Yangzi Delta Research Articles

Development or Involution in Eighteenth-Century Britain and China? A Review of Kenneth Pomeranz'sThe Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy

Kenneth pomeranz argues that “the great divergence” between development and involution in Europe and China did not occur until after 1800. Until then, Europe and China were comparable in population history, agriculture, handicraft industry, income, and consumption. Europe before 1800, in other words, was much less developed than the last two decades of scholarship have led us to believe, while China before 1800 was much less involuted. To make his case, Pomeranz spotlights England, the most advanced part of Europe, and the Yangzi delta area, the most advanced part of China. They diverged only after 1800, mainly because of the lucky availability of coal resources for England, and also of other raw materials from the New World.

Andrew M. Marton, China's Spatial Economic Development. Restless Landscapes in the Lower Yangzi Delta

Andrew M. Marton, China's Spatial Economic Development. Restless Landscapes in the Lower Yangzi Delta

China's Spatial Economic Development: Restless Landscapes in the Lower Yangzi Delta

Chapter 1. Introduction 1.1 Rationale, Scope and Objectives 1.2 Redefining a New Critical Regional Geography 1.2.1 Chinese Landscapes of Transformation and the Representation of Place 1.2.2 Regional Geography: As Method and as Theory 1.3 The Lower Yangzi Delta Region and Kunshan 1.4 Issues and Methodology 1.5 Organization of the Book Chapter 2. Regional Development and Industrialization: Towards Mega-Urbanization 2.1 Development Theory in Crisis: Beyond the Impasse 2.2 Confronting the Post-Modern Void: Taking Diversity Seriously 2.3 Linkages and the Transactional Revolution 2.4 A New Geography of Production: Making Space for Place 2.5 Cities, Towns, and Rural Transformation: The Chinese Development Debate 2.6 Rural and Urban in China's Regional Development: Seeking a Middle Ground 2.7 Mega-Urbanization in the Lower Yangzi Delta: Enterprise Location and the Reconstruction of Local Space Chapter 3. The Lower Yangzi Delta: Historical Geography and Contemporary Patterns of Change 3.1 The Lower Yangzi Delta From the Late Imperial Period 3.1.1 Natural Environment and Spatial Economic Structure 3.1.2 Rural-Urban Relations and the Urban Penumbra 3.2 Pre-Reform Political Economy 3.3 Reforms and Transformations in the Rural Economy 3.3.1 Changes in Agriculture 3.3.2 Township and Village Enterprises: New Shapes, Old Patterns 3.4 Spatial Economic Patterns in the Lower Yangzi Delta 3.5 At the Edge of Shanghai: Kunshan to the Fore Chapter 4. Structure of Local Government and Relationship to Enterprises 4.1 Bifurcation of the Functions of Local Government 4.1.1 Community Administration 4.1.2 Ownership and Management of Enterprises 4.2 Spatial Proliferation on Non-Agricultural Activities 4.3 Formalizing Local Institutional Structures in a Partially Reformed Command Economy 4.3.1 Capitalism With Chinese Characteristics 4.3.2 Individual Interactions and Interrelationships 4.3.3 Horizontal and Vertical Linkages 4.3.4 Economic Cooperation Commission 4.4 Socialist New Rural Area With Chinese Characteristics Chapter 5. Grounding Regional Restructuring: The Local Character of Spatial Change 5.1 Transportation 5.2 Dianshanhu Town 5.3 Tongxin Village 5.4 Specialized Development Zones Chapter 6. Linkages and the Location of Non-Agricultural Production 6.1 Investment in Local Development 6.1.1 Capital Formation 6.1.2 Reproduction of Capital 6.2 Ownership, Land and Labour 6.3 Enterprise Procurement, Marketing and Management 6.4 Transactional Environment Chapter 7. Mega-Urbanization in the Lower Yangzi Delta: Theoretical and Policy Challenges and Responses 7.1 Negotiating and Managing the Regional Transformation: Institutional Parameters and Rural Agglomeration 7.2 Theoretical Implications: Urbad Transition or Regional Resilience? 7.3 Planning and Management Agenda: Chinese Solutions for Chinese Proble

Chinese Modernity and the Peasant Path: Semicolonialism in the Northern Yangzi Delta, by Kathy Le Mons Walker

<i>Chinese Modernity and the Peasant Path: Semicolonialism in the Northern Yangzi Delta</i>, by Kathy Le Mons Walker

