Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Series
  3. Cambridge Modern China Series

The Cambridge Modern China Series was established to capitalize on the recent explosion of available source materials for modern China studies. The expansion of new research opportunities has occurred in all periods of modern China studies and has helped to narrow the gaps between them. In particular it has diminished the centrality of the political dates that have defined various eras in our century - 1911 and 1949 - and scholarship is increasingly able to research patterns of continuities amid the great changes of the past century. The series emphasizes work that brings fresh material to bear on contemporary issues, and encourages comparative work both within and beyond the modern China field (Taiwan and the People's Republic of China, and across the Qing, Republican, and contemporary eras).

  • General Editors: William Kirby, Harvard University

Refine search

Refine search

Content type:
Publication date:
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

20 results in Cambridge Modern China Series

China since Tiananmen
  • The Politics of Transition
  • Joseph Fewsmith
  • Published online:
    05 September 2012
    Print publication:
    30 July 2001
  • China Since Tiananmen is the first book to look comprehensively at the intellectual and political trends in the decade since the Tiananmen Incident (1989) to assess the ways in which China has changed. Fewsmith looks on the one hand at the intellectual critique of the enlightenment tradition, which had previously held a sacrosanct position in the thinking of liberal intellectuals since the May Fourth Movement of 1919, to explain the rise of neo-conservatism and nationalism over the past decade. On the other hand, he examines the maneuverings of elite political actors to understand the constraints they operate under and how the conduct of elite politics has changed since Tiananmen. Together, these two approaches give a more comprehensive and realistic assessment of the forces that drive China today. These trends are of great importance for anyone trying to understand Sino-US relations.

China since Tiananmen
  • From Deng Xiaoping to Hu Jintao
  • 2nd edition
  • Joseph Fewsmith
  • Published online:
    05 September 2012
    Print publication:
    03 July 2008
  • In this edition of his path-breaking analysis of political and social change in China since the crackdown in Tiananmen Square in 1989, Joseph Fewsmith traces developments since 2001. These include the continuing reforms during the final years of Jiang Zemin's premiership and Hu Jintao's succession in 2002. Here the author also considers social trends and how Chinese citizens are starting to have a significant influence on government policies. As Fewsmith - a highly regarded political scientist and a seasoned China-watcher - observes, China is a very different place since Tiananmen Square. In the interim, it has emerged from isolation to become one of the most significant players on the world stage. This book explains the forces that have shaped China since Tiananmen.

Selling China
  • Foreign Direct Investment during the Reform Era
  • Yasheng Huang
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    16 December 2002
  • In this book, Yasheng Huang makes a provocative claim: the large absorption of foreign direct investment (FDI) by China is a sign of some substantial weaknesses in the Chinese economy. The primary benefits associated with China's FDI inflows are concerned with the privatization functions supplied by foreign firms, venture capital provisions to credit-constrained private entrepreneurs, and promotion of interregional capital mobility. Huang argues that one should ask why domestic firms cannot supply the same functions. China's partial reforms, while successful in increasing the scope of the market, have so far failed to address many allocative inefficiencies in the Chinese economy.

Hong Kong under Chinese Rule
  • The Economic and Political Implications of Reversion
  • Edited by Warren I. Cohen, Li Zhao
  • Published online:
    22 March 2010
    Print publication:
    28 May 1997
  • What will the reversion of Hong Kong mean to the people of Hong Kong - and the rest of us - who invest, trade, and shop there? Over the last fifty years Hong Kong has served as a refuge from those who fled communism in China. It became the greatest entrepot and financial center on the Asian mainland. A stunning percentage of the world's trade passed through its magnificent harbor. The focus of this book is on the impact Chinese control is likely to have on the city's role in the international economic system, and how the business community will be affected. Issues of trade and finance, of political economy, and concerns about Chinese respect for the rule of law predominate. The result is a balanced analysis of a sensitive subject: the prospects for Hong Kong's continued success and freedom.

Women's Work in Rural China
  • Change and Continuity in an Era of Reform
  • Tamara Jacka
  • Published online:
    20 March 2010
    Print publication:
    13 February 1997
  • Since 1978, reform policies introduced in rural China have had a profound impact on women's work and gender divisions of labour. This book provides detailed information on shifts in women's work patterns. It explains how and why these shifts have come about, and how they relate to women's position in society. While other aspects of reform in rural China have been analysed extensively, this is one of very few, and to date the most comprehensive studies of the effects of reform on rural women.

