Harvard East Asian Series

Yen Fu undertook years of laborious translation and commentary on the work of such Western thinkers as Spencer, Huxley, Adam Smith, Mill, and Montesquieu. Schwartz examines the modifications and consequent revaluation of these familiar works as they were presented to their new audience and analyzes the impact of this Western thought on the Chinese culture of the time.

This book—written in one man’s eloquent voice—is testimony to his belief that the need for democratic reform has taken root among the Chinese people and that they will ultimately take steps to transform their nation.

The first Western scholar invited by a province to make such an extended visit, Ezra Vogel traveled to every prefecture in Guangdong and conducted hundreds of interviews to get a true picture of how post-Mao reforms are working. The result is a richly detailed study of a region on the cutting edge of socialist reform.

Leo Ou-fan Lee gives us a wide-angle view of Shanghai culture in the making. He shows us the architecture and urban spaces in which the new commercial culture flourished, then guides us through the publishing and filmmaking industries that nurtured a whole generation of artists and established a bold new style in urban life known as modeng.

How much was the Japanese administration of Taiwan like French, Dutch, British, or American rule in other parts of Asia? How closely did the actions taken by the colonial governments resemble the patterns of governmental initiative in the home islands established by the Meiji politicians and their successors? What is the effect of colonization on the mental and physical condition of people who are colonized? This study of Japanese colonialism in Japan’s first overseas acquisition, Taiwan, approaches these questions through an analysis of a central pillar of Japanese rule there—education—which performed key functions in keeping order, exploiting economic resources, securing the cooperation of the natives, and attempting to assimilate them.

The Chinese Communists see the May Fourth Movement (named for the students’ mass demonstration of May 4, 1919) as the beginning of a popular movement that brought them to power thirty years later. The heart of the movement involved criticism by China’s young intelligentsia of traditional thought and institutions and a search for new solutions in terms of Western democracy and science. The movement was intensified to new heights by the student strikes of 1919 against the decisions on China reached at Versailles and against the Chinese government’s policy toward Japan.

Ping-ti Ho makes a thorough examination of the machineries with which population data were collected in different periods. This has led him to redefine, among other things, the key term ting, which has served as almost the sole basis of reconstruction of China’s historical population by many well-known authorities. The second part of the book deals with factors which have affected the growth of China’s population during the last six centuries. While it is primarily an historical study, the book also correlates the past with the present.

Frank King’s book presents a systematic exposition of the structure of the monetary system, clarified by comparisons with similar systems in late medieval and early modern Europe, including detailed definitions, examples, and suggestions for handling Chinese terms consistently. The first study in a Western language to include an analysis of Ch’ing monetary institutions and policy, this book provides an invaluable aid to our understanding of the economic factors in the lack of growth in nineteenth-century China.

In modern China, literature has been regarded as a vehicle of political and idea logical dissent, a concept that has persisted under communism. This study exhaustively analyzes the conflict between the Chinese Communist party and the intellectuals, particularly the writers, in the crucial decades of the 1940s and 1950s.

The years from 1928 to 1937 were the “Nanking decade” when the Chinese Nationalist government strove to build a new China with Western assistance. This was an interval of hope between the turbulence of the warlord-ridden ’20s and the war with Japan that began in 1937. James Thomson explores the ways in which Americans tried to help the Chinese undertake a transformation of rural society. His is the first in-depth study of these efforts to produce radical change and at the same time avoid the chaos and violence of revolution.

Shirley Garrett presents the impressive early history of the Y.M.C.A. in China, an organization which, during the first quarter of the twentieth century, became that country’s most prominent private agency of social planning. The author interviewed many ex-Y.M.C.A. China hands and combed a variety of archives to complete this inside account of the missionary origins of, and Chinese participation and leadership in, the Chinese Y.M.C.A.

Imperial China cannot be understood without an examination of its fiscal base. In his pioneering study, Yeh-chien Wang for the first time provides a reliable estimate and an in-depth analysis of China’s principal source of public revenue—the land tax—in the Ch’ing period.

Kunio Odaka is Japan’s leading labor sociologist. In this study he discusses the complex attitudes of Japanese workers toward management, unions, work, and leisure. The results of his scholarly surveys indicate a trend toward the democratization of Japanese industrial management. In part, the book is a presentation of Odaka’s belief in the necessity for greater worker participation in the decisions that affect their working lives, a belief that is indeed radical in the Japanese setting.

