Mark C. Elliott

New Qing Imperial History : the Making of Inner Asian Empire at Qing Chengde

Part 1: Chengde as Inner Asian Capital Part 2: Rituals of Empire Part 3: The Emperors Many Faces Part 4: Voices from Chengde

The Case of the Missing Indigene: Debate Over a “Second-Generation” Ethnic Policy

The last few years have seen a vigorous public policy debate emerge over a “second-generation” ethnic policy (di’erdai minzu zhengce) which, if implemented, would constitute a major revision of ethnic politics in China. Despite the fact that nationalities policy is a notoriously sensitive subject within China, the debate is happening openly in newspapers, academic journals and on the Internet. The prominence accorded to anthropological theory and international comparison is a notable feature of the debate. This article first explores the main positions in the ongoing policy discussion, then goes on to argue that, rather than comparing China’s non-Han peoples to minority immigrant populations in the industrialized democracies, a better comparison is to indigenous peoples. It then considers why this perspective is completely missing from the present debate.

Manchu Widows and Ethnicity in Qing China

Like women in many parts of the world whose husbands predeceased them, widows in China were free electrons, unbound elements in the social chemistry. Economically vulnerable, ritually superfluous, and at the same time socially destabilizing and sexually threatening, they were archetypal liminal figures—marginalized, caricatured, and feared. This has made the widow a good subject for literary critics, anthropologists, and historians interested in the way that societies treat women and in the way that treatment of widows in particular is intended to ward off or contain potential disturbance to the status quo. For China, as pioneering work by Mark Elvin and Susan Mann has shown, examining changing attitudes toward widows can illuminate larger social, political, and economic shifts in the late imperial period, roughly the thirteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Mark Elvin, “Female Virtue and the State,” Past and Present 104, 111–52; and Susan Mann, “Widows in the Kinship, Class, and Community Structures of Qing Dynasty China,” Journal of Asian Studies, 46:1 (February 1987), 37–56. Among newer work, see the excellent discussion in Bettine Birge, “Levirate Marriage and the Revival of Widow Chastity in Yuan China,” Asia Major, 8:2 (Fall 1995), 107–46. By focusing on Manchu widows, the present essay attempts to improve our understanding of widowhood in late imperial China and at the same time shed light on the role of widows, and women generally, in the construction of ethnicity in the Qing period (1644–1911), when the alien Manchu dynasty ruled the country.

Bannerman and Townsman: Ethnic Tension in Nineteenth-Century Jiangnan

Anyone lucky enough on the morning of July 21, 1842, to escape the twenty-foot high, four-mile long walls surrounding the city of Zhenjiang would have beheld a depressing spectacle: the fall of the city to foreign invaders. Standing on a hill, looking northward across the city toward the Yangzi, he might have decried the masts of more than seventy British ships anchored in a thick nest on the river, or perhaps have noticed the strange shapes of the four armored steamships that, contrary to expectations, had successfully penetrated the treacherous lower stretches of Chinas main waterway. Might have seen this, indeed, except that his view most likely would have been screened by the black clouds of smoke swirling up from one, then two, then three of the citys five gates, as fire spread to the guardtowers atop them. His ears dinned by the report of rifle and musket fire and the roar of cannon and rockets, he would scarcely have heard the sounds of panic as townsmen, including his own relatives and friends, screamed to be allowed to leave the city, whose gates had been held shut since the week before by order of the commander of

Frederic Wakeman, Jr., 1937–2006

Frederic Wakeman Jr., pre-eminent historian of modern China and Haas Professor of Asian Studies emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, died of cancer on 14 September 2006 in Lake Oswego, Oregon, at the age of 68. He is survived by his wife, He Lea Wakeman, his sister, Sue Farquhar, three children, Frederic III, Matthew and Sarah, and two grandchildren.

Book Reviews : WANG Shaoguang, Failure of Charisma: The Cultural Revolution in Wuhan. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press 1995. viii+345 pp., with tables, figures, bibl., and index. ISBN: 0-19-585950-2. Price: £32.50

to the limitations of the sources (the Shanghai Municipal Police appear to have routinely described most of their suspects simply as &dquo;notorious loafers&dquo;) and the growing expertise and ruthlessness of those who fielded terrorist squads, ensuring that few Sun Yaxings would be in the position to give depositions after 1938. Wakeman concentrates for the most part on the ins and outs of the terrorist wars in Shanghai, but he does suggest some broader implications of these struggles. As in Policing Shanghai, he draws attention to the moral corrosion which affected anyone who tried to impose order on the politically divided city while profiting from it at the same time. He briefly discusses the theoretical question of the nature of collaboration, but does not directly compare his observations on the phenomenon in Shanghai with those of other scholars of Shanghai or elsewhere. For diplomatic historians of World War II, he proffers the intriguing suggestion that the terror in Shanghai was central to the US decision to &dquo;stiffen in the direction of abrogating commercial relations&dquo; with Japan in 1939, which &dquo;in turn helped lead Japan toward Pearl Harbor&dquo; (p. 5).