Forging Reform in China
  • The Fate of State-Owned Industry
  • Edward S. Steinfeld
  • Published online:
    12 January 2010
    Print publication:
    28 July 1998
  • The greatest economic challenge facing China in the post-Deng era is the reform of unprofitable, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) which threaten to drag down the rest of the economy. Despite an array of well-intentioned, market-oriented reform measures, these firms have never truly been forced to face the pressure of a bottom line, or the threat of bankruptcy. Forging Reform in China explains how and why these measures have not been sweepingly successful to date, and what it would take to achieve meaningful reform. The author investigates firm-level processes, including case studies of China's steel industry giants, revealing institutional and systemic barriers to market-oriented performance. This book makes a compelling argument that private ownership cannot work in China's current system until governance over complex economic factors has been established, that is, until credit is tightened and market selection processes made to work.

The Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace
  • State, Revolution, and Labor Management
  • Mark W. Frazier
  • Published online:
    15 December 2009
    Print publication:
    24 January 2002
  • State workers in China have until recently enjoyed the 'iron rice bowl' of comprehensive cradle-to-grave benefits and lifetime employment. This central institution in Chinese politics emerged over the course of various crises that swept through China's industrial sector prior to and after revolution in 1949. Frazier explores critical phases in the expansion of the Chinese state during the middle third of the twentieth century to reveal how different labour institutions reflected state power. While the 'iron rice bowl' is usually seen as an outgrowth of Communist labour policy, Frazier's account shows that is has longer historical roots. As a product of the Chinese state, the iron rice bowl's dismantling in the 1990s has raised sensitive issues about the way in which the contemporary Chinese state exerts control over urban industrial society. This book sheds light on state and society relations in China under the Nationalist and Communist regimes.

How Migrant Labor is Changing Rural China
  • Rachel Murphy
  • Published online:
    09 November 2009
    Print publication:
    19 September 2002
  • One of the most dramatic and noticeable changes in China since the introduction of economic and social reforms in the early 1980s has been the mass migration of peasants from the countryside to urban areas across the country. Murphy's in-depth fieldwork in rural China offers a rich basis for her findings about the impact of migration on many aspects of rural life: inequality; the organization of agricultural production; land transfers; livelihood diversification; spending patterns; house-building; marriage; education; the position of women; social stability; and state-society relations. Her analysis focuses on the human experiences and strategies that precipitate shifts in national and local policies for economic development, and the responses of migrants, non-migrants, and officials to changing circumstances, obstacles and opportunities. This pioneering study is rich in original source materials and anecdotes, as well as useful, comparative examples from other developing countries.

The Modern Chinese State
  • Edited by David Shambaugh
  • Published online:
    15 October 2009
    Print publication:
    28 March 2000
  • This is the first book to examine systematically the evolution of the Chinese state from the late Ming Dynasty of the seventeenth century, through the Nationalist and Communist party states of the twentieth century, and into the next century. Leading scholars carefully assess the internal organization of the Chinese state over time, the ruling parties that have governed it, the foreign and indigenous systems that have served as models for state-building and political development, and the array of concepts that have guided Chinese thinking about the state. The Chinese state is the oldest in the world, far predating European and other Oriental state systems, but the party-states in both mainland China and Taiwan today both face serious challenges. What are these challenges and can they endure? What will the Chinese state of the next century look like? These contemporary, and many more historical questions are explored in this book.

Power and Wealth in Rural China
  • The Political Economy of Institutional Change
  • Susan H. Whiting
  • Published online:
    30 September 2009
    Print publication:
    27 November 2000
  • China's rural industrial sector has been the engine driving much of the Chinese economy's dynamism during the reform period. The nature and development of this sector, also referred to as township and village enterprises (TVEs) defy easy explanation. Across regions, there is dramatic variation in property rights among TVEs, ranging from local government ownership to outright private ownership. This book focuses on China's rural industries, offering a theoretical framework to explain institutional change. Susan Whiting explores the complex interactions of individuals, institutions and the broader political economy to examine variation and change in property rights and extractive institutions in China's rural industrial sector. Whiting explains why public ownership predominated during the early years of reform and why privatization is now taking place. This book will be of interest not only to those studying Chinese economic development and reform but also to scholars and students of comparative politics and political economy.

