history.

About the Author

Joseph W. Esherick is emeritus professor of modern Chinese history at the University of California, San Diego. Education: B.A. Harvard University, Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley

Madeleine Zelin is Dean Lung Professor of Chinese Studies and professor of history at Columbia University. Education: B.A. Cornell University, Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley

Wen-hsin Yeh is professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. She has served as the director of the Institute of East Asian Studies and the chair of the Center for Chinese Studies at Berkeley. She has edited and contributed to many IEAS publications, including Mobile Subjects; Mobile Horizons; History in Images; Cities in Motion; Empire, Nation, and Beyond; Cross-Cultural Readings of Chineseness; Landscape, Culture, and Space in Chinese Society; and Shanghai Sojourners. Education: B.A., History, National Taiwan University; M.A., History, University of Southern California; Ph.D., History, University of California, Berkeley

Table of Contents

Contributors – vii
Introduction – 1

Part I: Unofficial Accounts – 15
1. Manchus as Ethnographic Subject in the Qing – 17
    Mark C. Elliott

2. Fictional and Real-Life Rulers: Journey to the West and Sixteenth-Century Chinese Monarchs – 38
    Richard Shek

3. The Disputation of the Body Snatchers: Scandal in Chinese Legal Culture – 58
    Melissa Macauley

4. Spatial Decorum, Transgression, and Displacement in Shen Fu's Six Records from a Floating Life – 78
    Ann Waltner

Part II: Politics in Economy – 103

5. Eastern Sichuan Coal Mines in the Late Qing – 105
    Madeleine Zelin

6. Rural Commercialization, Polder Reclamation, and Social Transformation in Modern China – 123
    Robert Y. Eng

7. ""Native"" and ""Foreign"": Discourses on Economic Nationalism and Market Practice in Twentieth-Century North China – 149
    Linda Grove

Part III: Beyond the Binary – 167

8. Shards of Ming: Culture and Improvisation in Enterprises Great and Small – 169
    Lionel M. Jenson

9. Terror and War at the Turn of Two Centuries: The Boxer Crisis Revisited – 192
    Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom

Part IV: Enduring Networks – 211

10. The Culture of Patronage in Early Nineteenth-Century China: Ruan Yuan's Circle at Canton – 213
    Jonathan Porter

11. The Zhigongtang in the United States, 1860–1949 – 231
    Sue Fawn Chung

12. Two Generations of a Chinese Family – 250
    Joseph W. Esherick

Part V: Contesting Narratives – 273

13. Beijing University as a Contested Symbol – 275
    Timothy B. Weston

14. History in Modernity: The May Fourth Movement and Shanghai – 292
    Wen-hsin Yeh

Index – 309

Reviews

"The ten original and four republished contributions of this festschrift reveal much about Wakeman's influence on the contributors who–according to the editors–"cohere in their endeavour to look beyond the obvious ... to consider the weight of documented evidence and to make a case through a methodical teasing out of the inherent logic" (p. 13) of their historical sources. And indeed the volume coheres with its ideas about how to write history. That is why the reader comes to appreciate this book...by what it tells us about the discipline of modern Chinese history."—Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, The China Quarterly

"This collection of essays, by fourteen distinguished students of Fred Wakeman, appeared only shortly before his untimely death, which itself came very soon after his retirement. One imagines he must have felt both honoured and gratified at the superior level and broad range of scholarship on display, qualities that aptly reflect and refract his own scholarly endeavours....The usual misgivings about the uneven quality of festschrifts and of essay collections more generally are completely misplaced here. The essays are individually and collectively strong....[T]he single thread that binds them together is perhaps the heritage of Wakeman's eclectic and acute spirit of enquiry....This book adds up to much more than the sum of its parts. It is an apt monument to Professor Wakeman, and its essays will be read and cited for some years to come. Its wide coverage and innovative scholarship should attract attention well beyond the field of Chinese History."—Joanna Waley-Cohen, New York University, China Review