Review: Of Myths and Movements: Rewriting Chipko into Himalayan History, China's Spatial Economic Development: Restless Landscapes in the Lower Yangzi Delta, Local Government from Thatcher to Blair: The Politics of Creative Autonomy, Globalization and Urban Change: Capital, Culture, and Pacific Rim Mega-Projects

Review: Of Myths and Movements: Rewriting Chipko into Himalayan History, China's Spatial Economic Development: Restless Landscapes in the Lower Yangzi Delta, Local Government from Thatcher to Blair: The Politics of Creative Autonomy, Globalization and Urban Change: Capital, Culture, and Pacific Rim Mega-Projects

Changes in Family and Marriage in a Yangzi Delta Farming Community, 1930-1990

This article explores how marriage patterns and practices changed over the course of 60 years in Willow Pond Village (a pseudonym), a rice-farming community on the Yangzi Delta, 50 km west of Shanghai. Data gathered during eight months of fieldwork in 1990 reveal the intimate relationship between marriage and changes in the local political climate and illustrate the ways in which marriage reflects and reproduces the local social hierarchy. (Marriage, family, kinship, social stratification, China) ********** By late imperial times, China's highly elaborate system of stratification had developed an extraordinary degree of social mobility (Ho 1962; Fei and Chang 1945; Yang 1945; Hsu 1948), owing in part to the virtual absence of legal restrictions on intermarriage or movement between strata. Ironically, the permeability of the strata may have allowed the system of stratification to persist. As long as upward mobility remained a possibility, albeit requiring several generations, and as long as a few families served as examples of mobility, non-elite strata were likely to accept the legitimacy of their positions. The social order itself was a process of anfractuous reconstruction whose shape is described by the calculus of families striving for material and symbolic benefit. And in no domain of rural Chinese social life is this calculus more apparent and more determinative of the social order than in the decisions surrounding marriage. These decisions, as Bourdieu (1977:70) points out, belong to the system of reproduction strategies.... [E]very marriage tends to reproduce the conditions which have made it possible. PREREVOLUTIONARY WILLOW POND On the eve of the Communist victory in 1949, what is now the administrative village of Willow Pond was the site of two villages with a combined population of roughly 245. On small plots of generally fertile land, some 60 households cultivated a main crop of summer paddy rice and some winter wheat or barley. Although all families worked in the fields, marked social differences are evident in older informants' descriptions of village life during the 1930s and 1940s. About 60 percent of families lived at the margins of subsistence, with half their crop extracted as rent by absentee landlords. Most owned no draft animals or only a share in one, and either rented the pumps of wealthier neighbors or paid for itinerant pump-boat operators to irrigate their fields. They frequently hired out themselves or their older children as laborers to others. Another 20 per cent of village families fared little better. They were driven less frequently to sell their labor to others, but they controlled no surplus land, and could not afford the tools and means to maximize yields. The top strata of village society, perhaps 20 per cent, had landholdings that exceeded their own subsistence needs, derived a significant portion of their income by renting this surplus to others, but worked in the fields themselves, also employing one or more long-term laborers. The very wealthiest families derived most income from renting land, and owned one or more oxen and perhaps a windmill for irrigation; although their primary business was agriculture, some of their children were involved in nonfarm pursuits, like extended education or apprenticeship to a skilled craftsman. One family briefly owned a rice mill until it was lost to fire in 1946. Wealthier families were far more likely than others to have reserves of capital that allowed them to buy land, goods, and services when the prices were at their lowest, and to acquire some of the trappings of the elite lifestyle they tried to emulate. Thus, land, labor, capital, and access to irrigation, tools, and agricultural inputs--the means of production--were one dimension along which village families were stratified. The social relations of production comprised another dimension and included the division of labor within the production unit (the family), the network of alliances a family could depend on for support, and its accumulated symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1977). …

Practice Makes Within 5% of Perfect: Visual Perception, Motor Skills, and Memory in Artifact Variation

Practice Makes Within 5% of Perfect: Visual Perception, Motor Skills, and Memory in Artifact Variation

Chinese Modernity and the Peasant Path: Semicolonialism in the Northern Yangzi Delta

Introduction: modernity, the semicolonial process and alternative histories Part I. Signposts: The Ming-Qing Transition and Beyond: 1. Agrarian class relations and peasant history in the Southern Yangzi delta during the Ming 2. The view from the periphery: Tongzhou and the Northern delta 3. Historical trends during the Qing Part II. The Semicolonial Process: 4. Shanghai, cotton cloth and the shaping of Nantong's modern merchant elite 5. Remaking local power: Zhang Jian's self-reliant path 6. Extending the sway of commercial capital 7. The politics of the peasant and modernist paths in the late Qing-early Republican years 8. Constituting 'semicolonial capitalisms': modern landlordism, commercial farming, and rural labor 9. Subproletarianization in the industrial districts Conclusion: semicolonialism and the peasant path Notes References Character list Index.

