• Origins of agriculture

  / China
• Rice

  / Domestication and cultivation

• Dress

  / China
• Fan
• pao

• fan-tan
• keno

• Carboniferous Period

  / Paleogeography
• Asia

  / Cenozoic events in the island arcs and the marginal basins
• Devonian Period

  / Asia
• Cambrian Period

  / Paleogeography
• Pleistocene Epoch

  / Loess-paleosol records

• Buddhism

  / China
• Buddhism

  / Ullambana festival
• Buddhism

  / Vajrayana traditions in China and Japan
• Kumarajiva
• Zen

  / China
• Buddhism

  / Dhyana (Chan/Zen)

• East Asian mathematics
• algebra

  / The equation in India and China
• number theory

  / Number theory in the East
• numerals and numeral systems

  / Number bases
• numerals and numeral systems

  / Multiplicative grouping systems

• space exploration

  / China
• astronaut

  / History and highlights

General works

Denis Twitchett and John K. Fairbank (eds.), The Cambridge History of China (1978– ), is the standard multivolume reference for Chinese history. The following are comprehensive works in their fields: John K. Fairbank and Merle Goldman, China: A New History, 2nd enlarged ed. (2006), a magisterial survey, offering new ideas from many of the dissertations Fairbanks advised; Jacques Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilization, 2nd ed. (1999; originally published in French, 1972), a detailed survey of China’s intellectual, social, and economic history from the neolithic cultures up to the late 20th century; Charles O. Hucker, China’s Imperial Past: An Introduction to Chinese History and Culture (1975), to 1850; and F.W. Mote, Imperial China, 900–1800 (1999), covering nearly a millennium. Also useful are Edwin Pak-wah Leung (ed.), Historical Dictionary of Revolutionary China, 1839–1976 (1992); and Lawrence R. Sullivan, Historical Dictionary of the People’s Republic of China, 2nd ed. (2007).

Prehistory

Scholarly analyses include Kwang-chih Chang, The Archaeology of Ancient China, 4th ed., rev. and enlarged (1986), a pioneering, comprehensive synthesis based on excavations; David N. Keightley (ed.), The Origins of Chinese Civilization (1983), a collection of articles about environment and agriculture, cultures and peoples, and the genesis of the state; Jessica Rawson, Ancient China: Art and Archeology (1980), a study of the artistic significance of Neolithic and Bronze Age artifacts; William Watson, Cultural Frontiers in Ancient East Asia (1971), an illustrated analysis of cultural interaction; and Rukang Wu and John W. Olsen (eds.), Palaeoanthropology and Palaeolithic Archaeology in the People’s Republic of China (1985), an account of Chinese research on early humans.

The first historical dynasty: the Shang

In addition to the works of Chang, Watson, and Rawson mentioned in the previous paragraph, the following works are also informative: Kwang-chih Chang, Early Chinese Civilization: Anthropological Perspectives (1976), and Shang Civilization (1980), on Shang archaeology and culture; David N. Keightley, Sources of Shang History: The Oracle-Bone Inscriptions of Bronze Age China (1978, reprinted 1985); Wen Fong (ed.), The Great Bronze Age of China (1980), an analytic catalog of an exhibition from the People’s Republic of China; and Paul Wheatley, The Pivot of the Four Quarters (1971), a comparative study of the origins of urban society.

The Zhou and Qin dynasties

Useful works on the period include Nicola Di Cosmo, Ancient China and Its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History (2002); Cho-yun Hsu (Zhouyun Xu) and Katheryn M. Linduff, Western Chou Civilization (1988); Mark Edward Lewis, Sanctioned Violence in Early China (1990); and Yu-ning Li, The First Emperor of China (1975); Xueqin Li, Eastern Zhou and Qin Civilizations (1986).

