Culture, Power, and the State : Rural North China, 1900-1942

Prasenjit Duara

ISBN 10: 0804718881 / ISBN 13: 9780804718882

Published by Stanford University Press Apr 1991, 1991

About this Item

Neuware - In the early twentieth century, the Chinese state made strenuous efforts to broaden and deepen its authority over rural society. This book is an ambitious attempt to offer both a method and a framework for analyzing Chinese social history in the state-making era.

Seller Inventory # 9780804718882

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Culture, Power, and the State : Rural North China, 1900-1942
• Publisher: Stanford University Press Apr 1991
• Publication Date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804718881
• ISBN 13: 9780804718882
• Binding: Taschenbuch
• Condition: Neu
• Dimensions: 216W x 140H x 25D millimeters 216 millimeters width by 140 millimeters height by 25 millimeters depth
• Weight: 454 grams

About this title

Synopsis

In the early twentieth century, the Chinese state made strenuous efforts to broaden and deepen its authority over rural society. This book is an ambitious attempt to offer both a method and a framework for analyzing Chinese social history in the state-making era.

The author constructs a prismatic view of village-level society that shows how marketing, kinship, water control, temple patronage, and other structures of human interaction overlapped to form what he calls the cultural nexus of power in local society. The author's concept of the cultural nexus and his tracing of how it was altered enables us for the first time to grapple with change at the village level in all its complexity.

The author asserts that the growth of the state transformed and delegitimized the traditional cultural nexus during the Republican era, particularly in the realm of village leadership and finances. Thus, the expansion of state power was ultimately and paradoxically responsible for the revolution in China as it eroded the foundations of village life, leaving nothing in its place.

The problems of state-making in China were different from those of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe; the Chinese experience heralds the process that would become increasingly common in the emergent states of the developing world under the very different circumstances of the twentieth century.

About the Author

Prasenjit Duara is Director of the Asia Research Institute at National University of Singapore.