Kathy Le Mons Walker. &lt;italic&gt;Chinese Modernity and the Peasant Path: Semicolonialism in the Northern Yangzi Delta&lt;/italic&gt;. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1999. Pp. xiv, 330. $55.00

Kathy Le Mons Walker. Chinese Modernity and the Peasant Path: Semicolonialism in the Northern Yangzi Delta. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1999. Pp. xiv, 330. $55.00 Get access Le Mons Walker Kathy. Chinese Modernity and the Peasant Path: Semicolonialism in the Northern Yangzi Delta. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1999. Pp. xiv, 330. $55.00. Roxann Prazniak Roxann Prazniak Hampden-Sydney College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 105, Issue 3, June 2000, Pages 905–906, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/105.3.905 Published: 01 June 2000

One industry, two Chinas: silk filatures and peasant-family production in Wuxi County, 1865-1937

Note on Wuxi county's administrative boundaries, commerical districts, and size Weights, measures and exchange rates 1. introduction: a tale of two Chinas 2. Markets and power in the late imperial era 3. Why Wuxi? merchant competition and the changing contours of Yangzi Delta Silk Production 4. Public sphere or private interest? Defending the Wuxi cocoon trade 5. Investors at risk in the Wuxi filature industry 6. Women in sericulture, or how gendered labor (re-)shaped peasant-family production 7. Imparting modernity: women and the politics of silk-industry reform 8. Success at last? Bourgeois practice and state intervention under the nationalists 9. Conclusion: peasants, industry, and the state Appendices Abbreviations Notes Bibliography Character list Index.

The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy

The Great Divergence brings new insight to one of the classic questions of history: Why did sustained industrial growth begin in Northwest Europe, despite surprising similarities between advanced areas of Europe and East Asia? As Ken Pomeranz shows, as recently as 1750, parallels between these two parts of the world were very high in life expectancy, consumption, product and factor markets, and the strategies of households. Perhaps most surprisingly, Pomeranz demonstrates that the Chinese and Japanese cores were no worse off ecologically than Western Europe. Core areas throughout the eighteenth-century Old World faced comparable local shortages of land-intensive products, shortages that were only partly resolved by trade.Pomeranz argues that Europe's nineteenth-century divergence from the Old World owes much to the fortunate location of coal, which substituted for timber. This made Europe's failure to use its land intensively much less of a problem, while allowing growth in energy-intensive industries. Another crucial difference that he notes has to do with trade. Fortuitous global conjunctures made the Americas a greater source of needed primary products for Europe than any Asian periphery. This allowed Northwest Europe to grow dramatically in population, specialize further in manufactures, and remove labor from the land, using increased imports rather than maximizing yields. Together, coal and the New World allowed Europe to grow along resource-intensive, labor-saving paths.Meanwhile, Asia hit a cul-de-sac. Although the East Asian hinterlands boomed after 1750, both in population and in manufacturing, this growth prevented these peripheral regions from exporting vital resources to the cloth-producing Yangzi Delta. As a result, growth in the core of East Asia's economy essentially stopped, and what growth did exist was forced along labor-intensive, resource-saving paths--paths Europe could have been forced down, too, had it not been for favorable resource stocks from underground and overseas.