The Han dynasty

There are several translations of Shiji (“Historical Records”), the great work of Han historian Sima Qian that covers the periods of Chinese history up to the 1st century bce. Notable among these is William H. Nienhauser, Jr. (ed.), The Grand Scribe’s Records: Ssu-ma Ch’ien (1994– ), a multivolume project. Other sources include Homer H. Dubs (ed. and trans.), The History of the Former Han Dynasty, 3 vol. (1938–55); Esson M. Gale (ed. and trans.), Discourses on Salt and Iron (1931, reprinted 1973); and A.F.P. Hulsewé, Remnants of Ch’in Law (1985). Works on specific topics of Han history include Hans Bielenstein, The Restoration of the Han Dynasty, 4 vol. (1953–79); Michael Loewe, Records of Han Administration, 2 vol. (1967), Everyday Life in Early Imperial China During the Han Period 202 B.C.–A.D. 220 (1968, reissued 1973), and Crisis and Conflict in Han China 104 B.C. to A.D. 9 (1974); T’ung-tsu Ch’u, Han Social Structure (1972); A.F.P. Hulsewé, Remnants of Han Law (1955); Cho-yun Hsu, Han Agriculture: The Formation of Early Chinese Agrarian Economy, 206 B.C.–A.D. 220 (1980); and Ying-shih Yu, Trade and Expansion in Han China (1967).

Period of division

W.J.F. Jenner, Memories of Loyang (1981), is a political history of the Wei dynasty during the Six Dynasties period. Discussions on religious development during the period include Holmes Welch, Taoism: The Parting of the Way, rev. ed. (1965); and Erik Zürcher, The Buddhist Conquest of China, 3rd ed. (2007), a study of the formation of gentry Buddhism.

Sui and Tang periods

The best general history of these dynasties is in vol. 3 of The Cambridge History of China (1979). The most important work on the Sui period is Arthur F. Wright, The Sui Dynasty (1978). His two studies “The Formation of Sui Ideology 581–604,” in John K. Fairbank (ed.), Chinese Thought and Institutions (1957, reissued 1973), and “Sui Yang-ti: Personality and Stereotype,” in Arthur F. Wright (ed.), The Confucian Persuasion (1960, reissued 1983) are also useful. Woodbridge Bingham, The Founding of the T’ang Dynasty: The Fall of Sui and Rise of T’ang (1941, reprinted 1970), gives a clear account of the period from 607 to 624.

Analyses of the early Tang are presented in Howard J. Wechsler, Mirror to the Son of Heaven: Wei Cheng at the Court of T’ang T’ai-tsung (1974), and Offerings of Jade and Silk: Ritual and Symbol in the Legitimation of the T’ang Dynasty (1985). R.W.L. Guisso, Wu Tse-t’ien and the Politics of Legitimation in T’ang China (1978), is a comprehensive study of the Empress Wu’s reign.

Edwin G. Pulleyblank, The Background to the Rebellion of An Lu-shan (1955, reprinted 1982), gives a full account of every aspect of the reign of Xuanzong. Also interesting on the politics of the same period is P.A. Herbert, Under the Brilliant Emperor: Imperial Authority in T’ang China as Seen in the Writings of Chang Chiu-ling (1978). The An Lushan rebellion is described in Howard S. Levy (ed. and trans.), Biography of An Lu-shan (1960), a well-annotated translation.

There is no satisfactory book-length account of the following period. The rebellions of the 780s are described briefly in Denis Twitchett, “Lu Chih (754–805),” in Arthur F. Wright and Denis Twitchett (eds.), Confucian Personalities (1962, reissued 1980). The mysterious reign of Shunzong has not been subjected to a modern analytic study, but the principal source is translated in Bernard S. Solomon (ed. and trans.), The Veritable Record of the T’ang Emperor Shun-tsung (1955). There is some account of the subsequent reigns in Arthur Waley, The Life and Times of Po Chü-i, 772–846 A.D. (1949, reissued 2005), but the historical analysis is somewhat outdated.

For the period after 847 even the Chinese primary documentation becomes thin. The only events that have attracted attention of Western scholars are the rebellions, as in Howard S. Levy (ed. and trans.), Biography of Huang Ch’ao, 2nd rev. ed. (1961); and Gungwu Wang, Divided China: Preparing for Reunification, 883–947, 2nd ed. (2007).

