The question of Chu's cultural affinity perplexed—and continues to perplex—traditional and modern scholars. Some view it as the cultural Other of the Zhou world, while others believe that this state fundamentally belonged to the Zhou cultural sphere. The difficulty in assessing Chu's cultural trajectory derives in not a small measure from the bias of traditional sources, all of which were composed or compiled in the northern and eastern parts of the Zhou world. Yet recently discovered Chu historical manuscripts allow us to overcome this “northeastern bias.” How much do the newly available texts display—if at all—a distinct Chu identity? Do they present an alternative version of Chu history? Who were their audience? By answering these questions I hope both to revisit the question of Chu's relations to the Zhou (“Chinese”) world, and to put forward novel understandings of the usages of history writing in preimperial China.

Human activity has eliminated many of the natural lowland ecosystems of the Middle and Lower Yellow River Valley, and has modified the rest, making it difficult to understand what species are native to the region. As a step towards the reconstruction of these lost environments, this paper employs zooarchaeological and other evidence to identify the native mammals of the region. We provide basic ecological information about these animals and discuss controversial or difficult cases in more depth. Our goal is not only to study China's environmental history, but also to make clear that conventional understandings of species ranges are based on the distributions of animals in the modern period, when many had already been eliminated from large areas by human activity.

By examining the cultural identity of China's Ming dynasty, this essay challenges two prevalent perceptions of the Ming in existing literature: to presume a monolithic socio-ethno-cultural Chinese empire and to equate the Ming Empire with China (Zhongguo, the “middle kingdom”). It shows that the Ming constructed China as an ethnocultural space rather than a political entity. In essence, China was defined as a Han domain that the Han people inhabited and where Han values were produced, practiced, and preserved in contrast to those of non-Han “barbarians,” be they domestic or foreign. The “Great Ming”—the dynastic title—cannot be confused with China, the ethnocultural space. For the Ming ruling elite, the “Miao territory” in western Huguang and eastern Guizhou provinces represented a land “beyond the pale of civilization” (huawai), which was outside and different from China. The Ming construction of the ethnocultural China connects the imperial heritage to China's modern identity.

Scholars have long assumed that the opening of Shanghai as a treaty port in 1843, followed by the disruption caused by the Taiping Rebellion, led to an abrupt restructuring of China's internal organization and a fundamental change in its relation to the outside world. Looking at developments at Suzhou and Shanghai over the long nineteenth century in parallel, this study argues that this was in fact a far later and much more gradual process than we have heretofore appreciated, the decisive breaks occurring at least a half-century later than usually assumed.

This article examines the creation, preservation, and destruction of the defensive forest that the Northern Song built in Hebei along the Song–Liao border. Created as a landscape barrier against the Kitan attacks, this forest established the necessary strategic depth between the capital city and the northern frontline of the Song empire to compensate for Kaifeng's geographical vulnerability. While the Song government painstakingly maintained this forest throughout most of the dynasty, Liao troops, Hebei borderland residents, and many Song officials had nonetheless posed incessant challenges to this military forestation project. In 1122/23, at the onset of the war on the Liao to retrieve the Sixteen Prefectures, the Song army removed this borderland forest that blocked their northern expedition. The destruction of this defensive forest, which could have had thwarted attacks from the north, dismantled the strategic depth between Kaifeng and the Hebei borderland and henceforth presaged the fall of Kaifeng to the Jin, the Liao's successor, in a few years. I argue that this strategic depth was not only a physical distance, but also a diplomatic, sociopolitical, and military link that connected the ecology of the Song's northernmost periphery and the fate of the entire empire.

This article explores the understudied issue of urban problems in pre-modern China and examines the responses to the negative impact of urban development on life in the populous city of Kaifeng in the Northern Song (960–1127). Although writers, painters, and historians have portrayed the capital city's splendor for centuries, various urban problems emerged as medieval China became a more urbanized society. This article investigates Ouyang Xiu's (1007–1072) accounts of how extreme weather conditions adversely affected the lives of Kaifeng residents. These experiences, which he discussed in letters and poems, are associated with longer trends that result in climatic anomalies and disasters in the city. Ouyang Xiu also complained about living costs and medical services in Kaifeng. These reflect the difficulties in maintaining good urban provisions and services in a city of this scale.