Chinese modernity and the peasant path: semicolonialism in the Northern Yangzi Delta

Chinese Modernity and the Peasant Path: Semi-Colonialism in the Northern Yangzi Delta. KATHY LE MONS WALKER. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1999; 330 pp. This is an ambitious book with a commendable agenda-a rigorous class analysis of the complex relations between indigenous elites, the local peasantry, national and international merchants, and the state in the cotton producing hinterland of treaty port Shanghai in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Writing against the grain of linear, positivist development theory, the author argues that . . . the very idea of development restrictively enforces a certain definition of modemity, [that] would only permit an examination of China in terms of negative analysis and residual categories (p. vii). For the most part the author succeeds in the agenda she sets. In the end the account of the development of class relations in the northern Yangzi delta from the late Ming dynasty (1368-1644 AD) through to the twentieth century Republic (1911-- 1949 AD) gives us a good feeling for the contingent nature of historical development in the region and a comprehensive assessment of the fluctuating interests and relative strength of the contending parties. author also makes her case for the need to recognize the importance and utility of the concept semicolonial. author's interpretive framework provides a number of excellent insights into the historical process. Some of these emphasize the particularity of the Chinese experience, some borrow from the anthropological and historical investigation of other cultures, and still others represent creative inferences derived from the source materials. For example, the author's account of the development of cotton textile development in the Ming dynasty and the changing patterns in household division of labor it entailed creatively explains the origin of the common saying, The men till and the women weave (pp. 50-51). Also of interest in light of recent world historical research is the author's recognition of the far reaching effects of cotton textile commercialization in the delta. This process not only propelled movement toward the formation of a national market structured on the exchange of grain for cotton cloth . . . by petty producers, but also stimulated demand for the international flow of silver as a commodity, and hence also drove the formation of a global monetary system (p. 34). She also demonstrates, contrary to the assumptions of modernization theory, that Third World modernities, emerging within the framework of im and colonialism have often entailed the extension, hardening and ever the resurrection of traditional fame (p. 93) of exploitation, such as indentured and other forms of disguised wage labor (p. 174). twentiethcentury reemergence of sharecropping in the delta is understood as one manifestation of the latter (p. 193). In the author's conceptualization, borrowed from Claude Meillasoux, these processes are part of a larger pattern in which wage labor first becomes indispensable to household subsistence. However, the continued coexistence of subsistence farming together with wage labor has the effect of subsidizing the industrial wage, leading to the subproletarianization of the vast majority of peasants (p. 174). author's analysis of usury capital is also quite insightful. She reads increases in the number of pawnshops in her historical records as expressing the growing power of trade-usury-landlordism (p. 126). She also shows how the institution of preharvest buying of the cotton crop extended the exploitation space of usury capital in the countryside, allowing larger firms to increase surplus appropriation and gain control of cotton supplies (p. 134). career of pioneer nationalist industrialist, ZhangJian, examined in some detail (Ch. 5), helps to illuminate the changing configuration of forces in the northern delta during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. …

Fenjia: Household Division and Inheritance in Qing and Republican China (review)

Reviewed by: Fenjia: Household Division and Inheritance in Qing and Republican China Robert J. Antony (bio) David Wakefield. Fenjia: Household Division and Inheritance in Qing and Republican China. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1998. x, 261 pp. Hardcover $42.00, ISBN 0-8248-2092-4. Fenjia is a highly informative and quite detailed study of the inheritance system in Qing and Republican China. This book by David Wakefield, who teaches at the University of Missouri, is a revision of his UCLA dissertation, and is based on extensive primary research in China and Taiwan, including fieldwork interviews. The author sets out to explore both the nature and the importance of household division (fenjia) in modern Chinese history, focusing on Taiwan in the Qing era and North China in the Republican era. The book is divided into ten chapters, including an introduction and a conclusion. After the useful background introduction surveying China's inheritance laws and practices from the Zhou to the Qing dynasties, other chapters probe such topics as why, when, and how households divided; the rights of individuals in property division; inheritance disputes in Qing courts; variations in inheritance patterns according to region and class; and the impact of household division on Chinese society. Throughout history the Chinese have always practiced, both in custom and in law, an "equal-male-division inheritance regime." As Wakefield shows, in China household division meant more than the equal division of family property and debt among all sons. It also included guarantees for the continued support of parents and for the marriage expenses of sons and daughters. Although the rules for household division remained consistent over time and place, the Chinese astutely devised various strategies or orientations that aimed to hold the family—and its property—together as long as possible. In Taiwan, families set aside lineage trusts; in the Lower Yangzi Delta, they used charitable estates; and in Huizhou, Anhui, merchant families adopted a "phased division orientation." Wakefield joins with several other recent scholars, particularly Jing Junjian and Thomas Buoye, in arguing for the notion of individual property rights in Qing China.1 In Qing Taiwan, as elsewhere in China, basic property rights were embodied in the process of household division for sons, adopted sons, living parents, widowed wives and concubines, and daughters. Although not everyone in the family, aside from male siblings, received equal shares, everyone could nevertheless expect to receive some share of property at division. Unmarried sons had rights to marriage expenses; unmarried daughters had rights to continued support and dowries; and parents—including husbands, wives, and concubines—had rights to continued support and a funeral. [End Page 542] Frequently, too, as the cases from the Baxian, Sichuan, judicial archives show, Qing local courts staunchly defended these rights, even those of women. As was true in other civil suits of the Qing period, contracts, wills, and other written evidence played important roles in adjudicating inheritance disputes. Interestingly, too, Wakefield points out that local yamens, once they became involved in disputes, often became "safe deposit boxes" for household division documents. Otherwise, the government tried not to get involved in the division of family property. Despite the promulgation of new laws in the Republican period, the author explains that the inheritance and division of household property continued to follow old customs. Laws that gave equal rights to daughters in inheritance, for instance, were largely ignored in actual practice. Numerous cases from North China in the 1930s show that daughters did not receive shares of the inheritance, but they did continue to get dowries. In discussing the important questions of the effect of household division on Chinese society and social mobility, Wakefield adds little that is new. Rather, his study lends further support to the earlier works by John Lossing Buck, Philip Huang, and William Lavely and R. Bin Wong.2 For example, in addressing the issue of whether or not Chinese peasants divided land beyond the point necessary for survival, the author agrees with Huang that well-to-do peasant families could little avoid the downward mobility caused by household division. Wakefield adds further that actually all peasant families, at least in North China, where most of the evidence comes from...

