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This chapter takes up the methodological challenge to consider a series of 18th- and 19th-century juridical texts as a particular kind of anthropological corpus. The reading of a part of that literature unveils a rich and complex reflection on causality, responsibility, and guilt. But what is most remarkable for an anthropologist is the way in which these categories were altered, to the extent of being inverted, when applied to the field of kinship defined by three instances: mourning, genealogy, and gender. The main sources are various editions of the code of the Qing dynasty, imperial edicts, and a huge collection of cases entitled Conspectus of Penal Cases (Xing'an huilan). Compiled by two officials of the Board of Punishments, this book belongs to a genre called ‘government books’ (zhengshu) including manuals for the magistrates, technical treatises on administration, and compilations of cases judged in all the provinces of the empire.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the political legitimacy of China's imperial system would be challenged simultaneously by popular uprisings, collectively called the Boxer movement, against encroachment by Western powers and the Qing dynasty's perceived loss of the Mandate of Heaven. Although the Boxer movement caught many legations in Peking off-guard, a multinational invasion force quickly drove the imperial court off into the hinterlands, leaving China with no other option but to surrender. The post-Boxer settlement heavily emphasized ostentatious symbols of China's guilt and contrition for wrongs done to the allies during the uprising. It wasn't a coincidence that the settlement's symbolic laden terms were imposed on an empire whose domestic political legitimacy depended on its unassailable adherence to Confucian notions of virtue and unquestioned superiority over all foreign peoples. From all the defeats and humiliation they suffered during this period, China did learn that familiarity with Western international law could protect them in their dealings with the Europeans on foreign affairs, national standing, and proper diplomatic methods. After the assaults on its traditional bases of politico-moral legitimacy and subjected to forced immersion in an international world dominated by Western-derived notions of coordinate, coequal identities, China began to develop a sense of nationalism. Realizing how weak and vulnerable China had become during this period, Western powers became open to the idea of revising some of the most notorious provisions of their unequal treaties with China. Nevertheless, foreign diplomatic relations did not always go China's way despite the Westerners' more conciliatory approach.

This chapter shows the general validity and significance of Inoue Susumu's and Katsuyama Minoru's statistical claims, but only after stressing the considerable coincidence of the overlap of these figures with the actual general trends. The use of the number of woodblock imprint titles to indicate book output tends to underestimate the scale of production levels and the extent of readership for Chinese books. The evidence presented indicates that large private libraries were few up to the early sixteenth century; that they usually held between 10,000 and 20,000 juan and seldom more than 30,000 juan until the latter half of the sixteenth century; that normal scholar-official collections were considerably smaller; that even high officials in the capital of Hangzhou had trouble acquiring copies; that the situation improved then in Hangzhou but not noticeably in large, nearby cities like Ningbo; and, that a shortage of books was reported in all these places from the fourteenth up to the early sixteenth centuries. The chapter also emphasizes that the ascendance of the imprint in the sixteenth century did not end the influence or the use of manuscripts in late imperial China.

By elucidating the historic continuities of diverse, malleable, ambiguous, and fluid sexual imaginations in China, chapter 1 critiques the postsocialist construction of heteronormativity and the portrayal of homosexuality as a representation of a decadent lifestyle imported from the West. It argues that recasting the past and linking the past to the present can enrich our understanding of the present and challenge the current discourse. During the ancient and imperial periods in China, same-sex desires were deemed normal and were enjoyed by many emperors and upper-class scholars and bureaucrats. There was never a fixed or reified sexual identity linked to a certain sexual preference. Sexual fantasies during these many centuries in China were fluid, diverse, and in constant flux. At the turn of the twentieth century, the onslaught of Western medical knowledge changed this cultural tradition and indoctrinated in society heteronormativity and a pathologized and vilified vision of homosexuality. This inaugurated the repression of same-sex-attracted people during the Communist era. The normalizing of heterosexuality and disavowing of China’s past continued in the postsocialist era.

In hindsight, it seems obvious that a salient feature of China's twentieth-century concerns was the rise of economism and the challenge it presented to morality. Under Chinese Communism, economic issues not only defined the Party line and dominated the state agenda, but also functioned as the most important set of constitutive factors in the determination of individual social identity. This chapter examines the maritime merchants who appeared along the China coast in the decades after the Opium War (1839–42). These merchants, many of them comprador agents for foreign firms in Shanghai, evolved from the culturally compromised to the officially honored by the late nineteenth century. Late imperial China had developed one of the world's most sophisticated mercantile economies, in which commercial wealth and official honor coexisted.

While she had not protested Guangxu's reforms until discovering that they came at the price of sweeping her out, Cixi's response was that of a woman fighting for her life on the one hand and fighting for imperial China's life on the other. Though she had quashed the Guangxu emperor's reforms when she executed his associates who desired her removal, she had not been able to stop the juggernaut of change. The aftermath of the Hundred Days of Reform flew not in the face of the emperor, hidden away in disillusionment and depression, but in her own. This chapter describes her response to this storm and her actions over the next eighteen months.

This chapter outlines the beginnings of Western learning in China during the years 1582 to 1644, the last six decades of the Ming dynasty; it discusses the Jesuits' teaching of mathematics in China during that period, and the translations that resulted from their work. The most famous of these is the Jihe yuanben (1607), a rendering into Chinese of the first six books of Euclid's Elements of geometry. One of the reasons for the success of the Jesuits' teaching was the perceived relevance of their mathematical knowledge to statecraft. In 1629, some of them were employed to work on calendar reform, the need for which had been felt for almost half a century.

