The Historical Origins of Anti-Muslim Sentiment in Modern China

In this paper, I show that narratives of historical conflicts between the Han Chinese and Muslims have been deployed to justify anti-Muslim sentiment and practices in modern and contemporary Northwest China. My study analyses Han Chinese narratives during and after the Northwest Muslim Rebellion—the largest ethnic conflict in nineteenth-century China. The historical narratives about the rebellion have been passed down inter-generationally and have been reiterated and reconstructed to fuel contemporary bias against Muslims in the twentieth century and beyond. My study contributes to the debate of Chinese Islamophobia by revealing how narratives of ethnic conflicts could help legitimize hostility against Muslims in modern-day China.

The beginning of modern educational system in China, was regarded Hundred Days" Reform in 1898 related foundation of modern university as a starting point. The modern and contemporary China, had been faced with the most endangered era: in the major significance of this crisis, was a kind of impact or shock from aggression by the Western imperialism. Especially in academy and culture, there was tension in the air as though something was going to happen. In national crisis, discourse of general education in Modern China should be focused on more pragmatical parts, not on the traditional cultivation of the mind or whole-rounded education. The most distinctive characteristics of education discourse in modern China was enlightenment and esthetics education from consciousness of crisis. The both seems to be different and oppositive, but intrinsically have many things in common. In this age, there were representative thinkers, Liang Qi-chao and Cai Yuan-pei, who played a crucial role in modern transformation of Chinese education. This paper is tried to examine the discourse of general education in modern and contemporary China, especially from these two thinkers" view and thought. The definitions of general education(or liberal education) is about humanities and education of humanism which is different from specialism. The discourse of education from the early years in 1900"s to establishment of New China in 1949, was about contemporary general education that mainly focused on elite education by study of chinese culture and heritage and socialism.

In what forms are agribusinesses entering agriculture and interacting with farmers? How are land, labor and capital now controlled by corporate and individual actors, and then organized into agricultural production? How does such control and organization shape the relationships between the actors? In this article we argue that agrarian capitalism is expanding in China. The means of production, such as capital and land, are increasingly controlled by agribusiness, while direct producers increasingly sell their labor for a living. We document various forms in which agribusiness companies are conducting transactions with individual agricultural producers. We also argue that China's unique system of land rights featuring collective ownership but individualized usage rights has acted as a powerful force in shaping interactions between agribusiness and direct producers. It provides farmers with a source of economic income and political bargaining power, and restricts corporate actors from dispossessing farmers of their land. We find strong norms protecting farmers' collective land rights in the agricultural sector, contrary to the received wisdom about weak protection of land rights in China. In the rest of the paper, we first review the policy context in which this transformation has taken place. Next we introduce our method of data collection, summarize the five forms of agribusiness-farmer interaction found in our study, and analyze each of the five forms in depth. We conclude with a discussion of the causes and characteristics of the rise of agrarian capitalism, with a focus on the role of the land rights system.

Disaster-mitigating and general innovative responses to climate disasters: Evidence from modern and historical China

