A Stanford University Press classic.

Includes bibliographical references.

This work is the first comprehensive study of law enforcement in traditional China. The depth and rigour to which the subject is treated makes it invaluable in the study of Chinese society or law and order.

A vital resource for non-Asia specialists in the fields of history, literature, music, economics, sociology, and art looking for a comparative or world-historical perspective on particular questions, including the nature of early modernity, the development of science, or recent trends in the study of early and medieval arts and letters.

The Confucian-Legalist State proposes a new theory of social change and, in doing so, analyzes the patterns of Chinese history, such as the rise and persistence of a unified empire, the continuous domination of Confucianism, and China's inability to develop industrial capitalism without Western imperialism.

The articles in this collection were all selected from the first five volumes of the Journal of Dialectics of Nature published by the Chinese Academy of Sciences between 1979 and 1985. The Journal was established in 1979 as a comprehensive theoretical publication concerning the history, philosophy and sociology of the natural sciences. It began publication as a response to China's reform, particularly the policy of opening to the outside world. Chinese scholars began to undertake distinctive, original research in these fields. This collection provides a cross-section of their efforts during the initial phase. To enable western scholars to understand the historical process of this change in Chinese academics, Yu Guangyuan's `On the Emancipation of the Mind' and Xu Liangying's `Essay on the Role of Science and Democracy in Society' have been included in this collection. Three of the papers included on the philosophy of science are discussions of philosophical issues in cosmology and biology by scientists themselves. The remaining four are written by philosophers of science and discuss information and cognition, homeostasis and Chinese traditional medicine, the I Ching (Yi Jing) and mathematics, etc. Papers have been selected on the history of both classical and modern science and technology, the most distinctive of which are macro-comparisons of the development of science in China and the west. Some papers discuss the issue of the demarcation of periods in the history of science, the history of ancient Chinese mathematics, astronomy, metallurgy, machinery, medicine, etc. Others discuss the history of modern physics and biology, the history of historiography of science in China and the history of regional development of Chinese science and technology. Also included are biographies of three post-eighteenth-century Chinese scholars, Li Shanlan (1811-1882), Hua Hengfang (1833–1902), and Cai Yuanpei (1868–1940), who contributed greatly to the introduction of western science and scholarship to China. In addition, three short papers have been included introducing the interactions between Chinese scholars and three great western scientists, Niels Bohr, Norbert Wiener, and Robert A. Millikan.

This book is a case study of history and culture in the Taiwanese town of Ta-ch'i and the group of rural villages that constitute its standard marketing community. However, its scope exceeds that of most community studies. The author attempts to construct a holistic view of Chinese culture from an analysis of the relationship between history and ritual in a particular locality. The author argues that social institutions and collective representations are dialectically connected in the process of social and cultural reproduction. He describes this dialectical process through an analysis of the key cultural concept of ling, the magical power attributed to ghosts, gods, and ancestors. In analyzing the symbolic logic of ling, he asserts that it can be fully understood only as a product of the reproduction of social institutions and as a manifestation of a native historical consciousness. Structuralist and Marxist insights are combined to explain how ling is best understood as both a cultural logic of symbolic relations and a material logic of social relations. The book is in three parts. Part I is a social and economic history that outlines what one might call an objectivist or positivist view of Ta-ch'i's history, describing events as they were, regardless of the perceptions of local participants. This material is a background to the synchronic sociological analysis of local territorial cults that constitutes Part II. In Part III, the author unsettles the objectivist assumptions of Part I by showing how the idiom of ling underlies Taiwanese constructions of history and identity and how the cultural construction of history dialectically reproduces society and creates history. The book is illustrated with 8 pages of photographs, 17 line drawings, and 9 maps.