In late imperial China, an extremely small number of bureaucrats adopted corpse admonition (shijian 尸諫) to protest with their death what they regarded as inadequacies or failings in the imperial structure. This article introduces the case of Wu Kedu 吳可讀, who killed himself to protest the designation, by the late Qing empress dowagers Ci'an and Cixi, of Guangxu as the emperor, and as the adopted son of Xianfeng and not as the heir to Tongzhi. The article argues that Wu Kedu's suicide, which was highly praised during and after its time, was an attempt to sway bureaucratic opinion to put a check on the arbitrary power of empress dowagers, but instead had the unintended consequence of reinforcing it. More importantly, Wu Kedu's corpse admonition was a precursor of the outpouring of voices of remonstrance over political issues at the turn of the twentieth century, leading to further development of the Chinese “constitutional agenda.”

In 1782 acting Shaanxi Governor Bi Yuan 畢沅 (1730–97) submitted an exemplary memorial to the throne that concisely outlined the provincial administrative view of the proper order of relations between people, cultivars, livestock, climate, and water in northwestern China. He began with ostensibly human relations. His premise was that imperial official identity was ultimately formed through its connection to the food security of the general populace: “The root purpose of appointing officials is to prioritize the devotion of effort to civil affairs, and its main end is to put food sufficiency first.” Bi Yuan, like most of his contemporaries, unquestionably valued agriculture as the general and “main source” of food. By virtue of his posting to a China-proper province whose northern reaches lay along an ecotone with the Mongolian steppe, however, Bi Yuan was also distinctively aware of pastoralism as what he called the “second” source. While he made it clear that agriculture was certainly preferable, he was equally plain that human agency's range of choice was quite constrained in large parts of his jurisdiction, primarily by scarce water and cold climate. “Places in the northern provincial prefectures of Yan'an 延安 and Yulin 榆林, like Suide 綏德 and Fuzhou 鄜州, have land full of sand and gravel. Each is a high, cold frontier area where rainfall and ponds are scarce and inhibited, so that at harvest there is concern about shortfall.”

This article investigates the formation of the Shatan scholarly group and the contribution of its leader, Zheng Zhen. Zheng benefitted from a vigorous trans-regional cultural network of returned local scholars such as Li Xun and Mo Yuchou and prominent scholar-officials from outside such as Cheng Enze and He Changling. Zheng Zhen remained true to the approaches and research topics of evidential research, i.e., historical philology and exegesis of pre-Qin classics, bibliography, and an inquiry into ancient institutions and technology, in an era when the general intellectual trend turned toward statecraft studies and the politicized Modern Text School, promoted by scholars like Gong Zizhen and Kang Youwei. The contribution of the Shatan group, Zheng Zhen in particular, embodies the rise of evidential research, a passion for facts, as well as concerns about society. More importantly, it prompts us to rethink Guizhou as an active agent in the late Qing Chinese cultural landscape.

The North China Famine of 1876–1879 has received some attention recently, but little of this work has focused on the north-western province of Shaanxi. This imbalance is reflected in the local histories that devote far more space to the documentation and commemoration of the Hui rebellion than to the famine. This paper argues that the drought of those years and the ensuing famine is historically much more significant than this biased documentation would suggest, and that the rebellion can only be fully understood by paying attention to the environmental and social conditions in which it unfolded. Further, the paper engages with Mike Davis’s argument that portrays the famine in China as part of a ‘late-Victorian holocaust.’ While persuasive, his focus on outside forces is problematic as it ignores the history of the Qing Empire as an expanding force in itself and inadvertently reinforces the victimization narrative that dominates modern Chinese historiography.

