I spent a rewarding afternoon at the Institute for Rural Studies at Central China Normal University in Wuhan this week (link). The Institute is the leading center for research on China's rural population, and it has conducted research projects for decades on villages throughout China. It is an important resource for government officials as they …
Mobilizing the masses
One of the books on the Chinese Revolution that I particularly respect is Odoric Wou's 1994 Mobilizing the Masses: Building Revolution in Henan. As noted in an earlier post, histories of the revolution have gone through several waves, and a general trend has been towards more focused regional studies. Wou's book belongs in what I categorize as …
Recent historiography of China
The field of China history evolved rapidly after the McCarthy attacks on the field in the 1950s. The most significant developments, in my view, are these. First, there developed in the 1960s and 1970s what Paul Cohen refers to as a “China-centered” approach to the study of the history of China (Discovering History in China: …
Protest in Wukan
A period of demonstration and protest in the Chinese village of Wukan has caught the attention of world media in the past several weeks (link, link). The village is in Guangdong, the dynamic coastal province. The demonstrations began in September against major land seizures by local government in alignment with developers, and became more intense in …
Health disparities in the US and China
Health disparities across a population are among the most profound indicators of social inequalities that we can find. And the fact of significant disparities across groups is a devastating statement about the circumstances of justice under which a society functions. These disparities translate into shorter lives and lower quality of life for whole groups of …
China’s role in world history?
People sometimes want to make large statements about China's future in the coming fifty years. These range from a Sinocentric paen -- "The twenty-first century will be marked by a hegemonic China on the world stage", to the dubious -- "China's polity will ultimately shatter under the pressures of regional inequalities and competing political interests …
Beijing Forum 2011
I'm attending the Beijing Forum 2011 this week, and it's a superb international conference. Much of the conference took place at Peking University. Over three hundred international scholars were invited to participate, and there are dozens of interesting conversations going on at any one time. The goal is to stimulate productive dialog among scholars from …
Notes from Xi’an
People here in Xi'an say: "The Chinese city of the present is Beijing. The city of the future is Shanghai. The city of China's past is Xi'an." This seems to be more than a slogan. People in Xian seem deeply proud of the history and heritage that Xian represents -- the thirteen dynasties that made …
New thinking about the Red Guards
https://youtu.be/gaz8sVaK8s4 Andrew Walder has spent almost all of his academic life, on and off, studying the Chinese Cultural Revolution. In Fractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guard Movement (2009) he offers some genuinely new insights into this crucial and chaotic period of China's revolutionary history. Some historians have focused on the political motivations of Mao and other top leaders …
Historical GDP estimates for early modern China
Li Bozhong is one of China's most influential economic historians, and he is undoubtedly the most internationally connected. Much of his work in the past several decades has been devoted to constructing a detailed economic history of the lower Yangzi Delta (for example, Agricultural Development in Jiangnan, 1620-1850). His findings have been crucial empirical contributions to …
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