Peter Zarrow

Imagining the People: Chinese Intellectuals and the Concept of Citizenship, 1890-1920

This textbook acquaints readers with the major federal statutes and regulations that control management and employment practices in the American workplace. The material is presented from the perspective that the human resource professional is the employers representative and is, therefore, responsible for protecting the employers interests and reducing the employers exposure to litigation through monitoring activities and viable employee policies. The book is designed as a tool for todays business and management professionals, and unlike some other texts in the field, maintains a pro-business or pro-management approach. The authors have skilfully crafted Employment Regulation in the Workplace to be an effective learning tool. Each chapter opens with learning objectives and an example scenario, and each chapter contains plenty of illustrative figures, boxes, and diagrams. Chapters conclude with a listing of key terms, questions for discussion, and two case exercises. The book also includes a comprehensive bibliography.

He Zhen and Anarcho-Feminism in China

Anarchists publishing in small student journals in the years before the 1911 Revolution made a significant contribution to Chinese feminism. They linked feminism to their call for a complete social revolution; they understood the oppression of women in China to be linked to modern class divisions and economic exploitation as well as traditional culture. They discussed the relationships among feminism, individual rights, and political liberties. He Zhen in particular severed feminism from nationalism, proclaiming “womens liberation” not “for the sake of the nation” but out of moral necessity.

Anti-Despotism and “Rights Talk”: The Intellectual Origins of Modern Human Rights Thinking in the Late Qing

During the last years of the Qing dynasty, intellectuals began to refer to the notion of “human rights” with increasing frequency, and it soon became, in effect, indigenized. In this process, Chinese intellectuals forged a modern conception of rights that was not identical to todays notions but treated rights as morally necessary, along with duties, for any decent society. Rights talk spread rapidly because it was a powerful tool for the critique of Qing despotism and also for the building of a modern state. In a fashion in some ways parallel to the northern Atlantic world two and three centuries previously, late Qing intellectuals combined fears of despotism with dreams of a new constitutional order based on rights-bearing citizens. Anti-despotism thus fueled rights thinking, as was seen not only among radicals but also by the last years of the Qing, among reformers and even officials as well.

One, two, many revolutions

History depends on perspective, and historians of China may legitimately treat the revolutions of the twentieth century—1911, 1928, 1949, and 1966—as distinct upheavals. In this view, each revolution needs to be understood in terms of its distinct causation and development. It is equally legitimate to understand these events as a single, larger movement—a “long revolution.” From this point of view, “revolution” is not limited to the actions of self-proclaimed revolutionaries but encompasses the activities of all those who contributed to fundamental structural change of the polity. In this light, the so-called reformers of 1898 and the liberals of the New Culture movement that got underway in 1915 were integral to the unfolding of the Chinese revolution, and the revolution is seen as a long process that was in many ways shaped by the rich cultural resources of the past. Furthermore, it is possible to take an even broader perspective. The twentieth century was surely an era of anti-imperialist, state-building revolutions around the world, and it is useful to examine the Chinese case in its global context. In the West, “the history of the twentieth century is almost always written as the story of a series of catastrophes,” as the historian Jay Winter has noted. The twentieth century was an era of utopian planning that “wound up producing mountains of victims on a scale the world had rarely seen.” Hitler and Stalin haunt the memory of the West, and if the capitalist crises of the 1990s and 2000s have dented neoliberal triumphalism, they have had little impact on the general disillusionment with revolution. Nonetheless, the promise of revolution—whether nationalist, Communist, or democratic—is less tarnished elsewhere. For the twentieth century, at least, it is not possible to speak of revolutions entirely in terms of either anonymous

Chinese press accounts of the 1911 Revolution: Seeing ‘revolution’

By examining how a particular story of events from October 1911 through to the abdication of the Qing imperial house in February 1912 was constructed, it is possible to suggest the effects of that story both as events unfolded and on subsequent historical consciousness. This article examines the coverage of the revolution in two newspapers, Shenbao, founded in Shanghai in 1872, and Dagongbao, founded in Tianjin in 1902. They were not necessarily representative of the press as a whole, much less public opinion, but they demonstrate different versions of the same essential narrative. The Shenbao story of ‘1911’ told of struggle and triumph, culminating in the election of Sun Yat-sen as provisional president on 1 January 1912, which marked the founding of the republic. Dagongbao lacked triumphalism and was almost tragic in its reading of the revolution. Nonetheless, Dagongbao as much as Shenbao was quick to present a story of the transformation of ‘chaos’ into ‘revolution’ and finally into the republic (with the imperial abdication of 12 February). Both newspapers traced the revolution from the Wuchang Uprising, and the resulting narrative structure divided political time into before and after. That division is probably the essence of ‘revolution’.

A Bitter Revolution: China's Struggle with the Modern World. Rana Mitter

Review(s) of: A Bitter Revolution: Chinas Struggle with the Modern World, Rana Mitter, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. xx + 357 pp.

And never the twain shall meet

Alain Grosrichard. The Sultans Court: European Fantasies of the East (trans. Liz Heron). London and New York: Verso, 1998. xxvii, 222 pp. A

Book Reviews : Mark ELVIN, Changing Stories in the Chinese World. Stanford: Stanford Univer sity Press 1998. Distributed outside North America by Cambridge University Press. xiv +256 pp. ISBN: 0-8047- 3090-3 (hc), 0-8047-3091-1 (pbk). Price: £35.00/US

35.00, paper. J.J. Clarke. Oriental Enlightenment: the Encounter between Asian and Western Thought. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. vii, 273 pp. £45.00, hardcover; £12.99, paper. Andrew Gerstle and Anthony Milner, eds. Recovering the Orient: artists, Scholars, Appropriations. Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1994. ix, 362 pp. A

49.50 (hc), £12.95/US

86.00, hardcover; A

18.95 (hc)

42.00, paper.