Since the economic liberalization of the 1980s, the Chinese economy has boomed and is poised to become the world's largest market economy, a position traditional China held a millennium ago. William Guanglin Liu's bold and fascinating book is the first to rely on quantitative methods to investigate the early market economy that existed in China, making use of rare market and population data produced by the Song dynasty in the eleventh century. A counterexample comes from the century around 1400 when the early Ming court deliberately turned agrarian society into a command economy system. This radical change not only shrank markets, but also caused a sharp decline in the living standards of common people. Liu's landmark study of the rise and fall of a market economy highlights important issues for contemporary China at both the empirical and theoretical levels.

This unique study argues that in the Qin-Han period, there arose in China a regime of textual authority_one that overlapped but did not coincide with imperial authority. Drawing on a wide range of research and theory, Connery makes an original contribution to the analysis of early imperial elite culture, particularly in the fields of literature and linguistics, intellectual, and institutional history. The author provides new contexts for thinking about canonization and textual transmission systems, an innovative framework for analysis and discussion of the early imperial elite, a socio-ideological exploration of one strand of late Han 'Confucian' thought, and a critique of the concepts of subjectivity and the 'birth of lyricism' in China.

This book traces changing gender relations in China from the tenth to fourteenth centuries by examining three critical categories of women: courtesans, concubines, and faithful wives. It shows how the intersection and mutual influence of these groups—and of male discourses about them—transformed ideas about family relations and the proper roles of men and women. Courtesan culture had a profound effect on Song social and family life, as entertainment skills became a defining feature of a new model of concubinage, and as entertainer-concubines increasingly became mothers of literati sons. Neo-Confucianism, the new moral learning of the Song, was significantly shaped by this entertainment culture and by the new markets—in women—that it created. Responding to a broad social consensus, Neo-Confucians called for enhanced recognition of concubine mothers in ritual and expressed increasing concern about wifely jealousy. The book also details the surprising origins of the Late Imperial cult of fidelity, showing that from inception, the drive to celebrate female loyalty was rooted in a complex amalgam of political, social, and moral agendas. By taking women—and men’s relationships with women—seriously, this book makes a case for the centrality of gender relations in the social, political, and intellectual life of the Song and Yuan dynasties.

An analysis of the causes and consequences of China's transformation from a minor player to the world's tenth largest trader in less than two decades. It locates the transformation in the synergy created by new forces unleashed in China and their interaction with entrepreneurs in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Southeast Asia, who invested capital, transferred production facilities and provided the marketing channels by which Chinese goods reached world markets. The book also examines the dynamics behind Japan's increasing role in China's foreign trade in the late 1990s and the growing trade friction between China and the United States, which it argues is produced by the failure of the latter to recognise the dynamics of China's export growth.

How could late Qing China, a country bound largely by parochial ties of family, clan, and native place, produce a nationwide mass movement? Was this popular outburst symptomatic of a domestic "nationalist awakening," as historians of modern China claim, or a result of pressure from Chinese overseas suffering under harsh U.S. immigration laws, as students of American history contend? In considering these vying explanations for the boycott of American products, Wang identifies a coalition of interests that came together to shape the movement's strategy, objectives, and outcome. He explores the larger structural and organizational resources available to boycott organizers and participants and the role of this common experience in laying the groundwork for later reform and revolutionary movements.