Minghui's Blogs

The eighth set of readings is Tonio Andrade's The Gunpowder Age , which encompasses a fairly large literature on history of science, technology, warfare, state formation and competition. Andrade asks a poignant question: How did Europe conquer the world? Industrial revolution and capitalism alone could not explain Europe's military conquest and colonial power around the world. Steamships could go far and fast around the globe, but the cannons equipped on the steamships were the main advantage for them to defeat Chinese navies. How did this great divergence of military technology take place? Andrade's part 3, dubbed the age of parity, describes several battles between Dutch and Zhengs in Taiwan on the one hand and the Manchu-Korean coalition against the Cossacks on the other. I think this is the best part of the book and the most important contribution he makes to the field. He explains in convincing details why Europe's military technology advanced while the Ming dyna...

The seventh set of readings include parts 2 and 3 of Matthew Sommer's Polyandry and Wife-selling in Qing Dynasty China and a collection of judicial records called True Crimes in Eighteenth-century China , translated and edited by Robert Hegel. Sommer speaks broadly to two bodies of literature. The first (social and economic history) searches for the roots of social crisis and revolution in China. The second (social anthropology) analyzes the disjunction between a variety of non-normative marriages and some practices were stigmatized but solved problems and met needs that normative noes could not. His case studies on wife sale is our focus. By meticulously tabulating and classifying his cases from court central archive to various local archives, Sommer analytically divides his cases into "anatomy of a wife sale," "prices in wife sales," "negotiation between men in wife sales," and "wives, natal families and children." Then he brought them t...

The sixth set of readings includes Andrea Goldman's  Opera and the City  and Stephen Roddy's " Toward a Buddhist Cosmopolitanism" and " Cultural Solidarity in Troubled Times." In this section we examine the contested and moving lines between China's elite and popular cultures as well as between center and periphery in the nineteenth century. Goldman's Opera and the City can be read along four lines of inquiry. (1) The difference between urban and rural experience. She lists three kinds of venues for theatrical performance in Beijing–commercial playhouses, temple fairs and salon. Only temple fairs were available in rural market towns, depending on the economical scale of each town. (2) Grey area between elite and popular cultures. The entertainment values of sex and violence came largely from popular imagination based up some historical anecdotes or fictions like Water Margins. What was considered high brow (Yabu) or low brow (huabu) could be att...

The fifth set of readings includes A lexander Woodside's Lost Modernities and the first two parts of Benjamin Elman's Civil Examinations and Meritocracy in Late Imperial China . Let us focus on rational bureaucracy as a form of modernity and how its institution–civil service examination system–endured for more than seven hundred years. As Richard von Glahn has shown, the rise of market economy was coupled with transformation of social and political elites from aristocrats to "literati" during the Tang-Song transition. Literati then thrived on the expansion of civil services until 1850. How does Elman account for its history? Woodside, on the other hand, describes the rise of postfeudal professional bureaucrats in China, Korea and Vietnam as alternative modernities. These modernities then were lost in narratives of world history. What does he mean by that?

Academia Sinica in Taiwan recently elected Wai-yee Li to be its academician, which is widely considered as pinnacle of scholarly achievement in Sinophone world. Her book also wins Joseph Levenson Pre-1900 Book Prize in 2016, a coveted prize for China scholars. We need to account for the success of her book. My friend Xiaorong Li's review should be useful.

We venture into maritime history in East and Southeast Asia this week. The fourth set of readings includes  Leonard Blussé's Visible Cities and the first six chapters of Philip Kuhn's Chinese among Others . We will also read Melissa Macauley's new article: “ Entangled States: The Translocal Repercussions of Rural Pacification in China, 1869–1873 .” Kuhn sharply and clearly divides Chinese migration into two periods: early modern and modern ones. Each has a distinctive pattern, structure and scale. Early Modern Maritime Expansion and Chinese Migration: Chinese migrant communities coexisted with early colonial administration in Southeast Asia from the outset. They also sprawled outside the reach of these colonial empires, such as Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch. Blussé's book gives us a close look at VOC's trading networks from Dutch perspectives, but we get very little on Portuguese Malacca and Spanish Manila from his work. Kuhn's coverage is way more compreh...

The third set of readings is Richard von Glahn's new book, The Economic History of China , published by Cambridge University Press in 2016. The most salient feature of this book is its periodization, which does not conform to either standard progression from ancient through medieval to modern history or from early through middle to late imperial history. It is better read against the framework set by Mark Elvin's The Pattern of the Chinese Past (Stanford, 1973). The rise of Jiangnan (market/money/silver/rice) economy: During the Tang-Song transition (775–1127), fundamental economic transformation took place in China. Four aspects of this transformation are decisive: (1) the formation of market economy linking all regions both inside and outside China proper; (2) Jiangnan emerged as the wealthiest region powering national economy; (3) high level of urbanization of large cities rivaling early modern European counterparts; (4) rice economy created labor-intensive and small ...