Qiang Fang and Xiaobing Li, editors. Corruption and Anticorruption in Modern China. Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Groups, Inc., .  pp. Hardback $., ISBN ----. While students and observers of China may disagree on many things about China, one thing that they tend to agree on is the serious, and continuous, corruption throughout Chinese history, from imperial ages to the reform era. Accordingly, anticorruption is also an important, if not more important, theme that continues to be an issue in Chinese politics. Thus, corruption and anticorruption, both have constituted a lens through which we can understand modern China, including the ruling regimes in different periods, the political elites, the common people, and the underlying cultural identity of the nation. This book covers a topic that has long been of interest to me. Hence, it was a great pleasure to read this book, Corruption and Anticorruption in Modern China, edited by Qiang Fang and Xiaobing Li. Being a political scientist who studies corruption and anticorruption in contemporary China, I find the historians’ studies in this book fascinating. Under their pen, corruption and anticorruption in modern China become a grand picture dynamically unfolded in front of the readers, linking imperial dynasties (e.g., Han, Tang, Ming, and Qing), Republic China (e.g., Yuan Shikai, Chiang Kai-Shek’s GMD), and contemporary China (e.g., under Mao, Jiang, and Xi) in both a longitudinal and comparative way. Feeling the echo of history, and reconsidering the similarities and differences between the present and the past, one can more deeply reflect the logic of Chinese political institutions. As a famous quote from Kenneth Lieberthal’s book, Governing China, states, “But all long-term observers of this remarkable country (i.e., China) know that there are few places in the world for which the phrase ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same’ more aptly applies” (, p. xvii). It also comes as a surprise to see scholars in other disciplines share similar research interests in several specific topics that have been largely understudied, such as corruption fugitives (chapter  by Yue Li and Chen Liu), political satire (chapter  by Helen Xiaoyan Wu), and political rumors (chapter  by Stella Y. Xu). In these chapters, the historians’ documentation and interpretation of the issues, for example, why the problems occurred and their sociopolitical implications, and the authors’ scholarly utilization of the available materials, Review©  by University of Hawai‘i Press provide new analytical and methodological angles to think about in my own related research (e.g., Zhu ; Zhu, Lu, Shi ). Moreover, for the general readership who are interested in the general topic of China, or corruption and anticorruption in China in particular, this book has at least the following merits making it worth reading. First, this book provides an earnest and timely presentation of historical materials. All contributors skillfully dissect historical materials into analytical stories accessible to general readers. For example, chapter  by Qiang Fang sampled sixty-one primary corruption cases involving top Qing officials and classified the politics behind corruption reporting and tackling, which demonstrates the fundamental flaws of the imperial system. In chapter  written by Patrick Fuliang Shan, abundant information and analysis about Yuan Shikai’s management ideas and implementations are presented in detail, and readers can reconsider their constructed opinions on Yuan Shikai and the Beiyang period. In chapter  by Sherman Xiaogang Lai, historical details conveyed by Chiang Kai-Shek’s wartime diaries are excavated, illuminating how Chiang as the national leader perceived his own political party and the critical historical moments at that time. In contrast, other chapters remind readers of the near past. For instance, chapter  by Dongyu Yang, reviewed the corruption and anticorruption in Jiang’s era by studying a case of anticorruption in Shaanxi Province to exemplify the practices at that time. This is also the age when the market economy and the socialist political system were dramatically adapted together, economic opportunities and political resources met, and thus cultivated the hotbed of corruption. The anticorruption practices in Jiang’s era also inspire readers to compare these with the recent anticorruption initiatives under Xi. Chapter  by Xiansheng Tian, documented the recent breaking news about the Bo and Wang event...

China's epidemic of child obesity:: An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of treatment

Reviewed by: Governing the Dead: Martyrs, Memorials, and Necrocitizenship in Modern China by Linh D. Vu Daniel Asen Linh D. Vu. Governing the Dead: Martyrs, Memorials, and Necrocitizenship in Modern China. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021. 281 pp. Hardcover ($49.95) or e-book. In Governing the Dead: Martyrs, Memorials, and Necrocitizenship in Modern China, Linh D. Vu examines the questions of “how and why a nation cares about its dead” (2) for a period of Chinese history stretching from the founding of the Republic to the Nanjing Decade, Second Sino-Japanese War, and Chinese Civil War. Vu’s approach is wide-ranging: readers will learn about the narratives and textual genres through which successive early twentieth-century Chinese regimes elevated political martyrs and constructed narratives of national history, the ways in which the state attempted to influence death ritual in order to claim political authority, and the bureaucratic regulations and procedures through which relatives of the war dead were compensated amid expanding domestic military conflict. This book is meant for a wide readership in modern Chinese history. It contains material that will be of interest to those who work in political and military history, social history, and cultural history. Vu’s attention to the details of compensation regulations and the process through which relatives of the dead sought benefits might also be of interest to those who study Republican civil law, given that these issues were so often related to how familial relations were defined in law and social practice. Notably, Vu is attentive to the societal and cultural impacts of wartime mass death and its commemoration in other historical contexts, such as in the United States during the American Civil War and in Europe after the First World War. This attention to the global history of death commemoration—as well as the book’s use of “necrocitizenry” and “necropolitics” as framing concepts, discussed below—suggests the possibility that scholars who work on similar issues in other times and places will find in Vu’s study a useful comparative case. Chapter 1 examines how the anti-Qing Yellow Flower Hill uprising of April 1911 was commemorated under the Nanjing Provisional Government, the regime of Yuan Shikai, and the Nationalist state of the early 1920s. Vu shows that these regimes’ efforts to claim legitimacy by commemorating anti-Qing revolutionaries imbued this uprising with new meanings as a symbol of national identity and unity, Confucian virtue, and partyled revolutionary martyrdom. Chapter 2 turns to the Nanjing Decade and the Nationalist state’s efforts to commemorate and lay claim to a broad range of “martyrs,” including anti-Qing reformers and revolutionaries, Nationalist military personnel who died fighting the forces of the Chinese Communist Party or Japan, and even bureaucrats who died of “overexertion.” The Nationalist government used the memory of these revered figures to augment the narrative of its own indispensable role in China’s recent history and to assert its political legitimacy as the inheritor of the Republic. Chapter 3 examines how relatives of those who were recognized as martyrs interacted with the bureaucracy that provided death benefits in the form of stipends, tuition [End Page E-12] assistance, and burial assistance. Vu shows that in practice this compensation system involved inconsistent regulations, a poorly defined financial base (which relied on local governments’ willingness to follow national compensation policies), and discontent among families who did not receive the benefits for which they petitioned. In chapter 4, Vu examines how widows and other female relatives of martyrs petitioned for compensation, the gendered subject-positions that they claimed for themselves in doing so, and the somewhat ambivalent forms of agency that these interactions with the state involved. Vu argues that, while such women were active agents in engaging the state’s compensation system, their petitioning strategies tended to invoke and thus reinforce “traditional wifely virtues of sacrifice and perseverance” (118). Similar tropes were also deployed in the commemoration of women who died while fighting or resisting the enemy. Chapter 5 examines how the prospect of “mass martyrization” (156) during the Second Sino-Japanese War led to ever-finer compensation regulations and procedures, expanded efforts to collect martyrs’ stories and compile...