The Limits of Change disputes the impression that the conservative ideas and styles of China’s Republican period were neither strong nor persuasive enough to counter the ideas or the revolution of Mao. As the contributors to the book point out, these conservative movements reflected a modern outlook and shared a framework of common concepts with the radical movements they opposed. Through its far-reaching, detailed, and sympathetic assessment of the role of conservative ideology in China’s modern intellectual experience, it makes a distinguished contribution to Chinese studies.

Yenching University was perhaps the most impressive example of Sino–Western cooperation in the twentieth century. From its founding in 1916 by Western missionaries until the Communist victory, Yenching mirrored the colorful and frustrating efforts of Chinese and Western liberals to find solutions to China’s overriding preoccupation with national salvation. In charting the ebb and flow of university life, this definitive work sheds light on the intellectual, social, and diplomatic forces at work in this transitional period in Chinese history.

The cultural and literary flowering known as the May Fourth Movement is the subject of this comprehensive and insightful book. This is the first study of modern Chinese literature that shows how China’s Confucian traditions were combined with Western influences to create a literature of new values and consciousness for the Chinese people.

The reasons for the great debacle of the 1920s are set out in this book for the first time in all their complexity. As important as this history is, Roy Hofheinz, Jr. declares, the lessons Mao learned from his defeats are of even greater significance. The author demonstrates how Mao used ruralism, militarization, worship of numbers and not territory, and a fierce autonomy from other political groups to gain his ends.

With admirable lucidity and scrupulous attention to detail, Silas Wu recreates the conflict and intrigue that marked the struggle for succession to the throne of China during the reign of Emperor K’ang-hsi. This crisis, as Wu portrays it, stemmed from irreconcilable familial commitments and imperial responsibilities. K’ang-hsi, frequently compared to his contemporaries Louis XIV and Peter the Great, is depicted here as a psychologically complex individual with bewildering inconsistencies in his behavior.

A group of international experts presents essays that summarize the general characteristics of the Chinese economy, beginning with an overview of the development process in the Third World as a whole. They then examine three areas of China’s development program that are most frequently cited as success stories—income distribution, industrial technology, and public health—carefully documenting the degree to which these successes depend on the political and social environment. Finally, they discuss several themes of China’s contemporary development strategy and their historical antecedents, speculating on the transferability of China’s experience to other Third World countries.

The huaben, or vernacular story, was one of the richest, most varied, and appealing genres in Chinese literature, often reaching a larger audience than works in Classical Chinese. And yet because of its very popularity, the huaben was almost entirely disregarded by official society. Hanan brings this intriguing half-buried literature to light.

This study offers detailed analysis of the manipulative strategies of local rivals active over several decades in the competition for local status and power. But significantly, it treats relevant aspects of the broader Malaysian political environment as well, situating local-level politics firmly in the larger context of national politics.

Schoppa divides the counties of Zhejiang Province into four zones by level of political and economic development and scrupulously analyzes the complex processes of remolding society at the local and provincial levels. He reveals the common factors that make China a part of the worldwide story of reconstruction, reform, and developmental change.

Ding Ling is China’s foremost woman writer, and one of the great survivors in modern Chinese literary history. Iconoclast, feminist, and political activist, Ding Ling began her writing in the late 1920s as a member of the May Fourth generation and continued to write after the Communist Party had established control over all literary activities. Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker examines Ding Ling’s writings from the startling early stories about young women undergoing crises of love, sex, and identity to her novel on land reform, The Sun Shines on the Sanggan River, which won the 1951 Stalin prize for literature.

Hue-Tam Ho Tai traces the impact of millenarianism on Vietnamese society as its believers strove for salvation through both piety and violence. She shows how the dream of a perfect world helped the twentieth century Hoa Hao sect build a huge peasant following and how its apocalyptic vision of change eventually drove the sect into conflict with Communist revolutionaries.

In this biography of brilliant Chinese scholar Wang Kuo-wei, Bonner throws light on the range and course of ideas in early 20th-century China. She critically examines Wang’s essays on German philosophy and aesthetics; his poetry, literary criticism, and aesthetic theory; and his works on ancient Chinese history, particularly of the Shang dynasty.

David Zweig argues that because advocates of agrarian radicalism formed a minority group within China’s central leadership, they acted in opposition to the dominant moderate forces and resorted to alternative strategies to mobilize support for their unofficial policies.