日常语言影响着个体的思维方式，方言维系了民族的历史记忆，政治语言决定了国家的现实意识。《南腔北调：在语言中重新发现中国》是一部打破个人思维模式，追寻民族失落历史，探求家国意识逻辑的挑战读者智识边界之书。郑子宁以共时的现代汉语方言为经，横观汉语方言与民族文化传承的现实全景，发散式阐明了凝聚于其中的文化偏见；以历时的古代汉语嬗变为纬，纵览中国语言与传统的历史面貌，系统性揭示了遮蔽于其下的文化记忆。由此，郑子宁用以一种深入浅出的方式，化门槛与难度极高、向来被目为“绝学”的方言学与历史语言学为近50个精彩绝伦的故事，把汉语普通话、拼音、方言、古汉语、姓名、称谓、外语习得等几乎所有语言与文化的核心问题融会贯通，用具有内在统一性的连贯逻辑，为我们在语言中找到了一个全新的中国。

本书记录了中国改革开放过程中重大政治、经济、文化政策的台前幕后,披露了许多鲜为人知的珍贵史料,描绘了中国从计划经济体制向市场经济体制嬗变过程中所遭遇的碰撞和痛苦,分析了世纪之交的中国所面临的种种矛盾和希望所在。

本书内容包括:快乐到底是什么, 为何提出做快乐的共产党人, 何谓快乐的共产党人, 共产党人的快乐法则, 怎样做一个快乐的共产党人.

In 1995, the People’s Republic of China resurrected a Qing-era law mandating that the reincarnations of prominent Tibetan Buddhist monks be identified by drawing lots from a golden urn. The Chinese Communist Party hoped to limit the ability of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile to independently identify reincarnations. In so doing, they elevated a long-forgotten ceremony into a controversial symbol of Chinese sovereignty in Tibet.

In Forging the Golden Urn, Max Oidtmann ventures into the polyglot world of the Qing empire in search of the origins of the golden urn tradition. He seeks to understand the relationship between the Qing state and its most powerful partner in Inner Asia—the Geluk school of Tibetan Buddhism. Why did the Qianlong emperor invent the golden urn lottery in 1792? What ability did the Qing state have to alter Tibetan religious and political traditions? What did this law mean to Qing rulers, their advisors, and Tibetan Buddhists? Working with both the Manchu-language archives of the empire’s colonial bureaucracy and the chronicles of Tibetan elites, Oidtmann traces how a Chinese bureaucratic technology—a lottery for assigning administrative posts—was exported to the Tibetan and Mongolian regions of the Qing empire and transformed into a ritual for identifying and authenticating reincarnations. Forging the Golden Urn sheds new light on how the empire’s frontier officers grappled with matters of sovereignty, faith, and law and reveals the role that Tibetan elites played in the production of new religious traditions in the context of Qing rule.

In July 2009, violence erupted among Uyghurs, Chinese state police, and Han residents of Ürümqi, the capital city of Xinjiang, in northwest China, making international headlines, and introducing many to tensions in the area. But conflict in the region has deep roots. Now available in paperback, Holy War in China remains the first comprehensive and balanced history of a late nineteenth-century Muslim rebellion in Xinjiang, which led to the establishment of an independent Islamic state under Ya'qub Beg. That independence was lost in 1877, when the Qing army recaptured the region and incorporated it into the Chinese state, known today as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

Hodong Kim offers readers the first English-language history of the rebellion since 1878 to be based on primary sources in Islamic languages as well as Chinese, complemented by British and Ottoman archival documents and secondary sources in Russian, English, Japanese, Chinese, French, German, and Turkish. His pioneering account of past events offers much insight into current relations.