A number of important studies on Tang political history, taking account of modern Japanese and Chinese scholarship, are included in Arthur F. Wright and Denis Twitchett (eds.), Perspectives on the T’ang (1973). John Curtis Perry and Bardwell L. Smith (eds.), Essays on T’ang Society: The Interplay of Social, Political, and Economic Forces (1976), is also a significant collection.

Tang finances and economic problems are examined in Denis Twitchett, Financial Administration Under the T’ang Dynasty, 2nd ed. (1970); and Wallace Johnson (trans.), The T’ang Code, vol. 1 (1979), is a translation of the main documents on Tang law. Surveys of social history include Denis Twitchett, Land Tenure and the Social Order in T’ang and Sung China (1962), and Birth of the Chinese Meritocracy: Bureaucrats and Examinations in T’ang China (1976); as well as the relevant sections of Étienne Balazs, Chinese Civilization and Bureaucracy, trans. from the French (1964, reprinted 1972). Important evidence from Dunhuang is detailed in Lionel Giles, Six Centuries of Tunhuang (1944). More information is in the eyewitness account by a contemporary Japanese monk in Edwin O. Reischauer (trans.), Ennin’s Diary (1955), with a companion volume, Ennin’s Travels in T’ang China (1955, reprinted 1990).

Three works by Edward H. Schafer are extremely important for the light they throw on the cosmopolitan nature of Tang society: The Vermilion Bird: T’ang Images of the South (1967), The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T’ang Exotics (1963, reprinted 1985), and Shore of Pearls (1970), dealing with the early history of Hainan Island. Gungwu Wang, The Nanhai Trade (1958, reissued 2003), surveys Chinese overseas trade and relations with Southeast Asia.

Five Dynasties, Ten Kingdoms, and Song periods

A comprehensive survey from the fall of the Tang to the Mongol conquest of the Nan Song is The Cambridge History of China, vol. 5, part 1, The Sung Dynasty and Its Precursors, 907–1279, ed. by Denis Twitchett and Paul Jakov Smith (2009). Edward H. Schafer, The Empire of Min (1954), has an excellent sinological summary on this kingdom in the South. Works on conquest dynasties in the North include Hok-lam Chan, The Historiography of the Chin Dynasty: Three Studies (1970), and Legitimation in Imperial China: Discussions Under the Jurchen-Chin Dynasty, 1115–1234 (l984); and Jing-shen Tao, The Jurchen in Twelfth-Century China: A Study of Sinicization (1976). The significance of the Song and varying interpretations are given in James T.C. Liu and Peter J. Golas (eds.), Change in Sung China: Innovation or Renovation? (1969); Edward A. Kracke, Jr., Civil Service in Early Sung China, 960–1067 (1953, reissued 1968); two works attempting to relate general trends through historical figures, James T.C. Liu, Ou-yang Hsiu, an Eleventh-Century Neo-Confucianist, trans. from the Chinese (1967), and Reform in Sung China: Wang An-shih (1021–1086) and His New Policies (1959); and Brian E. McKnight, Village and Bureaucracy in Southern Sung China (1971). Jacques Gernet, Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion, 1250–1276 (1962; originally published in French, 1959), provides vivid descriptions. Also useful are Patricia Buckley Ebrey (ed. and trans.), Family and Property in Sung China: Yüan Ts’ai’s Precepts for Social Life (1984); Thomas H.S. Lee, Government Education and Examinations in Sung China (1985); Brian E. McKnight (trans.), The Washing Away of Wrongs: Forensic Medicine in Thirteenth-Century China (1981); and Bettine Birge, Women, Property, and Confucian Reaction in Sung and Yüan China (960–1368) (2001).

The Yuan dynasty

The history of Genghis Khan and Ögödei Khan is given in the Chinese rendition of the Mongolian historical literary narrative, Yuanchao bishi, which is known in the West through several translations, such as The Secret History of the Mongols, trans. and ed. by Francis Woodman Cleaves (1982); and The Secret History of the Mongols, adapted by Paul Kahn, expanded ed. (1998). The Mongol operations against China are described in Igor de Rachewiltz, “Personnel and Personalities in North China in the Early Mongol Period,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 9:88–144 (1966).

