CityReads│Summer Reading List of China Studies

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Summer Reading List of China Studies by Fairbank Center

Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies recommends 12 new books to read in this summer.

Source: http://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/summer-reading-list-2018/

1 Legal Lessons: Popularizing Laws in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1989, by Jennifer Altehenger

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.

2 Navigating Semi-Colonialism: Shipping, Sovereignty, and Nation-Building in China, 1860–1937, by Anne Reinhardt 

China’s status in the world of expanding European empires of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has long been under dispute. Its unequal relations with multiple powers, secured through a system of treaties rather than through colonization, has invited debate over the degree and significance of outside control and local sovereignty. Anne Reinhardt examines the expansion of steam navigation, the growth of shipping enterprise, and the social climate of the steamship in the nineteenth century as arenas of contestation and collaboration that highlight the significance of partial Chinese sovereignty.

3  Revolutionary Waves: The Crowd in Modern China, by Tie Xiao

During China’s transition from dynastic empire to nation-state, the crowd emerged as a salient trope. Intellectuals across the ideological spectrum have used the crowd trope to ruminate on questions of selfhood and nationhood, and to advance competing models of enlightenment and revolution. Tie Xiao analyzes the centrality of the crowd in the Chinese cultural and political imagination and its global resonances by delving into a wide range of fiction, philosophy, poetry, and psychological studies.

4 The Translatability of Revolution: Guo Moruo and Twentieth-Century Chinese Culture, by Pu Wang

The first comprehensive study of the lifework of Guo Moruo (1892–1978) in English, this book explores the dynamics of translation, revolution, and historical imagination in twentieth-century Chinese culture. Guo was a romantic writer who eventually became Mao Zedong’s last poetic interlocutor; a Marxist historian who evolved into the inaugural president of China’s Academy of Sciences; and a leftist politician who devoted almost three decades to translating Goethe’s Faust.

5 The China Questions: Critical Insights into a Rising Power, Harvard University Press, Michael Szonyi and Jennifer Rudoph, eds.

Many books offer information about China, but few make sense of what is truly at stake. The questions addressed in this unique volume provide a window onto the challenges China faces today and the uncertainties its meteoric ascent on the global horizon has provoked. Featuring chapters by thirty of the Fairbank Center’s faculty and affiliates, this book “should be on the shelf of anyone seeking to understand this fast-rising superpower.”

6 The Art of Being Governed: Everyday Politics in Late Imperial China, Princeton University Press, by Michael Szonyi

How did ordinary people in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) deal with the demands of the state? In The Art of Being Governed, Fairbank Center Director Michael Szonyi explores the myriad ways that families fulfilled their obligations to provide a soldier to the army. The complex strategies they developed to manage their responsibilities suggest a new interpretation of an important period in China’s history as well as a broader theory of politics.

7 The Halberd at Red Cliff: Jian’an and the Three Kingdoms, Harvard University Press, by Xiaofei Tian

The turn of the third century CE—known as the Jian’an era or Three Kingdoms period—holds double significance for the Chinese cultural tradition. How did Jian’an bifurcate into two distinct nostalgias, one of which was the first paradigmatic embodiment of wen (literary graces, cultural patterning), and the other of wu (heroic martial virtue)? Xiaofei Tian investigates how these associations were closely related in their complex origins and then came to be divergent in their later metamorphoses.

8 The Contentious Public Sphere: Law, Media, and Authoritarian Rule in China, Princeton University Press, by Ya-Wen Lei

Since the mid-2000s, public opinion and debate in China have become increasingly common and consequential, despite the ongoing censorship of speech and regulation of civil society. How did this happen? In The Contentious Public Sphere, Ya-Wen Lei shows how the Chinese state drew on law, the media, and the Internet to further an authoritarian project of modernization, but in so doing, inadvertently created a nationwide public sphere in China—one the state must now endeavor to control.

9  Zuo Tradition / Zuozhuan: Commentary on the “Spring and Autumn Annals” University of Washington Press, translation by Stephen Durrant, Wai-yee Li and David Schaberg

Zuo Tradition (Zuozhuan; sometimes called The Zuo Commentary) is China’s first great work of history. It consists of two interwoven texts – the Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu, a terse annalistic record) and a vast web of narratives and speeches that add context and interpretation to the Annals. This book was awarded the 2018 Patrick D. Hanan Translation Book Prize from the Association of Asian Studies.

10  Zouping Revisited: Adaptive Governance in a Chinese County, Stanford University Press, Steven Goldstein and Jean C. Oi, eds.

China has undergone dramatic change in its economic institutions in recent years, but surprisingly little change politically. This new volume, edited by Steven Goldstein and Jean C. Oi, examines the subtle but profound changes to the ways China’s political institutions and governing bodies actually work.

11 The Cold War: A World History, Penguin Books, by Odd Arne Westad

As Germany and then Japan surrendered in 1945 there was a tremendous hope that a new and much better world could be created from the moral and physical ruins of the conflict. Instead, the combination of the huge power of the USA and USSR and the near-total collapse of most of their rivals created a unique, grim new environment: the Cold War. Odd Arne Westad‘s book has the ambition to create a convincing, powerful narrative of the Cold War.

12 Curating Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao’s China, Cambridge University Press, by Denise Ho

How did China’s Communist revolution transform the nation’s political culture? In this rich and vivid history of the Mao period (1949–1976), Denise Y. Ho examines the relationship between its exhibitions and its political movements.

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