Origins of the Modern Chinese State

Kuhn Philip

ISBN 10: 0804749299 / ISBN 13: 9780804749299

Published by Stanford University Press, 2003

About this Item

pp. 176.

Seller Inventory # 7989705

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Origins of the Modern Chinese State
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication Date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804749299
• ISBN 13: 9780804749299
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

What is “Chinese” about China’s modern state? This book proposes that the state we see today has developed over the past two centuries largely as a response to internal challenges emerging from the late empire. Well before the Opium War, Chinese confronted such constitutional questions as: How does the scope of political participation affect state power? How is the state to secure a share of society’s wealth? In response to the changing demands of the age, this agenda has been expressed in changing language. Yet, because the underlying pattern remains recognizable, the modernization of the state in response to foreign aggression can be studied in longer perspective.

The author offers three concrete studies to illustrate the constitutional agenda in action: how the early nineteenth-century scholar-activist Wei Yuan confronted the relation between broadened political participation and authoritarian state power; how the reformist proposals of the influential scholar Feng Guifen were received by mainstream bureaucrats during the 1898 reform movement; and how fiscal problems of the late empire formed a backdrop to agricultural collectivization in the 1950s. In each case, the author presents the “modern” constitutional solution as only the most recent answer to old Chinese questions. The book concludes by describing the transformation of the constitutional agenda over the course of the modern period.

About the Author

Philip A. Kuhn is Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History at Harvard University. His most recent book is Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768, winner of the Joseph Levenson Prize of the Association for Asian Stud