Rural industrialization in China's lower Yangzi delta: Institutionalizing transactional networks

Understanding the nature of spatial economic change in China's most rapidly developing regions requires a conceptual and methodological shift away from the conventional macro-perspectives. An analysis of the processes and mechanisms which underlie the unique patterns of transformation in China's lower Yangzi delta is undertaken. The paper focuses on the emergence of small scale institutional and transactional activities as they relate to the location of nonagricultural enterprises in the countryside. The way in which networks of interactions and interrelationships are embedded within specific local exigencies and opportunities for development reveals much about the wider regional spatial economic patterns and trends. The historical, administrative, and territorial contexts and some detailed examples of the resulting institutional frameworks are also highlighted. The paper proposes a framework whereby spatial economic transformation in China is reconceptualized in relation to intensely localized place-based institutional structures.

Shanghai: From Market Town to Treaty Port, 1074-1858 (review)

Reviews 177 ionable because it is not durable (in more senses than one). Ha Jin is a good writer and demonstrates the talent to become a much better one. His tar may be rising and should be watched. Jack J. Gerson University ofToronto Jack Gerson's attachment to Chinese studies began in 1938 where itprogressed through three-and-a-halfdegrees, and seven sojourns in China between 1948 and 1990 as administrator, scholar and teacher; he is still going at age 75. Linda Cooke Johnson. Shanghai: From Market Town to Treaty Port, 10741858 . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. ix, 440 pp. Hardcover $49.50, isbn 0-8047-2294-3. This book grew out of the author's doctoral dissertation, in which she speculated on the relationship oftwo Jiangnan cities, Suzhou and Shanghai, cities that had clearly reversed their historical roles by the twentieth century. In her dissertation, Johnson examined the decline ofSuzhou, a prefectural city ofconsiderable historical importance, and the rise ofthe modest "fishing village" ofShanghai. The book's primary focus, however, is Shanghai from the eleventh century to the midnineteenth century, a time frame broad enough to establish historical continuity and to make "the enduring, traditional components ofChinese society at Shanghai more conspicuous" (p. 13). This book is also an attempt to move away from the established discourse, which divides Shanghai's history starting from 1843, the year in which it was opened as a treaty port and exposed to Western influences. The author's expressed hope is to dispel the "myths attaching to Shanghai," particularly the idea that "fhe impact ofthe West was primarily responsible for propelling China into early modernization, and its reverse interpretation, that the West failed in this mission, and Shanghai became part ofthe 'other China'" (p. 5). This, ofcourse, is a reference to the standard and highly respected works on Shanghai by John King Fairbank, Rhoads Murphey, and Marie Claire Bergère, among others. The author softens this critique by agreeing that the "diachronic© 1997 by University frameworks" between her own study and that ofMurpheyor Bergère, who examined post-treaty-port Shanghai, may account for the apparent differences in interpretation . To Johnson, the social and economic structure and institutions in place before 1843 remained traditional and effective, with change occurring within 178 China Review International: Vol. 4, No. 1, Spring 1997 the parameters set by patterns oflate imperial urban development comparable to what happened in other cities like Suzhou, Hangzhou, or Hankou as elucidated by recent scholarship. This volume, therefore, represents an attempt to fill in the gaps in fhe evergrowing body of English-language studies on what we know of the historical development ofpre-treaty-port Shanghai. To fhat end it is a descriptive analysis, drawn from recent Chinese scholarship on urbanization that focuses on the geographical rise ofShanghai and the surrounding