The sociopolitical history of the later Yuan is described in John W. Dardess, Conquerors and Confucians: Aspects of Political Change in Late Yüan China (1973); Franz Schurman (ed. and trans.), Economic Structure of the Yüan Dynasty (1956, reissued 1967); Herbert Franke, From Tribal Chieftain to Universal Emperor and God: The Legitimation of the Yüan Dynasty (1978); Ch’i-ch’ing Hsiao, The Military Establishment of the Yüan Dynasty (1978); Paul Heng-chao Ch’en, Chinese Legal Tradition Under the Mongols: The Code of 1291 as Reconstructed (1979); and John D. Langlois, Jr. (ed.), China Under Mongol Rule (1981).

Religious and intellectual life of the period is the subject of Arthur Waley (trans.), The Travels of an Alchemist (1931, reprinted 1963), on the Daoist monk Changchun; Frederick W. Mote, “Confucian Eremitism in the Yüan period,” in Arthur F. Wright (ed.), The Confucian Persuasion (1960); Wm. Theodore De Bary, Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy and the Learning of the Mind-and-Heart (1981); and Hok-lam Chan and Wm. Theodore De Bary (eds.), Yüan Thought: Chinese Thought and Religion Under the Mongols (1982).

Works on Yuan culture include Sherman E. Lee and Wai-kam Ho, Chinese Art Under the Mongols: The Yüan Dynasty, 1279–1368 (1968); James Cahill, Hills Beyond a River: Chinese Painting of the Yüan Dynasty, 1279–1368 (1976); and J.I. Crump, Chinese Theater in the Days of Khublai Khan (1980, reprinted 1990).

Chinese contacts with Asia and the West are discussed in Leonard Olschki, Marco Polo’s Asia: An Introduction to His “Description of the World” called “Il Milione” (1960; originally published in Italian, 1957); and Igor de Rachewiltz, Papal Envoys to the Great Khans (1971).

Ming dynasty

Useful reference guides include Edward L. Farmer, Romeyn Taylor, and Ann Waltner (eds.), Ming History: An Introductory Guide to Research (1994); Wolfgang Franke, An Introduction to the Sources of Ming History (1968); and L. Carrington Goodrich and Chao-ying Fang (eds.), Dictionary of Ming Biography, 2 vol. (1976). Reviews and articles regularly appear in the journal Ming Studies (semiannual).

The early Ming years are described in Edward L. Dreyer, Early Ming China: A Political History, 1355–1435 (1982); and Charles O. Hucker, The Ming Dynasty: Its Origins and Evolving Institutions (1978). Additional light is shed on early Ming life, thought, and institutions in Edward L. Farmer, Early Ming Government: The Evolution of Dual Capitals (1976); Frederick W. Mote, The Poet Kao Ch’i (1962); and John W. Dardess, Confucianism and Autocracy: Professional Elites in the Founding of the Ming Dynasty (1983). Early Ming overseas expeditions and foreign relations are dealt with in Edward L. Dreyer, Zheng He: China and the Oceans in the Early Ming Dynasty, 1405–1433 (2007); J.J.L. Duyvendak, China’s Discovery of Africa (1949); and Yi-t’ung Wang, Official Relations Between China and Japan, 1368–1549 (1953).

Specialized studies of mature Ming include Leo K. Shin, The Making of the Chinese State: Ethnicity and Expansion on the Ming Borderlands (2006); Charles O. Hucker, The Traditional Chinese State in Ming Times (1961), and The Censorial System of Ming China (1966); Charles O. Hucker (ed.), Chinese Government in Ming Times: Seven Studies (1969); Ray Huang, Taxation and Governmental Finance in Sixteenth-Century Ming China (1974); Kwan-wai So, Japanese Piracy in Ming China During the 16th Century (1975); Ping-ti Ho, Studies on the Population of China, 1368–1953 (1959, reprinted 1967), and The Ladder of Success in Imperial China: Aspects of Social Mobility, 1368–1911 (1962, reprinted 1976); and Ayao Hoshi, The Ming Tribute Grain System, trans. from the Chinese by Mark Elvin (1969). Ray Huang, 1587, a Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline (1981), is a wide-ranging critical discussion of Ming governance and the ruling class; a somewhat more approving view of Ming China of the same period is China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matthew Ricci, 1583–1610, trans. from the Latin by Louis J. Gallagher (1953). Modern studies of China’s contacts with Europeans in Ming times notably include Charles R. Boxer (ed. and trans.), South China in the Sixteenth Century (1953, reissued 2004); and George H. Dunne, Generations of Giants: The Story of the Jesuits in China in the Last Decades of the Ming Dynasty (1962).

