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Is Confucianism a religion? If so, why do most Chinese think it isn't? This book traces the birth and growth of the idea of Confucianism as a world religion. The book begins at Oxford, in the late nineteenth century, when Friedrich Max Müller and James Legge classified Confucianism as a world religion in the new discourse of “world religions” and the emerging discipline of comparative religion. The book shows how that decisive moment continues to influence the understanding of Confucianism in the contemporary world, not only in the West but also in China, where the politics of Confucianism has become important to the present regime in a time of transition. Contested histories of Confucianism are vital signs of social and political change. The book also examines the revival of Confucianism in contemporary China and the social significance of the ritual practice of Confucian temples. While the Chinese government turns to Confucianism to justify its political agenda, Confucian activists have started a movement to turn Confucianism into a religion. Confucianism as a world religion might have begun as a scholarly construction, but are we witnessing its transformation into a social and political reality? With historical analysis, extensive research, and thoughtful reflection, this book will engage all those interested in religion and global politics at the beginning of the Chinese century.

Established in 221 BCE, the Chinese empire lasted for 2,132 years before being replaced by the Republic of China in 1912. During its two millennia, the empire endured internal wars, foreign incursions, alien occupations, and devastating rebellions—yet fundamental institutional, sociopolitical, and cultural features of the empire remained intact. This book traces the roots of the Chinese empire's exceptional longevity and unparalleled political durability, and shows how lessons from the imperial past are relevant for China today. The book demonstrates that the empire survived and adjusted to a variety of domestic and external challenges through a peculiar combination of rigid ideological premises and their flexible implementation. The empire's major political actors and neighbors shared its fundamental ideological principles, such as unity under a single monarch—hence, even the empire's strongest domestic and foreign foes adopted the system of imperial rule. Yet details of this rule were constantly negotiated and adjusted. The book shows how deep tensions between political actors including the emperor, the literati, local elites, and rebellious commoners actually enabled the empire's basic institutional framework to remain critically vital and adaptable to ever-changing sociopolitical circumstances. As contemporary China moves toward a new period of prosperity and power in the twenty-first century, this book argues that the legacy of the empire may become an increasingly important force in shaping the nation's future trajectory.

What forces continue to oppress and restrain women artists in contemporary China? Some powerful answers are provided in this fictional memoir of an author who played an important role in the avant-garde cultural scene during the tumultuous early months of 1989. The acclaimed “China/Avant-Garde” exhibition organized by Gao Minglu at the National Art Museum in Beijing was shut down after about three hours from its opening on February 5th 1989, when the author shot live bullets into her mock-up of two telephone booths, turning an edgy installation work into an over-the-edge performance piece and an icon of the modern Chinese art movement. Many questions were left unanswered from where she got the gun to what she meant by all this. The man and the woman pictured in these two phone booths were specific people—she was one of them—the daughter of the director of a provincial art academy. Her father helped her get into the Central Academy in Beijing, where she was abused in various ways. In the 1989 exhibition, symbolically, she shot her nemesis, then went outside to a public telephone, called him, and told him what she had done. These events are naturally at the center of her memoir, but in describing the events and their aftermath, she offers candid views on the difficulties facing women in contemporary art circles and the way cultural power is exercised in China.

This book assesses the intimate connections between science and society in China, offering an in-depth look at how an array of sciences and technologies are being made, how they are interfacing with society, and with what effects. Focusing on critical domains of daily life, the chapters explore how scientists, technicians, surgeons, therapists, and other experts create practical knowledges and innovations, as well as how ordinary people take them up as they pursue the good life. The book offers a rare, up-close view of the politics of Chinese science-making, showing how everyday logics, practices, and ethics of science, medicine, and technology are profoundly reshaping contemporary China. By foregrounding the notion of “governing through science,” and the contested role of science and technology as instruments of change, the book addresses important questions regarding what counts as science in China, what science and technology can do to transform China, as well as their limits and unintended consequences.