Chinese leaders once tried to suppress memories of their nation's brutal experience during World War II. Now they celebrate the "victory"--a key foundation of China's rising nationalism.For most of its history, the People's Republic of China limited public discussion of the war against Japan. It was an experience of victimization--and one that saw Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek fighting for the same goals. But now, as China grows more powerful, the meaning of the war is changing. Rana Mitter argues that China's reassessment of the World War II years is central to its newfound confidence abroad and to mounting nationalism at home.China's Good War begins with the academics who shepherded the once-taboo subject into wider discourse. Encouraged by reforms under Deng Xiaoping, they researched the Guomindang war effort, collaboration with the Japanese, and China's role in forming the post-1945 global order. But interest in the war would not stay confined to scholarly journals. Today public sites of memory--including museums, movies and television shows, street art, popular writing, and social media--define the war as a founding myth for an ascendant China. Wartime China emerges as victor rather than victim.The shifting story has nurtured a number of new views. One rehabilitates Chiang Kai-shek's war efforts, minimizing the bloody conflicts between him and Mao and aiming to heal the wounds of the Cultural Revolution. Another narrative positions Beijing as creator and protector of the international order that emerged from the war--an order, China argues, under threat today largely from the United States. China's radical reassessment of its collective memory of the war has created a new foundation for a people destined to shape the world.

Tenacious patterns of ethnic and economic inequality persist in the rural, largely minority regions of China's north- and southwest. Such inequality is commonly attributed to geography, access to resources, and recent political developments. In Corporate Conquests, C. Patterson Giersch provides a desperately-needed challenge to these conventional understandings by tracing the disempowerment of minority communities to the very beginnings of China's modern development. Focusing on the emergence of private and state corporations in Yunnan Province during the late 1800s and early 1900s, the book reveals how entrepreneurs centralized corporate power even as they expanded their businesses throughout the Southwest and into Tibet, Southeast Asia, and eastern China. Bringing wealth and cosmopolitan lifestyles to their hometowns, the merchant-owners also gained greater access to commodities at the expense of the Southwest's many indigenous minority communities. Meanwhile, new concepts of development shaped the creation of state-run corporations, which further concentrated resources in the hands of outsiders. The book reveals how important new ideas and structures of power, now central to the Communist Party's repertoire of rule and oppression, were forged, not along China's east coast, but along the nation's internal borderlands. It is a must-read for anyone wishing to learn about China's unique state capitalism and its contribution to inequality.

In 1221, in what we now call Turkmenistan, a captive held by Mongol soldiers confessed that she had swallowed her pearls in order to safeguard them. She was immediately executed and eviscerated. On finding several pearls, Chinggis Qan (Genghis Khan) ordered that they cut open every slain person on the battlefield. Pearls, valued for aesthetic, economic, religious, and political reasons, were the ultimate luxury good of the Middle Ages, and the Chingissid imperium, the largest contiguous land empire in history, was their unmatched collector, promoter, and conveyor. Thomas T. Allsen examines the importance of pearls, as luxury good and political investment, in the Mongolian empire—from its origin in 1206, through its unprecedented expansion, to its division and decline in 1370—in order to track the varied cultural and commercial interactions between the northern steppes and the southern seas.Focusing first on the acquisition, display, redistribution, and political significance of pearls, Allsen shows how the very act of forming such a vast nomadic empire required the massive accumulation, management, and movement of prestige goods, and how this process brought into being new regimes of consumption on a continental scale. He argues that overland and seaborne trade flourished simultaneously, forming a dynamic exchange system that moved commodities from east to west and north to south, including an enormous quantity of pearls. Tracking the circulation of pearls across time, he highlights the importance of different modes of exchange—booty-taking, tributary relations, market mechanisms, and reciprocal gift-giving. He also sheds light on the ways in which Mongols' marketing strategies made use of not only myth and folklore but also maritime communications networks created by Indian-Buddhist and Muslim merchants skilled in cross-cultural commerce.In Allsen's analysis, pearls illuminate Mongolian exceptionalism in steppe history, the interconnections between overland and seaborne trade, recurrent patterns in the employment of luxury goods in the political cultures of empires, and the consequences of such goods for local and regional economies.

The Cold War was a media phenomenon. It was a daily cultural political struggle for the hearts and minds of ordinary people—and for government leaders, a struggle to undermine their enemies’ ability to control the domestic public sphere. This collection examines how this struggle played out on screen, radio, and in print from the late 1970s through the early 1990s, a time when breaking news stories such as Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” program and Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost captured the world’s attention. Ranging from the United States to the Soviet Union and China, these essays cover photojournalism on both sides of the Iron Curtain, Polish punk, Norwegian film, Soviet magazines, and more, concluding with a contribution from Stuart Franklin, one of the creators of the iconic “Tank Man” image during the Tiananmen Square protests. By investigating an array of media actors and networks, as well as narrative and visual frames on a local and transnational level, this volume lays the groundwork for writing media into the history of the late Cold War.