The last Ming years and the struggles of post-Ming loyalists are discussed in James B. Parsons, The Peasant Rebellions of the Late Ming Dynasty (1970); Lynn A. Struve, The Southern Ming, 1644–1662 (1984); and Jonathan D. Spence and John E. Wills, Jr. (eds.), From Ming to Ch’ing: Conquest, Region, and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century China (1979). Studies in Ming intellectual and religious history are found in Wm. Theodore De Bary et al., Self and Society in Ming Thought (1970), and The Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism (1975).

The Qing period

Among works on the rise of the Qing dynasty are Robert H.G. Lee, The Manchurian Frontier in Ch’ing History (1970); Silas H.L. Wu, Communication and Imperial Control in China: Evolution of the Palace Memorial System, 1693–1735 (1970); and Frederic Wakeman, Jr., The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of the Imperial Order in Seventeenth-Century China, 2 vol. (1985).

Useful studies of early foreign relations include Chusei Suzuki, “China’s Relations with Inner Asia: The Hsiung-nu, Tibet,” pp. 180–197 in John K. Fairbank (ed.), The Chinese World Order (1968); Antonio S. Rosso, Apostolic Legations to China of the Eighteenth Century (1948); and Marc Mancall, Russia and China: Their Diplomatic Relations to 1728 (1971).

Society and economy during the mid-Qing period are discussed in Chung-li Chang, The Chinese Gentry (1955, reprinted 1974); T’ung-tsu Chu, Local Government in China Under the Ch’ing (1962, reissued 1988); Madeleine Zelin, The Magistrate’s Tael: Rationalizing Fiscal Reform in Eighteenth-Century Ch’ing China (1984); and Yeh-chien Wang, Land Taxation in Imperial China, 1750–1911 (1973).

Among works on intellectual and cultural aspects are Ch’i-ch’ao Liang, Intellectual Trends in the Ch’ing Period, trans. by Immanuel C.Y. Hsu (1959); R. Kent Guy, The Emperor’s Four Treasuries: Scholars and the State in the Late Ch’ien-lung Era (1987); Benjamin A. Elman, On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550–1900 (2005); Cynthia J. Brocaw and Kai-wing Chow (eds.), Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China (2005); and Evelyn Sakakida Rawski, Education and Popular Literacy in Ch’ing China (1979).

Studies of the Qing’s dynastic degeneration include Jean Chesneaux (comp.), Secret Societies in China in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1971; originally published in French, 1965); Kung-chuan Hsiao, Rural China: Imperial Control in the Nineteenth Century (1960, reprinted 1967); Gilbert Rozman (ed.), The Modernization of China (1981), an interdisciplinary study of China’s modernization between the Opium Wars and 1980; Philip A. Kuhn, Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China: Militarization and Social Structure, 1794–1864 (1970, reprinted 1980); and Susan Naquin, Millenarian Rebellion in China: The Eight Trigrams Uprising of 1813 (1976). A more revisionist treatment of the period is in William T. Rowe, China’s Last Empire: The Great Qing (2009).

External challenges to the Qing are surveyed in Masataka Banno, China and the West, 1858–1861: The Origins of the Tsungli Yamen (1964); Hsin-pao Chang, Commissioner Lin and the Opium War (1964, reissued 1970); John K. Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast, 2 vol. (1953, reissued in 1 vol., 1969); Immanuel C.Y. Hsu, China’s Entrance into the Family of Nations: The Diplomatic Phase, 1858–1880 (1960); Peter Ward Fay, The Opium War, 1840–1842 (1976, reprinted 1997); and Frederic Wakeman, Jr., Strangers at the Gate: Social Disorder in South China, 1839–1861 (1966, reprinted 1997).

