This important volume affords a panoramic view of local elites during the dramatic changes of late imperial and Republic China. Eleven specialists present fresh, detailed studies of subjects ranging from cultivated upper gentry to twentieth-century militarists, from wealthy urban merchants to village leaders. In the introduction and conclusion the editors reassess the pioneering gentry studies of the 1960s, draw comparisons to elites in Europe, and suggest new ways of looking at the top people in Chinese local social systems. Chinese Local Elites and Patterns of Dominance lays the foundation for future discussions of Chinese elites and provides a solid introduction for non-specialists. Essays are by Stephen C. Averill, Lenore Barkan, Lynda S. Bell, Timothy Brook, Prasenjit Duara, Edward A. McCord, William T. Rowe, Keith Schoppa, David Strand, Rubie S. Watson, and Madeleine Zelin. 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 1990.

What binds overseas Chinese communities together? Traditionally scholars have stressed the interplay of external factors (discrimination, local hostility) and internal forces (shared language, native-place ties, family) to account for the cohesion and "Chineseness" of these overseas groups. Andrew Wilson challenges this Manichean explanation of identity by introducing a third factor: the ambitions of the Chinese merchant elite, which played an equal, if not greater, role in the formation of ethnic identity among the Chinese in colonial Manila. Drawing on Chinese, Spanish, and American sources and applying a broad range of historiographical approaches, this volume dissects the structures of authority and identity within Manila’s Chinese community over a period of dramatic socioeconomic change and political upheaval. It reveals the ways in which wealthy Chinese merchants dealt in not only goods and services, but also political influence and the movement of human talent from China to the Philippines. Their influence and status extended across the physical and political divide between China and the Philippines, from the villages of southern China to the streets of Manila, making them a truly transnational elite. Control of community institutions and especially migration networks accounts for the cohesiveness of Manila’s Chinese enclave, argues Wilson, and the most successful members of the elite self-consciously chose to identify themselves and their protégés as Chinese.

The China we know today emerged at the end of a long period of internal rebellions, civil wars, foreign invasions, and revolutionary insurrections that stretched across the nineteenth century to the mid-point of the twentieth. This book explores one important consequence of this situation—the increased role of military force in the determination of elite social, political, and economic power, and presents fascinating case studies of the warlords, militia leaders, and military officers who benefited from this. Examining the intersection of military force and elite power in the formative years of modern Chinese history, this book highlights just how important military force was to elite power in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China in a context of frequent warfare and political turmoil. It shows that the way in which military empowerment unfolded and who exactly was empowered, depended heavily on shifting military and political conditions, and each case confirms the extent to which military force emerged as a consistently significant determinant of elite power across this period. Indeed, the transformative effect of military force on social and political structures of power revealed by these studies sheds distinctive light on the prevalence, and wide-ranging impact, of military conflicts in this period. In turn, these studies also provide a particular perspective on the fluid boundaries of, as well as the constraints on, elite power in Chinese society in a time of intense social and political change. This book makes an important contribution to our understanding of the rise of modern China, and provides a keen insight into impact of war on the country, as such, it will be welcomed by students and scholars interested in Chinese history, Asian history, and military history more broadly.

This book includes eleven seminal essays by one of America’s leading authorities on modern Chinese history with an illuminating preface by Prof. Elizabeth Perry of Harvard University. it covers a range of topics from the impact of imperialism to the 1989 protests that led to the Tiananmen massacre. Chapters include an explanation of how China expanded its borders far beyond the Han Chinese heartland and maintained those borders in the transition from empire to nation; how Sun Yat-sen unexpectedly emerged as the Father of the Country; and how a series of unexpected and contingent events brought the empire down in 1911. Despite conventional representations of a static and unified China, this book proves Chinese society to be diverse and constantly changing—especially after the Communist revolution which was a transformative event in modern Chinese history. Esherick denounces traditional imagery of cultural uniformity, which derives from excessive attention to the unitary state, through chapters that explore the impact of the 1937-45 War of Resistance against Japan, the dramatic wartime transformation of Chinese society in both Communist and Nationalist (Guomindang) areas, and the nature of the new Communist regime in Northwest China. In his book, Esherick examines both the Marxist-Leninist theory behind Mao’s notion of the “restoration of capitalism,” against which he waged the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, and the political theater of the 1989 protest movement. Throughout the book the contingency of history, the need for careful empirical research, and the important yet limited role of history is highlighted as the key to understanding the present or predicting the future of China.

This volume examines the formidable transformation of elites in China in the Republican period and how the redistribution of power, wealth and knowledge among the newly formed elites left a deep imprint on the rise of modern China up to this day.