Romeyn Taylor

Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China

Introduction: gender and the politics of Chinese history Part I. Social and Private Histories: 1. In the floating world: women and commercial publishing 2. The enchantment of love in The Poetry Pavilion Part II. Womanhood: 3. Margins of domesticity: enlarging the womens sphere 4. Talent, virtue, and beauty: rewriting womanhood Part III. Womens culture: 5. Domestic communities: male and female domains 6. Social and public communities: genealogies across time and space 7. Transitory communities: courtesan, wife, and professional artist Epilogue Reference matter Notes Index.

Chinese Hierarchy in Comparative Perspective

How are we to understand the history of a nonmodern civilization without refracting and distorting what we see through the prism of the ostensibly individualistic and egalitarian modern culture in which most of us live and which we tend to take as normative? In this article I invite other modern-minded readers to turn our worldview upside down and look at Chinese society over the long term from the perspective of its official ideology and not from the perspective of a universalized modern worldview in which economic relations are privileged above all others.

China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia: Perdue, Peter C.: Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 725 pp., Publication Date: April 2005

The dynamic of competing nationalisms struggling to cultivate popular support for either a state or regional identity is the central focus of Nationalist Voices in Jordan. Its author, Betty S . Anderson, an assistant professor of Middle East and world history at Boston University, contends that in that contest, the Jordanian experience was quite unique as the country’s artificial state structure, largely a colonial construct erected around the Hashemite dynasty, managed to defeat and co-opt the challenges of those who questioned its legitimacy. During the 195Os, a coalition of political parties, known as the Jordanian National Movement (JNM), called for greater popular participation in determining domestic policies and in fostering regional unity based on Arab nationalism. Led by the urban intelligentsia, in large part a product of the emerging modem state, and bolstered by the professional classes of the newly incorporated West Bank, the movement was the culmination of a political and ideological development that was years in the making. Anderson argues that the coalition represented a serious challenge to the Hashemite state, as the nationalist party leaders and activists mobilized the citizenry, particularly in the cities, to protest government policies and the level of British influence in Jordan. In response, King Husayn felt pressured to liberalize the political process and allow the opposition to form a government. That decision, to obligate the nationalists to assume the reins of power and be responsible for promulgating effective policies, somewhat eased the pressure mounting on the Hashemite establishment. The opposition, on the other hand, faltered once it achieved the coveted control of the government as the JNM gradually splintered under factional fighting and ideological disputes. Anderson attributes the failure of the nationalist coalition in large measure to its lack of sustained unity in the face of an entrenched Hashimite state. Jordan avoided abrupt and radical change, unlike many other countries in the region, because “the regime supplied the services the people wanted and a national story giving it the legitimacy to do so, not to mention the fact that its intelligence organization grew competent enough to uncover antagonistic plots” (194). Through a nuanced use of soft and hard power, mixing gradual reform, government employment, and social services with a sizable security apparatus, namely the army, the Hashemite dynasty retained sufficient support to weather the JNM challenge and manage the pace and scope of domestic changes. Nationalist Voices provides a clear yet thorough analysis of the contentious efforts to define and spread regional nationalism across the Arab world. With its focus on events in Jordan, the book, written for a mostly academic audience, constitutes an in depth countrystudy of the political struggle in which a regime and its opponents competed for the right to define Arab nationalism.

Women, Property, and Confucian Reaction in Sung and Yuan China (960–1368)

The Mongol invasion of China in the thirteenth century had far-reaching consequences, but it has generally been assumed that in the area of gender and property relations, Mongol rule had no long-term effect on Chinese society. In this path-breaking work, Bettine Birge argues that on the contrary, the Mongol occupation precipitated a lasting transformation of marriage and property law in China that deprived women of their property rights and reduced their legal and economic autonomy. Birge shows that just prior to the Mongol-Yüan dynasty, women’s property rights had been steadily improving, and laws and practices affecting marriage and property had been moving away from Confucian ideals. Mongol rule created a new constellation of property and gender relations that persisted to the end of the imperial era. Birge demonstrates how the confrontation between Chinese and Mongol-steppe culture ironically created the conditions for dramatic changes in the law that for the first time brought it into line with the goals of radical Confucian philosophers by curtailing women’s financial and personal autonomy. These changes resulted in a shift in the balance of power from a woman and her natal family to her in-laws and marital family and laid the groundwork for the spread of the cult of widow chastity in late imperial China. This book offers a fresh evaluation of the Mongol invasion and its influence on Chinese law and society and presents a new look at the changing position of women in premodern China. Birge’s analysis reveals the links between foreign invasion, social change, and the construction of gender, and her conclusions have implications for the study of comparative law, social history, and gender studies around the world.