Studies of the Taiping Rebellion include Vincent Y.C. Shih, The Taiping Ideology: Its Sources, Interpretations, and Influences (1967, reprinted 1972); Franz H. Michael and Chang Chung-li, The Taiping Rebellion: History and Documents, 3 vol. (1966–71); and Albert Feuerwerker, Rebellion in Nineteenth-Century China (1975); and among those for the Nian Rebellion are Siang-tseh Chiang, The Nien Rebellion (1954, reprinted 1967); S.Y. Teng, The Nien Army and Their Guerrilla Warfare, 1851–1868 (1961, reprinted 1984); and Elizabeth J. Perry, Rebels and Revolutionaries in North China, 1845–1945 (1980).

Efforts on reform are discussed in Albert Feuerwerker, China’s Early Industrialization: Sheng Hsüan-huai (1844–1916) and Mandarin Enterprise (1958, reissued 1970); Yen-p’ing Hao, The Comprador in Nineteenth Century China: Bridge Between East and West (1970); Paul A. Cohen, Between Tradition and Modernity: Wang T’ao and Reform in Late Ch’ing China (1974, reissued 1987); William T. Rowe, Hankow: Commerce and Society in a Chinese City, 1796–1889 (1984); Luke S.K. Kwong, A Mosaic of the Hundred Days: Personalities, Politics, and Ideas of 1898 (1984); and Kung-ch’uan Hsiao, A Modern China and a New World: K’ang Yu-wei, Reformer and Utopian, 1858–1927 (1975).

Studies of the Boxer Rebellion include Paul A. Cohen, China and Christianity: The Missionary Movement and the Growth of Chinese Antiforeignism, 1860–1870 (1963), and History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (1997); Victor Purcell, The Boxer Uprising (1963, reprinted 1974); and Joseph W. Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (1987).

Republican China

The start of the Republic is the focus of John H. Fincher, Chinese Democracy, rev. and expanded (1989); Mary B. Rankin, Early Chinese Revolutionaries: Radical Intellectuals in Shanghai and Chekiang, 1902–1911 (1971); Edward J.M. Rhoads, China’s Republican Revolution: The Case of Kwangtung, 1895–1913 (1975); and Joseph W. Esherick, Reform and Revolution in China: The 1911 Revolution in Hunan and Hubei (1976, reissued 1998).

Interpretive texts on the period include Lucien Bianco, Origins of the Chinese Revolution, 1915–1949 (1971; originally published in French, 1961); and James E. Sheridan, China in Disintegration: The Republican Era in Chinese History, 1912–1949 (1975). O. Edmund Clubb, 20th Century China, 3rd ed. (1978), is also a standard work. For the revolution of 1911–12 and the early Republican period, scholarly essays are found in Mary C. Wright (ed.), China in Revolution: The First Phase, 1900–1913 (1968). The immediate consequences of the revolution of 1911–12 and the search for an appropriate political form for China are analyzed in Edward Friedman, Backward Toward Revolution: The Chinese Revolutionary Party (1974); and Ernest P. Young, The Presidency of Yuan Shih-K’ai: Liberalism and Dictatorship in Early Republican China (1977). Intellectual and political movements in China in the late teens are presented in the classic work Tse-tung Chow, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (1960). A more critical view of some of the leading participants is Yü-sheng Lin, The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Antitraditionalism in the May Fourth Era (1979).

Warlordism has been treated in Hsi-sheng Ch’i, Warlord Politics in China, 1916–1928 (1976); Andrew J. Nathan, Peking Politics, 1918–1923 (1976, reissued 1998); and Donald E. Sutton, Provincial Militarism and the Chinese Republic: The Yunnan Army, 1905–25 (1980). Collections of biographies of the leading figures of the period include Howard L. Boorman and Richard C. Howard (eds.), Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, 5 vol. (1967–79); and Donald W. Klein and Anne B. Clarke, Biographic Dictionary of Chinese Communism, 1921–65, 2 vol. (1971).