Party vs. State in Post-1949 China
  • The Institutional Dilemma
  • Shiping Zheng
  • Published online:
    23 September 2009
    Print publication:
    13 July 1997
  • This book provides the most comprehensive analysis of one of the most important issues in China today: the tensions between the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese state legislative, judicial, administrative, and military institutions. Taking the 'neo-institutionalist' approach, the author suggests that the Communist Party in post-1949 China faces an institutional dilemma: the Party cannot live with the state, and it cannot live without the state. Zheng demonstrates that it is not only conceptually constructive, but analytically imperative to distinguish the state from the Communist Party. Secondly, he integrates detailed study with broader generalizations about Chinese politics, thus making efforts to overcome the tendency toward specialized scholarship at the expense of comparative and systemic understanding of China. He also opens a new dimension of Chinese politics - the uncertain and conflictual relationship between the Communist Party and the Chinese state.

In Search of Chinese Democracy
  • Civil Opposition in Nationalist China, 1929–1949
  • Edmund S. K. Fung
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    04 September 2000
  • Why modern China has been unable to institutionalize democracy is a long-standing topic of debate and the ultimate subject of this book. The greatest momentum for democracy, Edmund Fung contends, emerged between 1929 and 1949 with civil opposition to the one-party rule of the Guomindang. This analysis of China's liberal intellectuals and political activists who pursued democracy in the 1930s and 1940s, fills a gap in the historical literature on the period between May Fourth Radicalism and the Chinese Communists' accession to power. Fung argues that the reasons the growth of democracy was thwarted during this period were ultimately more political than cultural. The Nationalist era contained the germs of a reformist, liberal order, which was prevented from growing by party politics, a lack of regime leadership, and bad strategic decisions. The legacy of China's liberal thinkers can be seen, however, in the pro-democracy movement of the post-Mao period.

Factionalism in Chinese Communist Politics
  • Jing Huang
  • Published online:
    11 September 2009
    Print publication:
    03 July 2000
  • Factionalism is widely understood to be a distinguishing characteristic of Chinese politics. In this book, first published in 2000, Jing Huang examines the role of factionalism in leadership relations and policy-making. His detailed knowledge of intra-party politics offers an alternative understanding of still-disputed struggles behind the high walls of leadership in Zhongnanhai. Huang traces the development of factional politics from its roots in the 'mountaintops' and the enduring impact of the personal bonds formed between Mao and his supporters at the Yan'an Round Table. Critiquing the predominant theories on leadership and decision-making, he explains that it is not power struggles that give rise to factionalism, but rather the existence of 'factionalism that turns power into an overriding goal in CCP politics'. Huang explains why policy outcomes switched constantly between 'Left-adventurism' and 'Right-conservatism' under Mao's reign and between 'emancipation of mind' and 'socialist spiritual civilization' in the Deng era.

Chinese Professionals and the Republican State
  • The Rise of Professional Associations in Shanghai, 1912–1937
  • Xiaoqun Xu
  • Published online:
    07 September 2009
    Print publication:
    04 December 2000
  • Xiaoqun Xu makes a compelling and original contribution to the study of China's modernization with this book on the rise of professional associations in Republican China in their birthplace of Shanghai, and of their political and socio-cultural milieu. This 2001 book is rich in detail about the key professional and political figures and organizations in Shanghai, filling an important gap in its social history. The professional associations were, as the author writes, 'unambiguously urban and modern in their origins and functions … representing a new breed of educated Chinese' and they pioneered a new type of relationship with the state. Xu addresses a central issue in China studies, the relationship between state and society, and proposes an alternative to the Western-derived concept of civil society. This book illuminates the complexity of modernization and nationalism in twentieth-century China, and provides a concrete case for comparative studies of professionalization and class formation across cultures.

Red Capitalists in China
  • The Party, Private Entrepreneurs, and Prospects for Political Change
  • Bruce J. Dickson
  • Published online:
    29 August 2009
    Print publication:
    20 January 2003
  • It has become a truism that continued economic reform in China will contribute to political change. Policy makers as well as many scholars expect that formation of a private sector will lead, directly or indirectly through the emergence of a civil society, to political change and ultimately democratization. The rapidly growing numbers of private entrepreneurs, the formation of business associations, and the cooperative relationships between entrepreneurs and local officials are seen as initial indicators of a transition from China's still nominally communist political system. This book, first published in 2003, focuses on two related issues: whether the Chinese Communist Party is willing and able to adapt to the economic environment its reforms are bringing about, and whether China's 'red capitalists', private entrepreneurs who also belong to the communist party, are likely to be agents of political change.