Imperial China, 900–1800: Mote, F. W.: Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1107 pp., Publication Date: November 1999

Imperial China is a tour de force: a millennium of Chinese history in the form of an intelligible narrative. F. W. Mote has accomplished this by holding unwaveringly to one perspective and one voice throughout. The perspective is that of a political history of the Chinese Empire in the context of an evolving civilization and with the whole ensemble encompassed by its East and Inner Asian context. The narrative culminates in Mote’s reflections on the confrontation, after 1800, between Chinese and Western worlds, each with its pretensions to universality and ultimate superiority in the context of a modernizing world order. Mote respects the reader and wears his learning lightly. The intended audience is an intelligent layperson willing to roll up his sleeves and do some serious reading on Chinese history. Mote brings the reader close to the subject, despite its immensity, by staying close to his documents. He has relied mainly on his own translations from the Chinese texts and on the translations of others from the literary languages of the Inner Asian frontiers. Moreover, the reader is constantly reminded of the power of human agency in history by the scores of concise sketches of the lives and the character of representative actors as they appear. Imperial China is also distinguished by its extensive and in-depth histories of the steppe and forest peoples along the Inner Frontiers. These take up about 150 pages, in addition to Mote’s thoughtful accounts of the hybrid, conquest regimes, with their unstable collaborations between alien courts and military establishments and Chinese civil administrators. The frontier emphasis throws the Chinese world order into high relief while connecting it with universal history. On the vexed question of the periodization of Chinese history, Mote labels the nine centuries of his narrative as “later imperial” (3). By doing so, he avoids the teleological and Eurocentric “early modern” tag, while acknowledging its use by others for the period beginning in the Southern Song (320-321). Mote supports his rejection of Western models of historical development in a lucid and thoroughgoing refutation of the “buds of capitalism” theory, which claims to have found evidence that China entered a precapitalist stage in the late imperial period (765). His adoption of the Five Dynasties era (907-959) as the beginning of the late imperial period is justified here on several grounds. It marked the beginning of a millennium during the greater part of which some or all of the Chinese people were subject to non-Chinese (that is, non-Han) rulers. It saw the final displacement of the political center of the empire eastward from the Wei valley to the north China plain. The Five Dynasties period also accomplished the definitive destruction of the aristocratic elite of the Six Dynasties and Tang, which prepared the way for accelerated commercial urbanization, and easier upward social mobility through the civil service examination system. Mote lets the year 1800 stand as the end of the late imperial period, when continuous Chinese contacts with the Western world, already more than two centuries old, were about to spin out of control and assume a threatening character. An issue often raised in relation to Chinese frontier history is whether an author’s stance does justice to claims of both Chinese and their non-Han neighbors. In conquest regimes, where a ruling elite of non-Chinese origin makes certain accommodations to Chinese culture and institutions, the better to govern their Chinese subjects, is this a question of “sinification,” that is, of barbarians striving to become culturally Chinese? Or is it a question of barbarians skillfully employing Chinese means in their own undisguised “barbarian” interests? Mote addresses the issue in relation to the Khitans’ Liao dynasty by ascribing to them the latter policy (42). In the context of the Manchu Qing Dynasty, he still rejects the sinification thesis, but with a difference. Owing to their relatively precarious military situation at the time of the conquest, the Manchus adopted “a public stance [italics mine] of being more Chinese than the Chinese.” This does not appear to contradict the anti-sinocentric position staked out by Evelyn Rawski in her recently published The Last Emperors. If the “barbarian” conquerors retained their ethnic identity, with one foot in China and the other in steppe or forest, the Chinese also maintained their identity under alien domination, though both were at times “corrupted” in some degree by the other. That raises the question of Chinese ethnic identity in the face of regional differences and changes over time, which Mote defines in