This is a study of Li Hung-chang which represents a collaboration of Li experts among Chinese and Western scholars. The biography examines the beginnings of China's modernisation; the Confucian as a patriot and pragmatist; his formative years, 1823-1866; and other aspects of his life.

Li Hung-chang (1823-1901) was a Chinese statesman particularly notable for his promotion of industrialization and advocacy of bureaucratic reform. Most of the papers in this volume were first presented in two panels devoted to Li at the 1987 annual meeting of the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association. The volume is divided into six parts: introduction ("The Beginnings of China's Modernization"), the rise of Li Hung-chang, Li in the role of a national official, Li as diplomat, Li as modernizer, and conclusion (including a bibliographical essay). Paper edition (unseen), $22.50. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Ma Jianzhong was a close adviser to the powerful Qing government official, Li Hong-zhang, and wrote several essays between 1878 and 1890 outlining his plans for economic and administrative reform. He was the first Chinese to advocate the creation of a specialized and professional diplomatic corps. His contribution to the late nineteenth-century Chinese discourse on the state and the economy has hitherto been neglected. Paul Bailey's translation of his essays will contribute to a wider understanding of the origins and circulation of reform ideas in the late Qing.

What should we make of claims by members of other groups to have moralities different from our own? Human Rights in Chinese Thought gives an extended answer to this question in the first study of its kind. It integrates a full account of the development of Chinese rights discourse - reaching back to important, though neglected, origins of that discourse in 17th and 18th century Confucianism - with philosophical consideration of how various communities should respond to contemporary Chinese claims about the uniqueness of their human rights concepts. The book elaborates a plausible kind of moral pluralism and demonstrates that Chinese ideas of human rights do indeed have distinctive characteristics, but it nonetheless argues for the importance and promise of cross-cultural moral engagement.

Laurits Andersen was a Danish tobacco entrepreneur and prominent businessman in China from the 1880s until his death in 1928. He was the manager of the American trading firm Mustard & Co. in Shanghai, introducing machine-produced cigarettes to the Chinese market in the late 1800s, at a time when cigarettes were gaining enormous popularity elsewhere in the world. He attained late fame in his native Denmark when shortly before his death he donated a large sum of money to the National Museum, which he had visited frequently as a boy. Laurits Andersen was born in a small village near Elsinore, Denmark, in 1849, and grew up in Copenhagen where he worked as an apprentice at a machine works. From 1870, he lived in East Asia, experiencing wars and revolutions and forming close bonds with the political elite in Imperial China. Laurits Andersen is a role model for later generations, displaying the courage to seek ones fortunes overseas, and showing that with drive, diligence, and willpower, and a preparedness to venture down untrodden paths, one can achieve ambitious goals.

This book explores how steam engine technology was transferred into nineteenth-century China in the second half of the nineteenth century by focusing on the transmission of knowledge and skills. It takes on the long-term problem in historiography that puts too much emphasis on politics but ignores the techno-scientific and institutional requirements for launching such an endeavor. It examines how translations broke linguistic and conceptual barriers and brought new a understanding of heat to the Chinese readership. It also explores how the Fuzhou Navy Yard’s shipbuilding and training program trained China’s first generation of shipbuilding workers and engineers. It argues that conservatism against technology was not to blame for China’s slow development in steamship building. Rather, it was government officials’ failure to realize the scale of institutional and techno-scientific changes required in importing and disperse new knowledge and skills.