It has been ten years since Ken Pomeranz published The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy., a book that forced some real rethinking about the economic history in Europe and China. Along with Bin Wong in China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience, he called for a deep …
Rural studies in China
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 …
Woodward Avenue
How does a rust belt city relaunch itself? How can the stakeholders of Detroit, Cleveland, or Milwaukee begin to reinvent their cities and get on a track that leads to greater prosperity, health, and educational attainment that can eventually result in opportunity and quality of life for the urban majority? The factors that led to …
Priorities for tax dollars
There is a very strong impulse in many state legislatures to cut taxes, no matter what the cost is to the state's ability to provide essential services for its citizens. The Michigan League for Human Services draws attention to the consequences of this impulse when it comes to the welfare of the children of Michigan. …
Michigan’s recovery?
The Mackinac Policy Conference brings forward something new this year -- optimism. The state of Michigan has been hammered in the past eight years by the upheaval of the auto industry and the national trauma of the global financial meltdown. Unemployment has been substantially higher than the national average, the city of Detroit has hemmorhaged …
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 …
Understanding Society 