<p><div><i>Conflicting Counsels to Confuse the Age</i> translates and analyzes thirty-eight memorials to the throne and other Qing documents dealing with important issues of Chinese political economy, providing thoughtful and provocative commentary. Subjects covered by the texts include water control, mining, grain trade, pawnshops, brewing, and commercial shipping. The documents also contain detailed discussions of how the state should control wealth, self-interest, profit, hoarding, and the market.</div> <div>In translating these primary sources, Helen Dunstan invites fellow specialists in Chinese studies, including Qing historians, to watch Qing officials and others thinking through problems of political economy and developing arguments to persuade colleagues or superiors. By emphasizing their rhetorical nature and genre conventions, Dunstan offers a reminder that it is improper to use the "information" in such texts without attention to the author's purpose, and without grasping the rhetorical structure of the text as a whole. As a model for close reading, <i>Conflicting Counsels</i> aims to induce greater sensitivity to the nature of Qing records.</div> <div>The second purpose of <i>Conflicting Counsels</i> is to help dispel the notion that economic liberalism is necessarily a Western, "modern" phenomenon. Many of the texts translated record areas of tension and controversy in eighteenth-century approaches to a central project of Confucian paternalist administration, "nourishing the people" (<i>yangmin</i>). Although Dunstan attempts to present both sides fairly, some materials included present the opinion that, in certain vital matters, it was better for the state to stand aside, and leave society's own economic institutions, trade in particular, to handle things. While not a majority, the texts that build some kind of market mechanism argument should be of greatest interest to Qing historians.</div></p>

Conflicting Counsels to Confuse the Age: A Documentary Study of Political Economy in Qing China, 1644–1840 (Michigan Monographs In Chinese Studies)

Business & Money

Dunstan, Helen

Economics

U OF M CENTER FOR CHINESE STUDIES

<p>What did it mean to run a large, commercialized agrarian polity according to the best Confucian principles?</p>
<p>This book is intended as a contribution to both intellectual and political history. It is partly a study of how Confucian-trained officials thought about the grain trade and the state's role in it, particularly the "ever-normal granaries," the stockpiles of grain maintained by every county government as protection against shortages and high prices. The author investigates the scope and limits of belief in market forces among those critical of government intervention, establishing that rudimentary economic arguments for state withdrawal from the grain trade were available by 1750. She then explores challenges, from within the ruling apparatus, to the state's claim that its own stockpiling served the public interest, as well as the factors behind decisions in the mid- and late 1740s to suspend or decrease state purchases of grain.</p>
<p>As a study of Confucian government in action, this book describes a mode of public policy discussion far less dominated by the Confucian scriptures than one might expect. As a contribution to intellectual history, the work offers a detailed view of members of an ostensibly Confucian government pursuing divergent agendas around the question of "state or merchant?"</p>

State or Merchant: Political Economy and Political Process in 1740s China (Harvard East Asian Monographs)

Harvard University Asia Center

This seminal book translates and analyzes thirty-eight memorials to the throne and other documents dealing with important issues of Chinese political economy--water control, mining, grain trade, pawnshops, brewing, and commercial shipping. The documents also contain detailed discussions of how the state should control wealth, self-interest, profit, hoarding, and the market; these texts go a long way toward dispelling the notion that economic liberalism is necessarily a Western, "modern" phenomenon. Helen Dunstan has succeeded brilliantly in translating and editing the documents and in providing thoughtful and provocative commentary.Helen Dunstan is Professor of History and Chair of Chinese Studies, University of Sydney. She has published widely on the economic, intellectual, and environmental history of late imperial China.

Conflicting Counsels to Confuse the Age: A Documentary Study of Political Economy in Qing China, 1644–1840 (Volume 73) (Michigan Monographs In Chinese Studies)

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Dunstan, Helen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Dunstan, Helen

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Dunstan, Helen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Conflicting Counsels to Confuse the Age: A Documentary Study of Political Economy in Qing China, 1644–1840 (Michigan Monographs In Chinese Studies)

State or Merchant: Political Economy and Political Process in 1740s China (Harvard East Asian Monographs)

Conflicting Counsels to Confuse the Age: A Documentary Study of Political Economy in Qing China, 1644–1840 (Volume 73) (Michigan Monographs In Chinese Studies)