Economic conditions are discussed in R.H. Tawney, Land and Labour in China (1932, reprinted 1972), a prophetic and still valuable study. Dwight H. Perkins (ed.), China’s Modern Economy in Historical Perspective (1975), is a collection of essays. A penetrating analysis of China’s rural order is Philip C.C. Huang, The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China (1985).

C. Martin Wilbur and Julie Lien-ying How (eds.), Documents on Communism, Nationalism, and Soviet Advisers in China, 1918–1927 (1956, reissued with corrections, 1972), discusses the Nationalist revolution. The struggles that displaced warlords from center stage are set forth in C. Martin Wilbur, The Nationalist Revolution in China, 1923–1928 (1984). Richard W. Rigby, The May 30 Movement: Events and Themes (1980), is a study of one of the most energizing of these struggles. The new national government that emerged has been portrayed in Lloyd E. Eastman, The Abortive Revolution: China Under Nationalist Rule, 1927–1937 (1974, reissued 1990). Among the rebuttals to some of Eastman’s arguments is Joseph Fewsmith, Party, State, and Local Elites in Republican China: Merchant Organizations and Politics in Shanghai, 1890–1930 (1985). Events of the war with Japan are discussed in Lloyd E. Eastman, Seeds of Destruction: Nationalist China in War and Revolution, 1937–1949 (1984).

People’s Republic of China

The bibliography on contemporary Chinese history is vast and is growing as rapidly as the country it describes. In addition to the following sampling of the scholarship available in books, further information may be found in such online sources as “Contemporary China: A Book List” (www.princeton.edu/~lynn/chinabib.pdf) from the Princeton University Woodrow Wilson School East Asian Studies Program.

The emergence and growth of the communist opposition to Nationalist rule can be traced in Benjamin I. Schwartz, Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao (1951, reprinted 1979); Stuart R. Schram, Mao Tse-tung (1967); Mark Selden, The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China (1971); and Edgar Snow, Red Star over China, rev. ed. (1968, reprinted 1973). The main treatment of the Red Army is William W. Whitson and Chen-hsia Huang, The Chinese High Command: A History of Communist Military Politics, 1927–71 (1973). Civilian and military phases of the late civil war period are covered in Susanne Pepper, Civil War in China: The Political Struggle, 1945–1949 (1978); and Lionel Max Chassin, The Communist Conquest of China: A History of the Civil War, 1945–1949 (1965; originally published in French, 1952).

Chalmers A. Johnson, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937–45 (1962, reprinted 1971), broke new ground by proposing that wartime communist recruitment in northern China came from reaction to Japanese violence during the war and not mainly from endemic social problems. This view conflicts with that of Selden and partially with that of Bianco, in the works cited earlier, and is part of a continuing debate. Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung), Selected Works, 4 vol. (1961–65), published by the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing, is the official translation of Mao’s writings, and numerous other versions of his works have been published. More background is provided in Stuart R. Schram, The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung, rev. ed. (1969); Stuart Schram (ed.), Mao Tse-tung Unrehearsed: Talks and Letters: 1956–71 (1974; U.S. title, Chairman Mao Talks to the People: Talks and Letters, 1956–1971); and Frederic Wakeman, Jr., History and Will: Philosophical Perspectives of Mao Tse-tung’s Thought (1973).

Roderick MacFarquhar (ed.), The Politics of China: The Eras of Mao and Deng, 2nd ed. (1997); Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, 3 vol. (1974–97); its continuation, Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Shoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution (2006); and vols. 14 and 15 of The Cambridge History of China, both ed. by Roderick MacFarquhar and John K. Fairbank, respectively The People’s Republic, Part 1: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1949–1965 (1987), and The People’s Republic, Part 2: Revolutions Within the Chinese Revolution, 1966–1982 (1991), are all thorough treatments. Further interpretations can be found in works such as Frederick C. Teiwes, Politics and Purges in China: Rectifications and the Decline of Party Norms, 1950–1965 (1979).