This book introduces readers to women's visual art in contemporary China by examining how the visual process of gendering reshapes understandings of historiography, sexuality, pain, and space. When artists take the body as the subject of female experience and the medium of aesthetic experiment, they reveal a wealth of noncanonical approaches to art. The insertion of women's narratives into Chinese art history rewrites a historiography that has denied legitimacy to the woman artist. The gendering of sexuality reveals that the female body incites pleasure in women themselves, reversing the dynamic from woman as desired object to woman as desiring subject. The gendering of pain demonstrates that for those haunted by the sociopolitical past, the body can articulate traumatic memories and psychological torment. The gendering of space transforms the female body into an emblem of landscape devastation, remaps ruin aesthetics, and extends the politics of gender identity into cyberspace and virtual reality. The book presents a critical review of women's art in contemporary China in relation to art traditions, classical and contemporary. Inscribing the female body into art generates not only visual experimentation, but also interaction between local art/cultural production and global perception. While artists may seek inspiration and exhibition space abroad, they often reject the (Western) label “feminist artist.”

As unprecedented waves of young, rural women journey to cities in China, not only to work, but also to “see the world” and gain some autonomy, they regularly face significant institutional obstacles as well as deep-seated anti-rural prejudices. This book provides an intimate portrait of the social, cultural, and economic implications of mobile communication for a group of young women engaged in unskilled service work in Beijing, where they live and work for indefinite periods of time. While simultaneously situating within the fields of feminist studies, technology studies, and communication theory, the book explores the way in which the mobile phone has been integrated into the transforming social structures and practices of contemporary China, and the ways in which mobile technology enables rural young women—a population that has been traditionally marginalized and deemed as “backward” and “other”—to participate in and create culture, allowing them to perform a modern, rural-urban identity. The book provides original insight into the co-construction of technology and subjectivity as well as the multiple forces that shape contemporary China.

This book addresses a long-ignored issue: How does the past failure of an ethnic people to maintain sovereignty over their homeland influence their contemporary reconfigurations of ethnic and national identities? To answer this, the book focuses on the Manzus, the second largest non-Han group in contemporary China, whose cultural and historical ancestors, the Manchus, ruled China from 1644 to 1912. It analyzes the major forces responsible for the transformation of Manchu identity from the ruling group of the Qing empire to the minority of minorities in China today. Within the first half of the twentieth century, four regimes each grouped the Manchus into different ethnic and national categories while re-positioning Manchuria itself on their political maps in accordance with their differing definitions of statehood. During periods of state succession, Manchuria was transformed from the Manchu homeland in the Qing dynasty to an East Asian borderland in the early twentieth century, before becoming China's territory recovered from the Japanese empire. As the transformation of territoriality took place, the hard boundaries of the Manchu community were reconfigured, its ways of self-identification reformed, and the space for its identity representations redefined. The book goes beyond the single-country focus and looks instead at regional and cross-border perspectives. It is a study of China, but one that transcends traditional historiographies.

China’s Banking Transformation explains how Chinese banks work, analyzes their strengths and weaknesses, and sets forth the challenges they face in a slowing economy. Based on his twelve years of service on the boards of Chinese banks, the author brings the informed view of an insider to explaining the reality of China’s banks. Without minimizing the real issues Chinese banks face, China’s Banking Transformation challenges negative media accounts and reports of “China bears.” China’s Banking Transformation demonstrates that Chinese banks have transformed into modern, well-run commercial banks, playing a vital role supporting China’s economic growth. Acknowledging that China’s banks are different from Western banks, the author explains that they are hybrid banks, borrowing from Western models, but at the same time operating within a traditional Chinese cultural framework and in line with China’s governance model. From personal experience at the board level, Stent describes the governance and management of China’s banks, including the role of the Communist Party. He sees China’s banks as embedded in ancient concepts of how government and society work in China, and also as actors within market socialism. As the first account of Chinese banking by a Westerner who has worked in China’s banks, China’s Banking Transformation will interest anyone interested in the political economy of contemporary China, in Asian development issues, and in the banking industry. The book dispels misconceptions and provides insight into the financial aspects of China’s economic growth story.