Chinese Nationalism

To the Editor: The recent Mini-Review: Expert Opinions series of articles on the metabolic syndrome epidemic published in the September 30, 2003, issue of Circulation 1–3 prompted me to write this letter to the editor. Barely 15 years since the …

The ideas and practices of written constitutions and constitutionalism that originated in the West in the 18th century were first imported into China in the late 19th century. There were three eras of constitution-making in modern Chinese history: the last decade of Qing imperial rule (1901-11), the republican era (1911-1949), and the communist era (1949-). The establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the Mainland in 1949 inaugurated a new era of constitution-making under the Soviet Union’s influence. However, even today, the discussion of “constitutionalism” (xianzheng) is still discouraged by the PRC regime, although the concepts of the (socialist) Rule of Law and human rights have been affirmed by constitutional amendments in 1999 and 2004 respectively. This paper will first review the historical evolution of constitutions and constitutionalism in the modern world (part I), and consider possible typologies of constitutions and constitutionalism in the contemporary world (part II). It then introduces the historical and ideological contexts of constitutional developments in modern China, and describes the operation of the Chinese constitutional system (part III). Finally, it considers whether or to what extent, or what type (if any) of, constitutionalism is practised in contemporary China (part IV).

This volume brings together a group of historians of modern China and East Asia, who have shared with Guido Samarani the experience of studying China in the last thirty years. It represents a small tribute to a friend and colleague, whose outstanding research activities have greatly increased our understanding of Chinese modern and contemporary history. Inspired by Samarani’s vast and multiple research interests, the essays collected in this volume weave together new interpretations and perspectives on the history and historiography of modern and contemporary China, covering a broad range of periods and topics, from imperial times to the contemporary age.

Modern China is at a stage of substantial change from tradition to modernity, and the relationship between China and the world has undergone a profound transformation. At the same time, literature, history, philosophy and the fine arts, among others, were on a journey towards modernization to varying degrees. The awakening of traditional consciousness in modern China is closely linked to the issue of comparative national culture. Both nationalists and traditionalists in art history have identified themselves in the context of the historical contrast between China and the West. In response to the relationship between Chinese and Western art, the traditionalists argued from a holistic perspective and slowly established the theory of the two sources of art and culture, East and West, and began to rethink the traditional characteristics of Chinese art in a global context. In addition to this, the discovery and summing up of folk art traditions is clearly a crucial achievement in modern Chinese history. While modern art history has become increasingly sophisticated and mature in its study of China's localisation, Chinese art history is still developing at a rapid pace in the face of persistence and change.

Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967), one of the foremost essayists in modern China, produced many exquisite Chinese translations of ancient Greek mythology and literature, as well as numerous essays on various aspects of ancient Greek culture. Making use of this rich body of work hitherto rarely explored, this essay addresses the following questions: what uses does a culture such as China, which has been essentially non-mythological in its long tradition, make of Greek mythology? What relevance does Greek mythology have at the two critical moments in modern Chinese history that Zhou lived through, i.e. the May-Fourth movement and its aftermath, and the post-1949 era up to the beginning of the ‘cultural revolution’? I approach these questions from two interrelated points of view: myth and knowledge and myth and literature. I argue that Zhou’s uses of Greek mythology formed an integral part of a cultural project aimed at defending free thought, which, as Zhou perceptively foresaw, was to be destroyed at the hands of self-claimed “progressive” intellectuals. This reassessment of Zhou’s thought via his life-long work in Greek mythology not only offers a better understanding of his aesthetics and cultural criticism, but also opens up a new perspective to the reception of Graeco-Roman antiquity in modern Chinese intellectual history.