Contemporary discussions of international relations in Asia tend to be tethered in the present, unmoored from the historical contexts that give them meaning. Sacred Mandates, edited by Timothy Brook, Michael van Walt van Praag, and Miek Boltjes, redresses this oversight by examining the complex history of inter-polity relations in Inner and East Asia from the thirteenth century to the twentieth, in order to help us understand and develop policies to address challenges in the region today.
This book argues that understanding the diversity of past legal orders helps explain the forms of contemporary conflict, as well as the conflicting historical narratives that animate tensions. Rather than proceed sequentially by way of dynasties, the editors identify three “worlds”—Chingssid Mongol, Tibetan Buddhist, and Confucian Sinic—that represent different forms of civilization authority and legal order. This novel framework enables us to escape the modern tendency to view the international system solely as the interaction of independent states, and instead detect the effects of the complicated history at play between and within regions. Contributors from a wide range of disciplines cover a host of topics: the development of international law, sovereignty, state formation, ruler legitimacy, and imperial expansion, as well as the role of spiritual authority on state behavior, the impact of modernization, and the challenges for peace processes. The culmination of five years of collaborative research, Sacred Mandates will be the definitive historical guide to international and intrastate relations in Asia, of interest to policymakers and scholars alike, for years to come.

After the fall of the Qing empire, amid nationalist and socialist upheaval, Buddhist monks in the Mongolian frontiers of the Soviet Union and Republican China faced a chaotic and increasingly uncertain world. In this book, Matthew W. King tells the story of one Mongolian monk’s efforts to defend Buddhist monasticism in revolutionary times, revealing an unexplored landscape of countermodern Buddhisms beyond old imperial formations and the newly invented national subject.

Ocean of Milk, Ocean of Blood takes up the perspective of the polymath Zava Damdin (1867–1937): a historian, mystic, logician, and pilgrim whose life and works straddled the Qing and its socialist aftermath, between the monastery and the party scientific academy. Drawing on contacts with figures as diverse as the Dalai Lama, mystic monks in China, European scholars inventing the field of Buddhist studies, and a member of the Bakhtin Circle, Zava Damdin labored for thirty years to protect Buddhist tradition against what he called the “bloody tides” of science, social mobility, and socialist party antagonism. Through a rich reading of his works, King reveals that modernity in Asia was not always shaped by epochal contact with Europe and that new models of Buddhist life, neither imperial nor national, unfolded in the post-Qing ruins. The first book to explore countermodern Buddhist monastic thought and practice along the Inner Asian frontiers during these tumultuous years, Ocean of Milk, Ocean of Blood illuminates previously unknown religious and intellectual legacies of the Qing and offers an unparalleled view of Buddhist life in the revolutionary period.

Lane J. Harris offers an innovative text covering the extraordinary ruptures and remarkable continuities in the history of China's long nineteenth century (1793-1912) by providing scholarly introductions to thematic chapters of translated primary sources from the government gazette of the Qing Empire. 'The Peking Gazette' is a unique collection of primary sources designed to help readers explore and understand the policies and attitudes of the Manchu emperors, the ideas and perspectives of Han officials, and the mentality and worldviews of several hundred million Han, Mongol, Manchu, Muslim, and Tibetan subjects of the Great Qing Empire as they discussed and debated the most important political, social, and cultural events of the long nineteenth century.

In Tibetan Printing: Comparisons, Continuities and Change the editors publish the results of the workshop "Printing as an Agent of Change in Tibet and beyond" held at Pembroke College, Cambridge, in November 2013. This is the first study of the social and cultural history of Tibetan book technology that takes materials, living traditions and cross-cultural comparisons into consideration. Bringing together leading experts from different disciplines, it discusses the introduction of printing in Tibetan societies in the context of Asian book cultures with an eye to the questions raised by the study of the European history of printing. This title is available online in its entirety in Open Access.
Contributors are: Tim Barrett, Alessandro Boesi, Peter Burke, Michela Clemente, Hildegard Diemberger, Dorje Gyeltsen, Franz-Karl Ehrhard, Helmut Eimer, Johan Elverskog, Camillo Formigatti, Imre Galambos, Agnieszka Helman-Wazny, Tomasz Wazny, Sherab Sangpo Kawa, Peter Kornicki, Leonard van der Kuijp, Stefan Larsson, Ben Nourse, Anuradha Pallipurath, Porong Dawa, Paola Ricciardi, Tsering Dawa Sharshon, Sam van Schaik, Cristina Scherrer-Schaub, Marta Sernesi, Pasang Wangdu.