Following the history of western constitutional history, studies of Chinese constitutionalism have tended to focus on its intellectual origins, or, more commonly these days, its failure to restrain official behavior. Drawing upon new archival materials, this article takes a different tack. I zero in on a critical period of constitutional gestation, when officials read the 1954 constitution in draft form, posed questions about its text and suggested revisions. How did officials react when told that citizens, many of whom were recently persecuted, now enjoy “freedom of assembly”? These materials allow us to see “the state” in real time: How did officials understand core legal concepts such as “right,” “constitution” and “citizen” as well as their role in the new polity? In many respects, the discussion surrounding the draft constitution turned out to be a venue for officials to talk about the meaning of the revolution they had just experienced.

Tianjin is the largest port city in Northern China and a major hub for water and land transportation. For geological reasons, the city has long been troubled by water drainage problems. To remove wastewater from within its walls, the city developed a drain system which relies on human labor and a series of variously sized ditches. Unlike the modern sewage system, which simply discharges wastewater into surrounding rivers and the sea, Tianjin's traditional wastewater disposal system worked in concert with an urban manure collection system. Urban wastewater was recycled as fertilizer, a valuable resource for the surrounding rural area. In tracing the origin, evolution, and influence of urban wastewater disposal in Tianjin, this article aims to reveal the potential value in Chinese traditional waste management practices. Contemporary urban waste disposal systems might benefit from a better understanding of the relationship between urban and rural areas that characterized these traditional practices.

What would Chinese history look like if we were to examine it from the perspective of the peoples living along China's periphery? How might a non-Chinese perspective challenge the dominant themes in Chinese historiography, themes which represent Chinese history as a linear narrative arising from the Central Plain and its original inhabitants, the Han Chinese? If, for example, we rely solely on Chinese sources to tell us about Chinese-Jurchen/Manchu relations during the first half of the seventeenth century, we will have privileged Chinese sources, affirmed the authority of the Chinese perspective, and suppressed voices that might offer an alternative perspective. Only an aggressive deconstruction of such “authoritative” Chinese texts can expose biases and logical inconsistencies, unpack cultural tensions that demand more rigorous scrutiny, and tease out into the open silenced voices from spaces buried deep in the text. Those historians who engage in such a methodological approach, however, run the risk of being accused of applying fanciful postmodernist conjecture or presentist interpretations to the past. This is why the recent (since the 1980s) addition of Manchu language sources to our examination of Qing history (1636–1912) has had such a seismic impact on the field.

It wasn't so long ago that histories of China's rocky transition to modernity featured a small and entirely male cast of characters. In the works of the first generation of American Sinologists, from John King Fairbank to his most famous students such as Joseph Levenson, a few men, from late Qing statesman Li Hongzhang 李鴻章 to reformers and revolutionaries like Kang Youwei 康有為, Sun Yatsen 孫中山, and Liang Qichao 梁啟超, loomed large over the narrative of the Chinese revolution. Into this lacuna Mary Rankin's rediscovery of the late Qing female martyr Qiu Jin 秋瑾 came as a thunderbolt. Her work opened up the possibility that perhaps the problem wasn't the absence of women in China's revolution but the failure of scholars to look for their contribution. Rankin's 1968 article on “The Tenacity of Tradition,” and her subsequent book Early Chinese Revolutionaries paved the way for a far more nuanced and complicated new social history of modern China.

Tonio Andrade's The Gunpowder Age is a big book. It spans roughly 800 years, in both China and Europe. Its boldest claims concern China, but Andrade delves into European history as well, making it a challenge for any one scholar to assess his evidence and arguments. Because China specialists would want to know how historians specializing in European warfare and in Western science and technology evaluate Andrade's challenges to received wisdom, the Journal of Chinese History’s editor and editorial board invited historians outside the China field to contribute to a joint review. We succeeded in recruiting a distinguished panel, all of whom have written extensively on these issues: David Parrott, author of such books as The Business of War: Military Enterprise and Military Revolution in Early Modern Europe; Philip Hoffman, author most recently of Why Did Europe Conquer the World?; Stephen Morillo, author of War in World History, among other books; and Ian Inkster, author of Science and Technology in History: An Approach to Industrial Development, among other books. This introduction provides an overview of the discussion so far, and a few additional observations from a historian who has also tried his hand at Sino-European comparisons.