This chapter talks about Continental China and the account of recent work in the rapidly developing area of social history. It begins at a high level of generality by asserting that the Chinese revolution of the twentieth century has differed from all other national revolutions in two respects: the greater size of the population and the greater comprehensiveness of the changes it has confronted. The comprehensiveness of change in modern China is a matter of dispute between two schools of interpretation, which posit linear and cyclical patterns. The question of what happened to the Chinese economy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is a major focus of discussion. Commercialization permeated the agrarian economy during the Ch'ing. The Han Chinese in different regions and at different class levels had a common sense of identity and historical continuity. The horizontal class structure of late imperial China was theoretically divided by the Classics into the four occupational classes: scholar-gentry, peasants, artisans, and merchants.

Reviews 209 Hard-pressed and facing increasingly difficult choices, die state opted for projects and regions where, from its larger perspective, investment promised the greatest and quickest rewards, even to die point of discouraging and foiling local efforts that might have ameliorated or solved local problems. This is a richly nuanced book that deserves close attention. Its author appreciates analytical models about China's economic and political character and evolution and dieir strengths and weaknesses, but he does not leave diem sacrosanct. How Pomeranz' unravelings will find dieir way into broader surveys ofmodern Chinese history will be the real test. Edward J. Lazzerini University ofNew Orleans David Pong. Shen Pao-chen and China's Modernization in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1994. xviii, 395 pp. Hardcover $54.95. Samuel C. Chu and Kwang-Ching Liu, editors. Li Hung-chang and China's Early Modernization. Armonk and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1994. xi, 308 pp. Hardcover $49.95. Paperback $22.50. Much of the contents of these two books will be known to those who keep up with scholarship on the late Qing, but both are nevertheless welcome contributions . David Pong has published over some years a long list ofhigh-quality articles on Shen Baozhen and odier related matters in nineteenth-century history; now it is good to have his full-lengdi treatment ofShen's career. Most ofthe Li book has already appeared, some ofit as a series ofarticles in Chinese Studies in History (CSH) (1990-1991); two articles are new (by Richard J. Smith and Thomas L. Kennedy), and die volume also includes two older articles by K. C. Liu, one from the Harvard Journal ofAsiatic Studies (1970) and one from the 1967 book Approaches to Modern Chinese History. The four articles that were not in CSHadd substantially to the volume's weight. Indeed, it is time to begin thinking ofPro-© 1995 h ? ' tv fessor Liu's articles as classics; Sam Chu was wise to suggest including them. ofHawai'i PressThe two books complement and reinforce each other, and not onlybecause David Pong is also a contributor to the Li anthology and deals widi die relationship between Li and Shen. Professor Pong is careful to point out that there were 210 China Review International: Vol. 2, No. 1, Spring 1995 differences as well as similarities between the lives and careers of the two men, but his emphasis rightly falls on the parallels and how die two tried to work together to further their many common modernization aims. The two books thus point to the efforts of two highly talented and farsighted men to promote China's "selfstrengthening " and to die many obstacles that blocked tiieir path. Both books want their protagonists to get their due, and while much is claimed for both Li and Shen their failures are not ignored; still, it is clear that Professor Pong wants Shen to be given more recognition as an important and creative reformer than he has received heretofore, and tìiat professors Liu and Chu want to have existing evaluations of Li revised upward. In a rather brief introductory essay, for example, Professor Liu views Li in the broad historical context of statecraft and finds diat he put into practice what Wei Yuan had sketched decades earlier, concluding that Li pioneered not only in military self-strengthening but also in state building and general economic development : "scholars have yet to do justice" to Li's efforts in these areas, he claims (p. 9). The general conclusion to this chapter is the following: "There were enough cases of comparative success in the record of China's late-nineteenth-century modernization to justify their being considered as precursors ofthe considerable economic development in the China of die early twentieth century __ Research on Li's role in the statecraft and reform of die late Ch'ing [Qing] period has barely begun." Professor Chu, in a lengthier concluding assessment, also suggests tìiat Li has been judged too harshly. In this chapter the evidence is weighed judiciously and widi a palpably strenuous effort to be candid and fair. Every wart is put under the microscope, from allegations of corruption and...