Wang's biography of Fu Ssu-nien examines Fu's important role in modern China's intellectual development.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1980.

This book is the first monograph to study the processes of establishing and reconstructing the academician system, and the landmark events in the history of science and technology in 20th century China. It also provides new insights to help us understand the process of scientific institutionalization in modern China. Drawing on detailed archive records, it discusses the process of the establishment of the Academia Sinica's academician system in the Republic of China, as well as the unique and tortuous transformation process from members of the Academic Divisions(学部委员)to academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院)in the People's Republic of China. These play an important part of China's modernization process, and reflect scientific institutionalization in China. The book also highlights the fact that under the leadership of the government, the academic elite became participants in the construction of national academic system after the founding of the People's Republic of China.

This book presents the syllabus of Hu Shih’s course on the History of Chinese Thought, which he taught at Harvard University from 1944 to 1945, and has been transcribed from his (more than 1500) hand-written notes. This book focuses on Hu Shih’s in-depth study and interpretation of Chinese intellectual history and philosophy, etc. It also distills the development of China’s long and complex intellectual history over the past 3,000 years into a clear and succinct outline. Transcribing, collating and publishing this valuable hand-written manuscript for the first time, the book represents a truly unique historical document.

The Qing dynasty office purchase system (juanna), which allowed individuals to pay for appointments in the government, was regarded in traditional Chinese historiography as an inherently corrupt and anti-meritocratic practice. It enabled participants to become civil and military officials while avoiding the competitive government-run examination systems. Lawrence Zhang’s groundbreaking study of a broad selection of new archival and other printed evidence—including a list of over 10,900 purchasers of offices from 1798 and narratives of purchase—contradicts this widely held assessment and investigates how observers and critics of the system, past and present, have informed this questionable negative view. The author argues that, rather than seeing office purchase as a last resort for those who failed to obtain official appointments via other means, it was a preferred method for wealthy and well-connected individuals to leverage their social capital to the fullest extent. Office purchase was thus not only a useful device that raised funds for the state, but also a political tool that, through literal investments in their positions and their potential to secure status and power, tied the interests of official elites ever more closely to those of the state.

Through a study of the readership of the most popular commercial daily newspaper in China during the early twentieth century, Reading Shenbao investigates ideas of nationalism, consumerism and individuality, looking at the relationship between advertising, modern lifestyles and changing social attitudes in China as it underwent modernization.

In literatures worldwide, animal fables have been analyzed for their revealingly anthropomorphic views, but until now little attention has been given to the animal tales of China. The complex, competitive relationship between rodents (vilified as thieves of grain) and the felines with whom they are perennially at war is explored in this presentation of Chinese tales about cats and mice. Master translator Wilt Idema situates them in an overview of animal tales in world literature, in the Chinese literary tradition as a whole, and within Chinese imaginative depictions of animals. The tales demonstrate the animals’ symbolism and their unusually prominent—and verbal—role in the stories. These readings depict cats and mice in conflict, in marital bonds, and in litigation—most centrally in a legal case of a mouse against a cat in the underworld court of King Yama. Many of the stories adopt the perspective of the mice as animals merely trying to survive, while also recognizing that cats are natural hunters. This entertaining volume will appeal to readers interested in Chinese literature and society, comparative literature, and posthumanist consideration of human-animal relations.