This text argues that the underlying theme of China's development trajectory in the 20th century is reconstruction. Contributors examine how movements and transitions have affected China at regular periods during this century.

A comprehensive collection on twentieth-century educational practices in China

Discussions of China’s early twentieth-century modernization efforts tend to focus almost exclusively on cities, and the changes, both cultural and industrial, seen there. As a result, the communist peasant revolution appears as a decisive historical break. Kate Merkel-Hess corrects that misconception by demonstrating how crucial the countryside was for reformers in China long before the success of the communist revolution. In The Rural Modern, Merkel-Hess shows that Chinese reformers and intellectuals created an idea of modernity that was not simply about what was foreign and new, as in Shanghai and other cities, but instead captured the Chinese people’s desire for social and political change rooted in rural traditions and institutions. She traces efforts to remake village education, economics, and politics, analyzing how these efforts contributed to a new, inclusive vision of rural Chinese life. Merkel-Hess argues that as China sought to redefine itself, such rural reform efforts played a major role, and tensions that emerged between rural and urban ways deeply informed social relations, government policies, and subsequent efforts to create a modern nation during the communist period.

The Rural Modern by historian Kate Merkel-Hess is the first book to discuss the importance of rural China in the nation's efforts to define itself as "modern" in the twentieth century. Discussions of modernization efforts in twentieth-century China have usually focused on modernity's manifestations--from ironworks to banking to dancehalls--in China's cities. As a result, the Communist peasant revolution appears to be a historical break. But Merkel-Hess shows that the countryside was crucial for reformers in Republican China, much before the peasant revolution of the communist period. Reformers hoped that, once the rural masses were educated enough to realize how China had been taken advantage of by imperial powers, they would act to repel foreign intervention. The Rural Reconstruction Movement's agenda was not a partisan plan for revitalization but rather a fundamentally Chinese one, a reconfiguration of traditional ways of engaging the countryside. In international Shanghai, "modernity" usually signaled what was foreign and new, but, as Merkel-Hess argues, it was the "rural modern" that captured the Chinese people's desire for a modernity rooted in Chinese tradition, and rural reform thus became crucial to China's self-definition. The book sheds much-needed light on the tensions--between foreign and traditional Chinese, urban and rural, tradition and reconstruction--that roiled the Chinese intellectual world in the early twentieth century, tensions that informed people's actions and social relations, government policies, and subsequent efforts to create a modern nation during the communist period.

Written by a hugely experienced team of international contributors from China, Europe and the US, this book takes an innovative and insightful look at one of the most important bilateral relationships in international relations this century.

An examination of the shifts in politics and revolution in China over the last century What must China do to become truly democratic and equitable? This question animates most progressive debates about this potential superpower, and in China’s Twentieth Century the country’s leading critic, Wang Hui, turns to the past for an answer. Beginning with the birth of modern politics in the 1911 revolution, Wang tracks the initial flourishing of political life, its blossoming in the radical sixties, and its decline in China’s more recent liberalization, to arrive at the crossroads of the present day. Examining the emergence of new class divisions between ethnic groups in the context of Tibet and Xinjiang, alongside the resurgence of neoliberalism through the lens of the Chongqing Incident, Wang Hui argues for a revival of social democracy as the only just path for China’s future.

In Liang Shuming and the Populist Alternative in China, Catherine Lynch examines the role of populist ideas in the development of Liang’s thinking.