Contemporary Chinese Studies

From 1935 to 1950, Chiang Kai-shek steered China's development as a nation and shaped global history. Yet he remains an enigmatic figure remembered primarily for losing a decisive civil war. A reinterpretation is overdue.Based on Chiang's own writing, particularly his diary, Chiang Kai-shek's Critical Years sheds new light on his call for mobilization against Japan in 1937 and his relations with US representatives during the war; his efforts first to accommodate and then to defeat the Chinese Communist Party; and his ability to hold on to the presidency of the Republic of China after 1949, despite disastrous military failure. This examination of Chiang's daily planning and reflection on events reveals astute improvisation that ensured political survival despite setbacks and weaknesses. The sharpened sense of Chiang's agency that emerges from this important book provides an invaluable foundation for further analysis of the military and political institutional structures he helped build.

In late 1995, the drama Heaven Above (Cangtian zaishang)debuted on Chinese TV. The series featured a villainous high-rankedgovernment official, and was the first of the wildly popular corruptiondramas

Medical care in nineteenth-century China was spectacularly pluralistic: herbalists, shamans, bone-setters, midwives, priests, and a few medical missionaries from the West all competed for patients. Th

The Jianghan plain in central China is shaped by its relationship with water. Once a prolific rice-growing region that drew immigrants to its fertile paddy fields, since the eighteenth century it has

Chinese history has always been written from a centrist viewpoint.Telling the story of a quintessential Chinese culture that spreaduniformly from the administrative heartland to the previously untamed

Based on a December 2008 symposium held at Hong Kong University, this collection examines the media used by diasporic Chinese to express their sense of the ambiguity and fluidity of the multicultural

Drawing on newly released archival documents as well as recent field research, authors Qiu (Vassar College) and Zhiliang and Lifei (Shanghai Normal University) present the first-person stories of 12 C

Author Gao (history, Ryerson University) is the first to cover the rise to fame of Chinese female athletes in the early part of the twentieth century. From the Japanese-engineered Mukden Incident of 1

As part of a wider effort to provide alternatives to the conventional history of China in which the central state perpetually drives local society, anthropologists and historians seek the voices of in

In the early 1900s, the Qing dynasty implemented a series of institutional reforms to shore up its power. The most important were anationwide school system and the abolition of the centuries-old civil

This first book by independent Chinese Studies scholar Juan Wang takes on an understudied subject: tabloid journalism in China. Prior to the 1890s, newspapers in the Western sense were basically unkno

Smith (history, U. of Guelph, Canada) fills a lacuna in English-language scholarship on alcohol culture in China in this focused study on its prominence in Northeast China. He analyzes alcohol narrati

China was afflicted by a brutal succession of conflicts through muchof the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet there has never beenclear understanding of how wartime suffering defined the nation a

An American historian of modern and late imperial China, VanderVen explains that at the beginning of the 20th century, the floundering Qing Dynasty, in a desperate effort to survive, instituted a seri

Part political biography, part economic history, and part murder mystery, Smokeless Sugar sheds new light on regional and national politics and state-led industrialization in Republican China by inves

A workshop was held in Vienna during November 2006 where Chinese and Western historians and political scientists shared their findings and raised new questions about the interaction between state and

Forty years after China's tumultuous Cultural Revolution, this book revisits the visual and performing arts of the period – the paintings, propaganda posters, political cartoons, sculpture, folk arts,

An art exhibit titled Art of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, 1996-76 (2002), showed viewers at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in Vancouver how greatly art was impacted by Mao's Cu

Explores the change in the formal intellectual conception of democracy among the Chinese since the Tiananmen Square period. Looks at changes in the relationship between state and society in intellectu

In Milestones on a Golden Road, Richard King presentspivotal works of fiction published under the watchful eye ofChina's Communist regime between 1945 and 1980. Addressingquestions of literary product

Sporting Gender is the first book to explore the rise to fameof female athletes in China in the early twentieth century. Gao showshow these women coped with the conflicting demands of nationalistcause

In China, both opium and alcohol were used for centuries in thepursuit of health and leisure while simultaneously linked to personaland social decline. The impact of these substances is undeniable, an

The end of the Qing dynasty in China saw an unprecedented explosionof print journalism. Chinese-owned newspapers, first encouraged byEmperor Guangxu to inform and educate an increasingly literate publ

Keeping the Nation’s House unsettles the assumptionthat home economics training lies far from the seats of power byrevealing how elite Chinese women helped to build modern China onefamily at a time.

Vancouver has one of the largest populations of Chinese in North America. In The Chinese in Vancouver, Wing Chung Ng captures the fascinating story of the city’s Chinese residents in their search for