Favoured by the exceptional economic circumstances of the First World War and the immediate post-war years, Chinese entrepreneurs made their mark by modernising and establishing themselves as a business bourgeoisie. Focusing upon Shanghai, this study explores the astonishing growth of Western-style industry, commerce and banking during the Republic's first decade. Marie-Claire Bergere analyses how the bourgeoisie gradually constituted itself as a specific and coherent social class, with its own ideology and type of political action, built upon family solidarities and regional links; and she examines the relations between this class and the State, the Revolution and the West.

China is now poised to take a key role on the world stage, but in the early twentieth century the situation could not have been more different. Rana Mitter goes back to this pivotal moment in Chinese history to uncover the origins of the painful transition from a premodern past into a modern world. By the 1920s the seemingly civilized world shaped over the last two thousand years by the legacy of the great philosopher Confucius was falling apart in the face of western imperialism and internal warfare. Chinese cities still bore the imprints of its ancient past with narrow, lanes and temples to long-worshipped gods, but these were starting to change with the influx of foreign traders, teachers, and missionaries, all eager to shape China's ancient past into a modern present. Mitter takes us through the resulting social turmoil and political promise, the devastating war against Japan in the 1940s, Communism and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, and the new era of hope in the 1980s ended by the Tian'anmen uprising. He reveals the impetus behind the dramatic changes in Chinese culture and politics as being China's "New Culture" - a strain of thought which celebrated youth, individualism, and the heady mixture of strange and seductive new cultures from places as far apart as America, India, and Japan.

This essay collection presents a global history of the middle class and its rise around the world during the age of empire. It compares middle-class formation in various regions, highlighting differences and similarities, and assesses the extent to which bourgeois growth was tied to the increasing exchange of ideas and goods and was a result of international connections and entanglements. Grouped by theme, the book shows how bourgeois values can shape the liberal world order.

In recent years the phenomenal rise of the economies of China and India has led to a proliferation of academic studies. Much of the focus has been on economic performance, development strategies and the comparative advantage of the two economies. A comparative study of business as an agent of change has been lacking This volume brings together articles by leading scholars in the field of Chinese and Indian business who offer fresh perspectives on the historical antecedents of business in the two economies.

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.

Over the past thirty-five years, Joshua Fogel has pioneered the study of Sino-Japanese cultural and political relations—understood as the intersections of the histories of these two countries. This volume brings together many of his essays and reviews in this new field. For a variety of reasons discussed within, scholars have been reluctant to look at these two nation’s historical connections, either through comparative analysis or actual interactions. Fogel’s work has focused squarely here. Among the issues addressed are Japanese scholarly views of modern China and Chinese history, Chinese considerations of the Japanese language in the Ming and Qing periods, the Japanese immigration to the East Asian Mainland (especially to Shanghai and Harbin), and more.

This book explores the rise of Shanghai-based popular magazines produced by the “Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School” in early twentieth-century China. It examines the national, gender, family, and social imaginaries constructed and negotiated through a complex network of relationships between popular writers, magazine editors, and their intended readers, which were represented in various forms of popular narratives, including patriotic stories, war/military stories, family narratives, domestic fiction, utopian writings, and industrial-business stories. The author argues that the national imagination, social ideals, and the notions of ideal womanhood and the new family, were intrinsically linked and integral to the search for cultural identity of the emerging Chinese “middle society” and an expression of their collective sensibilities, experiences, and aspirations. This book suggests that the cultural imaginaries configurated in these magazine stories articulated a shared quest for modernity, one that emphasized sentiment, quotidian experience, the pursuit of the modern family and individual success, strengthening of the nation, and the reinvention of cultural tradition. Popular magazines and fiction, therefore, became uniquely instrumental in catalyzing the process of Chinese modernity, which emerged and developed along the symbiotic interrelations between the private and the public, the traditional and the modern, and the real and the imaginary.