China’s westernmost province of Xinjiang has experienced escalating cycles of violence, interethnic strife, and state repression since the 1990s. In their search for the roots of these growing tensions, scholars have tended to focus on ethnic clashes and political disputes. In Natural Resources and the New Frontier, historian Judd C. Kinzley takes a different approach—one that works from the ground up to explore the infrastructural and material foundation of state power in the region.

As Kinzley argues, Xinjiang’s role in producing various natural resources for regional powers has been an important but largely overlooked factor in fueling unrest. He carefully traces the buildup to this unstable situation over the course of the twentieth century by focusing on the shifting priorities of Chinese, Soviet, and provincial officials regarding the production of various resources, including gold, furs, and oil among others. Through his archival work, Kinzley offers a new way of viewing Xinjiang that will shape the conversation about this important region and offer a model for understanding the development of other frontier zones in China as well as across the global south.

"The popularization of basic legal knowledge is an important and contested technique of state governance in China today. Its roots reach back to the early years of Chinese Communist Party rule. Legal Lessons tells the story of how the party-state attempted to mobilize ordinary citizens to learn laws during the early years of the Mao period (1949–1976) and in the decade after Mao’s death.Examining case studies such as the dissemination of the 1950 Marriage Law and successive constitutions since 1954 in Beijing and Shanghai, Jennifer Altehenger traces the dissemination of legal knowledge at different levels of state and society. Archival records, internal publications, periodicals, advice manuals, memoirs, and colorful propaganda materials reveal how official attempts to determine and promote “correct” understanding of written laws intersected with people’s interpretations and practical experiences. They also show how diverse groups—including party-state leadership, legal experts, publishers, writers, artists, and local officials, along with ordinary people—helped to define the meaning of laws in China’s socialist society. Placing mass legal education and law propaganda at the center of analysis, Legal Lessons offers a new perspective on the sociocultural and political history of law in socialist China."

All major continental empires proclaimed their desire to rule 'the entire world', investing considerable human and material resources in expanding their territory. Each, however, eventually had to stop expansion and come to terms with a shift to defensive strategy. This volume explores the factors that facilitated Eurasian empires' expansion and contraction: from ideology to ecology, economic and military considerations to changing composition of the imperial elites. Built around a common set of questions, a team of leading specialists systematically compare a broad set of Eurasian empires - from Achaemenid Iran, the Romans, Qin and Han China, via the Caliphate, the Byzantines and the Mongols to the Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals, Russians, and Ming and Qing China. The result is a state-of-the art analysis of the major imperial enterprises in Eurasian history from antiquity to the early modern that discerns both commonalities and differences in the empires' spatial trajectories.

Dali is a small region on a high plateau in Southeast Asia. Its main deity, Baijie, has assumed several gendered forms throughout the area's history: Buddhist goddess, the mother of Dali's founder, a widowed martyr, and a village divinity. What accounts for so many different incarnations of a local deity?

Goddess on the Frontier argues that Dali's encounters with forces beyond region and nation have influenced the goddess's transformations. Dali sits at the cultural crossroads of Southeast Asia, India, and Tibet; it has been claimed by different countries but is currently part of Yunnan Province in Southwest China. Megan Bryson incorporates historical-textual studies, art history, and ethnography in her book to argue that Baijie provided a regional identity that enabled Dali to position itself geopolitically and historically. In doing so, Bryson provides a case study of how people craft local identities out of disparate cultural elements and how these local identities transform over time in relation to larger historical changes—including the increasing presence of the Chinese state.

The ten chapters of this book, all of them published previously in specialist works, derive from the author's ethnographic research among the Uyghur of Xinjiang and Kazakhstan in the mid-1990s. Approaching beliefs and practices as politically embedded, the articles have historical value in documenting the possibilities and constraints of fieldwork in this region in the 1990s. They also offer a point of departure for new studies of the Uyghur and their relations with their neighbors in the increasingly difficult conditions which characterize the early twenty-first century. (Series: Halle Studies in the Anthropology of Eurasia, Vol. 31) [Subject: Sociology, Anthropology]