Books
MCI hosts in house book workshops to help our research affiliates develop their ideas about China. We also host book release events to disseminate China studies research findings. Celebrating successes also contributes to our supportive research culture.
Book release events
As a visiting scholar at MCI, George Washington University historian Eric Schluessel completed his translation of the Tarikh-i Hamidi, an early 20th century history of Xinjiang, originally written by Musa Sayrami.
It chronicles a Muslim rebellion against the Qing empire in the late 19th century, presenting a distinctly Uyghur perspective on China, Eurasia, and the world. Eric’s translation has been published by Columbia University Press.
Manchester public historian Michael Wood follows in the footsteps of Du Fu (712-70), one of China’s greatest poets, to try to understand the places that inspired Du Fu to write some of the most famous and best-loved poetry the world has known. The themes he wrote about – friendship, family, human suffering – are universal and in our troubled times are just as relevant as they were almost 1,300 years ago. Published by Simon & Schuster in 2023.
Professor Rawson (Oxford) explores the significance of China’s ancient early tombs which built a major architectural tradition from 3000 BC to the 19th century, an unrivalled source of information on the wider political and social contexts, illustrating important parallels with the modern Chinese state and society. Published by Penguin in 2023.
In 1644, after close to three centuries of relative stability and prosperity, the Ming dynasty collapsed. Many historians attribute its demise to the Manchu invasion of China, but the truth is far more profound. UBC historian Tim Brook provides an entirely new approach to the economic and social history of China, exploring how global climate crisis spelled the end of Ming rule.
Starting with Queen Elizabeth I’s letter to the Ming Emperor Wanli and ending with the letter from Lord Palmerston to the Minister of China just before the Opium War, this book narrates the fascinating encounters between the two historic empires and explores the long journey from cultural diplomacy to gunboat diplomacy. This book event was held in conversation with historian Michael Wood at the John Ryland Library.
Faculty books on China (selected)
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.
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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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.