Introduction -- People, poverty, politics, and posters -- Nature and transformation -- Production and mechanization -- Women hold up half the sky -- Serve the people -- Solidarity -- Politics in command -- After the cultural revolution.

Volume 2 of Inside Major East Asian Library Collections in North America presents an extensive collection of interviews that give key insights into Chinese, Korean, and Asian American librarianship

Inside the World’s Major East Asian Collections examines the rise of the “LAM,” an acronym that stands for libraries, archives and museums. In doing so, this book profiles leading experts—librarians, archivists and museum curators—who specialise in East Asian collections from across the world. In examining the dynamically shifting role of the cultural institution in the context of managing information and collections, this book provides important themes offered by these cultural experts in understanding the necessary professional skills, knowledge and personalities that are required for working in such environments of varying size, scope and composition in LAMs. As galleries, LAMs manage preservation and access of history and culture, and their missions and goals as cultural institutions continue to converge. As collecting institutions, LAMs share the common mandate to preserve and make accessible primary resources valuable for researchers and professionals, as well as the public. LAMs are mostly publicly funded, publicly accountable institutions collecting cultural heritage materials. Another aim of this book is to enhance the visibility and recognise the efforts of the LAM professionals as cultural institution leaders, since much of their great contributions in the respective fields to preserving our cultural and documentary heritages have gone unnoticed outside their parent institutions. Examines the roles and goals of cultural institutions Brings collections to life through interviews with LAM experts Presents LAMs with a focus on East Asia Serves as a platform for LAM professionals to share and exchange experiences and insights

This volume evaluates the dual roles of war and modernity in the transformation of twentieth-century Chinese identity. The contributors, all leading researchers, argue that war, no less than revolution, deserves attention as a major force in the making of twentieth-century Chinese history. Further, they show that modernity in material culture and changes in intellectual consciousness should serve as twin foci of a new wave of scholarly analysis. Examining in particular the rise of modern Chinese cities and the making of the Chinese nation-state, the contributors to this interdisciplinary volume of cultural history provide new ways of thinking about China's modern transformation up to the 1950s. Taken together, the essays demonstrate that the combined effect of a modernizing state and an industrializing economy weakened the Chinese bourgeoisie and undercut the individual's quest for autonomy. Drawing upon new archival sources, these theoretically informed, thoroughly revisionist essays focus on topics such as Western-inspired modernity, urban cosmopolitanism, consumer culture, gender relationships, interchanges between city and countryside, and the growing impact of the state on the lives of individuals. The volume makes an important contribution toward a postsocialist understanding of twentieth-century China.

This is the first comprehensive and in-depth study of the Chinese collection in the Library of Congress, the largest collection of its kind in the Western world. Started in 1869 with some 950 books received in the first exhange of publications between the United States and China, the collection has grown so steadily that in 1977 it numbered more than 430,000 volumes, including 2,000 rare Chinese items, some of which were printed in A.D. 975. In this primarily historical study, Professor Hu examines the social, cultural, and political forces that led to the development and growth of the collection, the acquisitions policies followed, and the sources of personal and financial support found within and outside the Library of Congress. He also explores the methods by which the library has built up several strong areas in the collection, particularly those of Chinese gazetteers, or local histories; ts’ung-shu, or collections of reprints; and rare works.

This volume marks a turning point in the study of Chinese economic history. It arose from a realization that the economic history of China—as opposed to the history of the Chinese economy—had yet to be written. Most histories of the Chinese economy, whether by Western or Chinese scholars, tend to view the economy in institutional or social terms. In contrast, the studies in this volume break new ground by systematically applying economic theory and methods to the study of China. While demonstrating to historians the advantages of an economic perspective, the contributors, comprising both historians and economists, offer important new insights concerning issues of long-standing interest to both disciplines. Part One, on price behavior, presents for the first time preliminary analyses of the incomparably rich and important grain price data from the imperial archives in Beijing and Taibei during the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911). These studies reveal long-term trends in the Chinese economy since the seventeenth century and contain surprising discoveries about market integration, the agricultural economy, and demographic behavior in different regions of China. The essays in Part Two, on market response, deal with different aspects of the economy of Republican China (1912–49), showing that markets for land, labor, and capital sometimes functioned as predicted by models of economic "rationality" but at other times behaved in ways that can be explained only by combining economic analysis with knowledge of political, regional, class, and gender differences. Based on new types of data, they suggest novel interpretations of the Chinese economic experience. The resulting collection is interdisciplinary scholarship of a high order, which weaves together the analytic framework provided by economic theory and the rich texture of social phenomena gathered by accomplished historians. 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 1992.