This chapter explores the soldiers' marriage practices, the temples at which they worshipped, and the Confucian schools at which some of them studied to show how soldiers and their families became integrated into the societies where they were garrisoned. When sons and daughters of the guard married, both to fellow military households and to other local families, they created new social networks that territorialized military household families in the locale. The chapter also talks about military households and their building of schools and temples for the community. Just as in other towns and villages in late imperial China, temples often served as the main venue for local management, the site where conflicts and tensions were worked out. In general, official military cults tended to be gradually displaced by popular gods, both those that soldiers brought with them from their own native places and those that were already worshipped in the area.

This chapter provides a brief sketch of letter writing in China and Western countries, with particular attention to published letters, love-letters, and letters in literature. It was this background from which Lu Xun and Xu Guangping drew for their own practice. The discussion summarizes the major characteristics of letters in pre-modern China, as well as the features associated with Western letter writing which differ from older Chinese letters. When Chinese writers and readers looked westwards in the early twentieth century, they quickly assimilated almost all of these features. Of particular relevance to the letters written and then published by Xu Guangping and Lu Xun are the porous borders between personal and open letters, between love-letters and other kinds of intimate confessions, and between authentic and imagined letters.

This chapter reviews some of the ways Ming families dealt with their obligations to provide labor service to the state. It provides broader ways of thinking about the art of being governed in late imperial China and beyond. The families faced some distinctive challenges because they were registered as military households, but the fact of their having to deal with state institutions did not make them distinctive. For these families, as for most of the people who in the past several centuries have lived in what is today China, the critical political decision was not whether to engage with the state but how best to do so. This chapter also illustrates four cycles of human interaction with a changing institution. Within each cycle, people deployed their ingenuity and elements from their repertoire of cultural resources to better manage individual, family, and communal interaction with the institution. The institutional chronology reveals how the evolution of the institution generated different sorts of challenges for different groups of people, and how they responded strategically.

This chapter begins by exploring the roots and origins of charity in the various philosophies and religions in China. The discussion examines such practices up through the mid-dynastic era, before Western Christianity entered China. It then discusses the manifestations of well-motivated acts of charity in individual cases, as well as the charitable practices of associations. Within the scope of organized charity, the internal self-regulatory rules created to govern charitable associations and to ensure that beneficiaries received funds set aside for their benefit are also examined. The chapter shows that both charitable and general associational activities were extremely important for the development of China in the early imperial era.

This essay discusses Confucianism in China in the Axial Age, Jesuit visitors, the late Qing, and its revival in the post-Mao PRC in the light of the question of the distinctiveness of Chinese civilization.

This introductory chapter provides a background of Chinese and Indian tea. It was in early imperial China where tea was first ritually imbibed as a medicinal and religious drink, and it was eighteenth-century Chinese merchants who helped popularize it as a global commodity, enabling it to become the most consumed commercial beverage in the world today. And yet, over the course of the next century, the Indian tea industry—operated by British colonial planters and based in the northeast territory of Assam—suddenly overtook China as the world's top exporter. British and, later, Japanese propagandists seized upon this inversion in the global division of labor. Propagandists dismissed Tang- and Song-era (618–1279) records of tea in China as unreliable, asserting instead that the true “birthplace of tea” must have been in India or Japan. This book presents the histories of Chinese and colonial Indian tea as a dynamic, unified story of global interaction, one mediated by modern capitalist competition. Their implications challenge many of the conventional assumptions about capitalism in China and India—or its absence thereof—and in so doing, they provocatively contribute to a more global conception of capitalism's history as a whole.

This chapter traces the history of tea cultivation and consumption in imperial China, its popularity in Euro-American markets, and experimental colonial projects to transplant cultivation to eastern India. For these regions in East and South Asia, participation in the global tea trade entailed a transformation from an early modern luxury trade to a decisively modern competition between capitalist industries. This competition between Chinese and Indian tea simply marked the next chapter in an ongoing story of expansive world trade featuring the exchange of tea, opium, sugar, cotton, and silver. As commodities, their exchange also connected countless systems for employing, organizing, and disciplining producers. In the “tea countries” of Huizhou, the Wuyi Mountains, and Assam, it was during the nineteenth century when falling prices and productivity pressures asserted themselves upon local populations.

This chapter discusses how madness was understood and treated in late imperial China. Arguing that madness was considered a simultaneously biological, social, supernatural, and moral issue, it shows how the insane were cared for by a range of healers, including literati physicians, herbalists, shamans, and faith healers. The chapter begins with a discussion of Qing dynasty legal codes, which mandated that the insane be confined within the home. The remainder of the chapter explores different modes of understanding, explaining, and treating the mad condition during the late imperial period. Practitioners of Chinese medicine traced madness to biological, environmental, gendered, and emotional causes. Supernatural healers posited a relationship between madness, demonic possession, and the displeasure of deceased ancestors or gods. Finally, many families attributed the onset of madness to social causes, such as financial insecurity, heartbreak, or the pressure of preparing for the civil service examinations.

Chapter 2 looks at how the temple was repeatedly ruined and reconstructed over the course of its 2,000 year history, finding that the physical destruction/construction of the place was inseparable from the devastation or recovery of its social and cultural milieu.

This chapter approaches China’s sequence of transformations in the ‘short’ twentieth century between the collapse of empire 1911 and World Trade Organization entry in 2001 against the background of discussing the nature of the Imperial from which this arduous and violent process started out. During that period, immense political efforts were directed at tackling the perceived legacy of social and cultural impediments to economic modernization and building national strength, though with radically different means, such as switching from Maoism to reform policies in 1978. The chapter analyses core features of change such as the role of the rural sector, the weak penetration of society by formal bureaucratic institutions of the state, and the interaction between institutional change and transformation of social structure. After detailing major aspects of recent economic reforms, the key conclusion is that throughout the twentieth century until present times, economic transformation remains inextricably intertwined with the secular process of modern state building.