region, as well as the older gazetteer (difangzhi) sources, rich in detail about local history and economy. It appropriately begins with a discussion of the geomorphology of fhe Yangzi delta and the gradual formation ofthe Shanghai region, due mosdy to natural forces but also to man-made intervention through the building ofretaining dikes and seawalls , notably the Hanhai dike constructed around a.d. 713 to protect the new agricultural land. Profiting from the pioneering works ofMark Elvin and G. William Skinner on the medieval revolution in marketing structure and urbanization, this study illuminates the various factors responsible for Shanghai's evolution and advancement in the traditional urban hierarchy. The village of Hudu that predated the town of Shanghai is identifiable in records from the Tang dynasty, but it was not until the eleventh century that Shanghai was officially recognized as a market town, and subsequendy, after approximately one hundred years of growth, as a shi or market city. This was pardy due to the geological shift that widened the Huangpu River, giving Shanghai better access to the sea, a shift that also resulted in the commercial decline ofthe port city ofQinglong. By the late thirteenth century, with the bureau in Qinglong permanendy closed, official commercial activities were to be regulated by the Office of Overseas Trade that opened in Shanghai. But Ming dynasty governmental policies, including die relocation ofdie national capital...

Shanghai: From Market Town to Treaty Port, 1074-1858

Introduction 1. Early cities in the Yangzi delta 2. Cotton: the development of Shanghai county 3. Ming Shanghai: city of temples and gardens 4. Qing Shanghai: a city by guilds 5. The guilds that built the city 6. Trade and commerce in a Chinese city 7. Arrival of the British 8. The China trade: the great scheme for commercial intercourse 9. The internationalisation of shanghai, 1846-1853 10. Rebellion: the small swords at Shanghai 11. Creation of the foreign inspectorate 12. Shanghai: dual city, 1854-1858 Abbreviations Notes Bibliography Character list Index.

Shanghai: Transformation and Modernization under China's Open Policy.

As China's largest city best known for its pre-eminent achievements in the early part of the twentieth century, Shanghai grew modestly in comparison with southern China after the adoption of China's open policy in 1978. With the 1990 announcement of Pudong as an area for special development, Shanghai has raced ahead, seemingly on its way to an economic and cultural resurgence that is likely to accelerate development and modernization in the Yangzi Delta and China at large. This volume focuses on the physical and socioeconomic transformation of Shanghai across a wide range of topics. Drawing on the experience and expertise of researchers primarily in Hong Kong, this study is a major contribution to the subject of economic development and social change in China. It seeks to understand, analyze and interpret how Shanghai has transformed itself in recent years.

The Oral Tradition of Yangzhou Storytelling

This is 'the most in-depth work on traditional oral narrative in the Yangzi delta published in English to date...Boerdahl is to be commended for producing such a rigorous study. Her enthusiasm for and love of the art is apparent in every sentence' (Asian Folklore Studies).

Gentlemanly Interests and Wealth on the Yangzi Delta (review)

Gentlemanly Interests and Wealth on the Yangzi Delta (review)

Chinese History in Economic Perspective. Edited by Thomas G. Rawski and Lillian M. Li. Studies on China No. 13. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. xvii, 362 pp.

Secular trends of rice prices in the Yangzi delta, 1638-1935 grain prices in Zhili Province, 1736-1911 the Qing state and the Gansu grain market, 1739-1864 grain markets and food supplies in eighteenth-century Hunan infanticide and family planning in later Imperial China land concentration and income distribution in Republican China farming, sericulture and peasant rationality in Wuxi county in the early twentieth century women's work in the Ningbo area, 1900-1936 native-place hierarchy and labor market segmentation local interest story.