Faculty books
MCI faculty research affiliates publish cutting-edge research on China.
Ed Pulford (2024): Past Progress: Time and Politics at the Borders of China, Russia, and Korea
While anxiety abounds in the old Cold War West that progress – whether political or economic – has been reversed, for citizens of former-socialist countries, murky temporal trajectories are nothing new. Grounded in the multiethnic frontier town of Hunchun at the triple border of China, Russia, and North Korea, Ed Pulford traces how several of global history's most ambitiously totalizing progressive endeavors have ended in cataclysmic collapse here.
From the Japanese empire which banished Qing, Tsarist, and Choson dynastic histories from the region, through Chinese, Soviet, and Korean socialisms, these borderlands have seen projections and disintegrations of forward-oriented ideas accumulate on a grand scale.
Xiaobing Wang (2024): Myths of China: Meet the Gods, Creatures, and Heroes of Ancient China
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From the creation of the world to the first emperors, this book charts the full sweep of ancient Chinese mythology, revealing fascinating elements of culture and religion along the way. The enthralling stories introduce mighty gods and mischievous creatures.
Yan Wang: Pension Policy and Governmentality in China: Manufacturing Public Compliance (2022)
Rapid economic growth is often a disruptive social process threatening the social relations and ideologies of incumbent regimes. Yet far from acting defensively, the Chinese Communist Party has lead a major social and economic transformation over forty years, without yet encountering fundamental challenges subverting its rule. A key question for political sociology is thus - how have the logics of China’s governmentality been able to help maintain compliance from the governed while acting so radically to advance the state’s growth priorities?
David R. Stroup (2022): Pure and True: The Everyday Politics of Ethnicity for China’s Hui Muslims
The Chinese Communist Party points to the Hui - China’s largest Muslim ethnic group - as a model ethnic minority and touts its harmonious relations with the group as an example of the Party’s great success in ethnic politics. The Hui number over ten million, but they lack a common homeland or a distinct language, and have long been partitioned by sect, class, region, and language.
Despite these divisions, they still express a common ethnic identity. Why doesn’t conflict plague relationships between the Hui and the state? And how do they navigate their ethnicity in a political climate that is increasingly hostile to Muslims?
Gordon Barrett (2022): China’s Cold War Science Diplomacy
During the early decades of the Cold War, the People's Republic of China remained outside much of mainstream international science. Nevertheless, Chinese scientists found alternative channels through which to communicate and interact with counterparts across the world, beyond simple East/West divides.
By examining the international activities of elite Chinese scientists, Gordon Barrett demonstrates that these activities were deeply embedded in the Chinese Communist Party's wider efforts to win hearts and minds from the 1940s to the 1970s. Using a wide range of archival material, including declassified documents from China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archive, Barrett provides fresh insights into the relationship between science and foreign relations in the People’s Republic of China.
Gregory Adam Scott (2020): Building the Buddhist Revival: Reconstructing Monasteries in Modern China
In this Oxford UP book, Manchester historian Gregory Scott explores the history of Chinese Buddhist monastery reconstruction from the end of the Imperial period through the first seventeen years of the People’s Republic.
It helps us understand the broader significance of the Buddhist ‘revival’ in China during this era, as a creative reconstruction of religion upon longstanding foundations.
Pierre Fuller (2019): Famine Relief in Warlord China
Famine Relief in Warlord China is a re-examination of disaster responses during the greatest ecological crisis of the pre-Nationalist Chinese republic. In 1920–1921, drought and ensuing famine devastated more than 300 counties in five northern provinces, leading to some 500,000 deaths. Long credited to international intervention, the relief effort, Pierre Fuller shows, actually began from within Chinese social circles.
Indigenous action from the household to the national level, modeled after Qing-era relief protocol, sustained the lives of millions of the destitute in Beijing, in the surrounding districts of Zhili (Hebei) Province, and along the migrant and refugee trail in Manchuria, all before joint foreign–Chinese international relief groups became a force of any significance.
Elena Barabantseva (2010): Overseas Chinese, ethnic minorities, and nationalism: De-centering China
This book offers new perspectives on the changing boundaries of the Chinese nation. It places domestic nation-building and transnational identity politics in a single analytical framework, and examines how they interact to frame the national project of the Chinese state.
By exploring the processes taking place at the ethnic and territorial margins of the Chinese nation-state, the author provides a new perspective on China’s national modernisation project, clarifying the processes occurring across national boundaries and illustrating how China has negotiated the basis for belonging to its national project under the challenge to modernise amid both domestic and global transformations.
Yang-Wen Zheng (2005): The Social Life of Opium in China
In a remarkable and broad-ranging narrative, Yangwen Zheng's book explores the history of opium consumption in China from 1483 to the late twentieth century. The story begins in the mid-Ming dynasty, when opium was sent as a gift by vassal states and used as an aphrodisiac in court. Over time, the Chinese people from different classes and regions began to use it for recreational purposes, so beginning a complex culture of opium consumption.
The book traces this transformation over a period of five hundred years, asking who introduced opium to China, how it spread across all sections of society, embraced by rich and poor alike as a culture and an institution. The book, which is accompanied by a fascinating collection of illustrations, will appeal to students and scholars of history, anthropology, sociology, political science, economics, and all those with an interest in China.
Peter Gries (2004): China’s New Nationalism: Pride, Politics, and Diplomacy
Three American missiles hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and what Americans view as an appalling and tragic mistake, many Chinese see as a "barbaric" and intentional "criminal act," the latest in a long series of Western aggressions against China.
In this book, Peter Hays Gries explores the roles of perception and sentiment in the growth of popular nationalism in China. At a time when the direction of China's foreign and domestic policies have profound ramifications worldwide, Gries offers a rare, in-depth look at the nature of China's new nationalism, particularly as it involves Sino-American and Sino-Japanese relations—two bilateral relations that carry extraordinary implications for peace and stability in the twenty-first century.