Modern Chinese History: Selected Readings. A Collection of Extracts from Various Sources Chosen to Illustrate Some of the Chief Phases of China's International Relations during the Past Hundred Years. Harley Farnsworth MacNair

1929 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 674-678
Author(s):  
Carroll B. Malone
1959 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 321-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert A. Scalapino ◽  
Harold Schiffrin

After a decade in power, the Chinese Communists have had enough time to change the past as well as the present. Voluminous documentary collections, monographs, and general treatises on modern Chinese history have been published. Many of these works are designed to tell how socialism was victorious over evil and oppression, why the Communists deserved to inherit the mantle of heaven. Modern Chinese history is being reconstructed, with one eye always focussed upon those impersonal and inexorable forces of dialectical materialism and economic determinism, while the other is fixed upon the very personal if enormously heroic qualities of Chairman Mao. In the opening stages of a Communist revolution (and perhaps of most revolutions), a cult of personality comes so naturally and serves so many strategi c purposes, it is difficult to avoid, whatever the logic in second generation criticisms.


1988 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 821-832 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Bowen

A full decade has passed since Frederic Wakeman, Jr., published his influential “Rebellion and Revolution: The Study of Popular Movements in Chinese History” (1977). He opened his article with the observation, “During the past twenty-five years, hundreds of studies of Chinese peasant rebellions have appeared in print.” He added that most of these studies had been published in the People's Republic, but in his bibliography he listed dozens of entries by Western scholars on the topic. Significantly, while noting that Western studies of peasant resistance in China “drew upon Chinese scholarship to write histories of their own,” Wakeman emphasized that Western historians were divided on the issue of whether the “Maoist depiction of Chinese history as perennial class struggle” was accurate. He summed up the controversy in these words:Was an immiserated peasantry ruthlessly exploited by a venal landlord class through the sweep of pre-modern Chinese history? Or would it be more accurate to say that, while the population suffered in times of epidemic or famine, there were long periods of plenty when relatively affluent farmers benefited from rising agricultural prices, and negotiated rental contracts to their own liking with accommodating landlords? (Wakeman 1977:202)


1996 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans van de Ven

Some time ago the Commonwealth and Overseas History Society of Cambridge University asked me to provide an overview of recent scholarship on modern Chinese history. What follows is a written version of this ‘public service’ lecture aimed at non-specialist historians. It discusses Western scholarship on China from the eighteenth until the twentieth century.


Tea War ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 230-272
Author(s):  
Andrew B. Liu

This chapter analyzes how the Republican economic reformer Wu Juenong, in his attempts to revive the collapsed industry, articulated a criticism of the tea merchants as parasitic. These were the same houses who played a crucial, dynamic role during the nineteenth-century golden years of Chinese tea. What had changed by the 1930s was not the comprador (buyer) and tea warehouse merchants' own behavior but instead the perspectives of Chinese economic thought, now rooted in a division between “productive” labor and “unproductive” finance. The chapter introduces the comprador both as a real, historical institution and as a theoretical category in modern Chinese history. As with free labor in India, the oppositional categories of productive and unproductive labor in China signaled an embrace of the industrial capitalist model by nationalists across Asia, in spite of a dearth of the traditional signs of industrialization in either region.


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