Human Rights in Chinese Thought
  • A Cross-Cultural Inquiry
  • Stephen C. Angle
  • Published online:
    14 August 2009
    Print publication:
    24 June 2002
  • What should we make of claims by members of other groups to have moralities different from our own? Human Rights in Chinese Thought gives an extended answer to this question in the first study of its kind. It integrates a full account of the development of Chinese rights discourse - reaching back to important, though neglected, origins of that discourse in 17th and 18th century Confucianism - with philosophical consideration of how various communities should respond to contemporary Chinese claims about the uniqueness of their human rights concepts. The book elaborates a plausible kind of moral pluralism and demonstrates that Chinese ideas of human rights do indeed have distinctive characteristics, but it nonetheless argues for the importance and promise of cross-cultural moral engagement.

China in the World Market
  • Chinese Industry and International Sources of Reform in the Post-Mao Era
  • Thomas G. Moore
  • Published online:
    07 August 2009
    Print publication:
    11 March 2002
  • This book reframes our thinking about the nature of China's reform and opening. Thomas Moore argues that the structuring impact of the international political economy represents one of the most theoretically important yet inadequately studied issues concerning change in post-Mao China. After carefully defining his conceptual framework, Moore presents detailed case studies of textiles and shipbuilding to examine the impact of varying degrees of economic openness in the world trading system on the reform, restructuring, and rationalization of Chinese industries. As the book amply demonstrates, the international environment most propitious for change in China's textile and shipbuilding industries during the 1980s and 1990s was one marked by moderate economic closure rather then the ideal-typic economic openness assumed by most observers. Moore also challenges popular notions of China's recent economic success by arguing that Beijing's ability to pursue strategic industrial policy is actually quite limited.

China's Use of Military Force
  • Beyond the Great Wall and the Long March
  • Andrew Scobell
  • Published online:
    29 July 2009
    Print publication:
    08 September 2003
  • In this 2003 study of China's militarism, Andrew Scobell examines the use of military force abroad - as in Korea (1950), Vietnam (1979), and the Taiwan Strait (1995–6) - and domestically, as during the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and in the 1989 military crackdown in Tiananmen Square. Debunking the view that China has become increasingly belligerent in recent years because of the growing influence of soldiers, Scobell concludes that China's strategic culture has remained unchanged for decades. Nevertheless, the author uncovers the existence of a 'Cult of Defense' in Chinese strategic culture. The author warns that this 'Cult of Defense' disposes Chinese leaders to rationalize all military deployment as defensive, while changes in the People's Liberation Army's doctrine and capabilities over the past two decades suggest that China's twenty-first century leaders may use military force more readily than their predecessors.

From Mao to Market
  • Rent Seeking, Local Protectionism, and Marketization in China
  • Andrew H. Wedeman
  • Published online:
    25 July 2009
    Print publication:
    10 July 2003
  • Andrew Wedemen argues that China succeeded in moving from a Maoist command economy to a market economy because the central government failed to prevent local governments from forcing prices to market levels. Having partially decontrolled the economy in the early 1980s, economic reformers baulked at price reform, opting instead for a hybrid system wherein commodities had two prices, one fixed and one floating. Depressed fixed prices led to 'resource wars', as localities battled each other for control over undervalued commodities while inflated consumer goods prices fuelled a headlong investment boom that saturated markets and led to the erection of import barriers. Although local rent seeking and protectionism appeared to carve up the economy, in reality they had not only pushed prices to market levels and cleared the way for sweeping reforms in the 1980s, they had also pushed China past the 'pitfalls' of reform that entrapped other socialist economies.

Taxation without Representation in Contemporary Rural China
  • Thomas P. Bernstein, Xiaobo Lü
  • Published online:
    13 July 2009
    Print publication:
    27 March 2003
  • The financial burden imposed upon the Chinese farmer by local taxes has become a major source of discontent in the Chinese countryside and a worrisome source of political and social instability for the Chinese government. Bernstein and Lü examine the forms and sources of heavy, informal taxation, and shed light on how peasants defend their interests by adopting strategies of collective resistance (both peaceful and violent). Bernstein and Lü also explain why the central government, while often siding with the peasants, has not been able to solve the burden problem by instituting a sound, reliable financial system in the countryside. While the regime has, to some extent, sought to empower farmers to defend their interests - by informing them about tax rules, expanding the legal system, and instituting village elections, for example, these attempts have not yet generated enough power from 'below' to counter powerful, local official agencies.