Cheng Li, China’s Leaders: The New Generation (2001); and Joseph Fewsmith, Elite Politics in Contemporary China (2001), carry this narrative about leadership into the reform period and also discuss the lower levels of administration. Mark Blecher and Vivienne Shue, Tethered Deer: Government and Economy in a Chinese County (1996), focuses on a localized area; as do Lynn T. White III, Careers in Shanghai (1978), Policies of Chaos (1989), Unstately Power, 2 vol. (1998), and Political Booms (2009), though from the perspective of several successive decades. Village politics is beautifully explored in Richard Madsen, Morality and Power in a Chinese Village (1984); Anita Chan, Richard Madsen, and Jonathan Unger, Chen Village: Revolution to Globalization, 3rd ed. (2009); and Edward Friedman et al., Chinese Village, Socialist State (1991).

Anthropological studies undertaken prior to the Cultural Revolution include C.K. Yang, Chinese Communist Society: The Family and the Village (1959, reprinted 1974); and G. William Skinner, Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China (1965, reprinted 2001). Among more recent investigations are Helen F. Siu, Agents and Victims in South China: Accomplices in Rural Revolution (1989); and Pierre F. Landry, Decentralized Authoritarianism in China: The Communist Party’s Control of the Local Elites in the Post-Mao Era (2008).

Dali L. Yang, Calamity and Reform in China (1996), describes that reforms were often based on local reactions to previous bad governance, notably during the famine that followed the Great Leap Forward, and Remaking the Chinese Leviathan: Market Transition and the Politics of Governance in China (2004), stresses ways in which the regime revived after the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident. Orville Schell and David Shambaugh (eds.), The China Reader: The Reform Era (1999), provides useful documents.

Mary Elizabeth Gallagher, Contagious Capitalism: Globalization and the Politics of Labor in China (2005), explains how reforms spread geographically. Kevin J. O’Brien, Reform Without Liberalization: China’s National People’s Congress and the Politics of Institutional Change (1990), is one of several books to describe the limits to China’s political reforms; nonetheless, Kevin J. O’Brien and Lianjiang Li, Rightful Resistance in Rural China (2006), offers explanations of China’s weakly institutionalized but pervasive popular sense of justice. Randall Peerenboom, China’s Long March Toward Rule of Law (2002), describes the slow but positive changes in the legal system. Elizabeth J. Perry, Challenging the Mandate of Heaven: Social Protest and State Power in China (2002), is one of several studies that explore the conditions under which protest erupts. A culture of regime conservatism is patterned rationally in works such as Susan L. Shirk, The Political Logic of Economic Reform in China (1993); and Melanie Manion, Corruption by Design: Building Clean Government in Mainland China and Hong Kong (2004). Yongnian Zheng, Technological Empowerment: The Internet, State, and Society in China (2008), looks at the new politics brought about by the World Wide Web.

Classic works on China’s foreign relations include Barbara W. Tuchman, Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–45 (1970, reissued 2001; also published as Sand Against the Wind, 1971, reissued 1981); and Akira Iriye (ed.), The Chinese and the Japanese: Essays in Political and Cultural Interactions (1980). Major studies of basic motives in China’s security policy include Allen S. Whiting, The Chinese Calculus of Deterrence: India and Indochina (1975, reprinted 2001); and Thomas J. Christensen, Useful Adversaries: Grand Strategy, Domestic Mobilization, and Sino-American Conflict (1996). Samuel S. Kim, China, the United Nations, and World Order (1979), was one of the early studies describing China’s multilateral diplomacy. Alastair Iain Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (1995), and Social States: China in International Institutions, 1980–2000 (2008), are somewhat contrasting explorations of the conditions for such diplomacy. Susan L. Shirk, China: Fragile Superpower (2007), describes the links between China’s internal politics and external attitudes; and Yongnian Zheng, Discovering Chinese Nationalism in China: Modernization, Identity, and International Relations (1999), explores the origins and types of Chinese patriotism.