The Abortive Revolution: China Under Nationalist Rule, 1927-1937 (Harvard East Asian Monographs)

History

Eastman, Lloyd

Americas

Harvard University Asia Center

This book explores the issues of nation and modernity in China by focusing on the work of Zhou Zuoren (1885-1967), one of the most controversial of modern Chinese intellectuals and brother of the writer Lu Xun. Zhou was radically at odds with many of his contemporaries and opposed their nation-building and modernization projects. Through his literary and aesthetic practice as an essayist, Zhou espoused a way of constructing the individual and affirming the individual's importance in opposition to the normative national subject of most May Fourth reformers. 
Zhou's work presents an alternative vision of the nation and questions the monolithic claims of modernity by promoting traditional aesthetic categories, the locality rather than the nation, and a literary history that values openness and individualism.

Zhou Zuoren and An Alternative Chinese Response to Modernity

Literature & Fiction

Daruvala, Susan

History & Criticism

The unique amalgam of prayer and play at the Sensōji temple in Edo is often cited as proof of the “degenerate Buddhism” of the Tokugawa period. This investigation of the economy and cultural politics of Sensōji, however, shows that its culture of prayer and play reflected changes taking place in Tokugawa Japan, particularly in the city of Edo. Play was an integral part of the business of religion at Sensōji, and the temple supplied both in equal measure to often rootless Edoites.Nam-lin Hur’s reappraisal of prayer and play and their inherent connectedness provides a cultural critique of conventional scholarship on Tokugawa religion and shows how Edo commoners incorporated cultural politics into their daily lives through the pursuit of prayer and play.

Prayer and Play in Late Tokugawa Japan: Asakusa Sensoji and Edo Society

Hur, Nam-lin

Asia

What ties bound region to center in the making of the modern Japanese state? What forces shaped these bonds? How did the local–center relationship change over time? What is its current legacy? Focusing on the marginal region of Toyama, on the Sea of Japan, the author explores the interplay of central and regional authorities, local and national perceptions of rights, and the emerging political practices in Toyama and Tokyo that became part of the new political culture that took shape in Japan following the Meiji Restoration. Lewis argues that in response to the demands of the centralizing state, local elites and leaders in Toyama developed a repertoire of supple responses that varied with the political or economic issue at stake.

Becoming Apart : National Power and Local Politics in Toyama, 1868-1945

Lewis, Michael

In this wide-ranging study, Hyung Il Pai examines how archaeological finds from throughout Northeast Asia have been used in Korea to construct a myth of state formation. This myth emphasizes the ancient development of a pure Korean race that created a civilization rivaling those of China and Japan and a unified state controlling a wide area in Asia. 
Through a new analysis of the archaeological data, Pai shows that the Korean state was in fact formed much later and that it reflected diverse influences from throughout Northern Asia, particularly the material culture of Han China. Her deconstruction of the uses of the archaeological finds by nationalistic historians reveals how they have been utilized to legitimate Korean nationalism and a particular form of national identity.

Constructing "Korean" Origins: A Critical Review of Archaeology, Historiography, and Racial Myth in Korean State Formation Theories

Pai, Hyung Il

This study addresses the relationship between the veneration of Buddha relics and the appropriation of power in early medieval Japan. Focusing on the ninth to the fourteenth centuries, it analyzes the ways in which relics functioned as material media for the interactions of Buddhist clerics, the imperial family, lay aristocrats, and warrior society and explores the multivocality of relics by dealing with specific historical examples. Brian Ruppert argues that relics offered means for reinforcing or subverting hierarchical relations. The author's critical literary and anthropological analyses attest to the prominence of relic veneration in government, in lay practice associated with the maintenance of the imperial line and warrior houses, and in the promotion of specific Buddhist sects in Japan.

Jewel in the Ashes: Buddha Relics and Power in Early Medieval Japan

Ruppert, Brian D.

This work examines the history of urban planning and administration during modern China's first age of city-centered politics, focusing on the New Policies of the late Qing and the city administration movement of the 1920s. Between 1895 and 1937, the management of cities emerged as one of the chief challenges for the Chinese state. Through a detailed case study, based on newly available archival sources, of the process of urban reform in Chengdu, a key provincial capital in the interior, Kristin Stapleton shows how urban reformers permanently changed urban administration, the urban landscape, and urban life by promoting a new type of orderly and productive community in population centers despite the many upheavals of the late Qing and Republican eras.

Civilizing Chengdu: Chinese Urban Reform, 1895-1937

Stapleton, Kristin

Chinese History: A Manual, Revised and Enlarged

Since publication of the first edition in 1998, Chinese History: A Manual has become an indispensable guide to researching the civilization and history of China. Updated through January 2000, the second edition discusses some 4,300 primary, secondary, and reference works, an increase of 1,500 titles over the first edition. The temporal coverage has been expanded to include the Republican period; sections on nonverbal salutations, weights and measures, money, and furniture have been added; the chapters on language, etymology, people, geography, chronology, warfare, leishu, food, and the Chinese world order have been thoroughly revised; and the subject index has been enlarged to include 2,500 technical terms.

Wilkinson, Endymion

"Other than the devil, there is no Buddha; other than the Buddha, there is no devil." The Chinese monk Siming Zhili (960-1028) uttered this remark as part of his justification for his self-immolation. An exposition of the intent, implications, and resonances of this one sentence, this book expands and unravels the context in which the seeming paradox of the ultimate identity of good and evil is to be understood. In analyzing this idea, Brook Ziporyn provides an overview of the development of Tiantai thought from the fifth through the eleventh centuries in China and contributes to our understanding of Chinese intellectual culture and Chinese Buddhism, as well as to basic ontological, epistemological, and axiological issues of interest in modern philosophy.

Evil and/or/as the Good: Omnicentrism, Intersubjectivity, and Value Paradox in Tiantai Buddhist Thought

Religion & Spirituality

Ziporyn, Brook

Buddhism

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Books by Harvard University Asia Center

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

The Abortive Revolution: China Under Nationalist Rule, 1927-1937 (Harvard East Asian Monographs)

Zhou Zuoren and An Alternative Chinese Response to Modernity

Prayer and Play in Late Tokugawa Japan: Asakusa Sensoji and Edo Society

Becoming Apart : National Power and Local Politics in Toyama, 1868-1945

Constructing "Korean" Origins: A Critical Review of Archaeology, Historiography, and Racial Myth in Korean State Formation Theories

Jewel in the Ashes: Buddha Relics and Power in Early Medieval Japan

Civilizing Chengdu: Chinese Urban Reform, 1895-1937

Chinese History: A Manual, Revised and Enlarged

Evil and/or/as the Good: Omnicentrism, Intersubjectivity, and Value Paradox in Tiantai Buddhist Thought

Chinese History: A Manual, Revised and Enlarged