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This collection provides new ways to understand how state power was exercised during the overlapping Liao, Song, Jin, and Yuan dynasties. Through a set of case studies, State Power in China, 900-1325 examines large questions concerning dynastic legitimacy, factional strife, the relationship between the literati and the state, and the value of centralization. How was state power exercised? Why did factional strife periodically become ferocious? Which problems did reformers seek to address? Could subordinate groups resist the state? How did politics shape the sources that survive? The nine essays in this volume explore key elements of state power, ranging from armies, taxes, and imperial patronage to factional struggles, officials’ personal networks, and ways to secure control of conquered territory. Drawing on new sources, research methods, and historical perspectives, the contributors illuminate the institutional side of state power while confronting evidence of instability and change—of ways to gain, lose, or exercise power.
A highly readable and engaging survey of China's history from the tenth through the mid-fourteenth centuries.
The Politics of Higher Education: The Imperial University in Northern Song China uses the history of the Imperial University of the Northern Song to show the limits of the Song emperors’ powers. At the time, the university played an increasingly dominant role in selecting government officials. This role somehow curtailed the authority of the Song emperors, who did not possess absolute power and, more often than not, found their actions to be constrained by the institution. The nomination mechanism left room for political maneuvering and stakeholders—from emperors to scholar-officials—tried to influence the process. Hence, power struggles among successive emperors trying to assert their imperial authority ensued. Demands for greater autonomy by officials were, for example, unceasing. Chu Ming-kin shows that the road to autocracy was anything but linear. In fact, during the Northern Song dynasty, competition and compromises over diverse agendas constantly altered the political landscape. “The scholarship of this book is exceptionally sound. Chu’s command of both primary and secondary sources is breathtaking in its scope. This will be the standard treatment of Northern Song higher education for many years to come. The pages that describe how the university functioned as a cynical vehicle to facilitate upper class entry into the jinshi system are fascinating and an important contribution to the larger scholarship on Song culture.” —Charles Hartman, University at Albany, State University of New York “This work highlights in arresting detail a heretofore neglected area of higher education under the Northern Song, the Directorate of Higher Education, with particular focus on student activism at the peak of the institution’s political clout. There is nothing comparable either in China or the Western World. The book is ambitious in the use of sources, while nuanced in interpreting them. In sum, it is a work of rare erudition, particularly for a young scholar.” —Richard L. Davis, National Taiwan University
How social networks shaped the imperial Chinese state China was the world’s leading superpower for almost two millennia, falling behind only in the last two centuries and now rising to dominance again. What factors led to imperial China’s decline? The Rise and Fall of Imperial China offers a systematic look at the Chinese state from the seventh century through to the twentieth. Focusing on how short-lived emperors often ruled a strong state while long-lasting emperors governed a weak one, Yuhua Wang shows why lessons from China’s history can help us better understand state building. Wang argues that Chinese rulers faced a fundamental trade-off that he calls the sovereign’s dilemma: a coherent elite that could collectively strengthen the state could also overthrow the ruler. This dilemma emerged because strengthening state capacity and keeping rulers in power for longer required different social networks in which central elites were embedded. Wang examines how these social networks shaped the Chinese state, and vice versa, and he looks at how the ruler’s pursuit of power by fragmenting the elites became the final culprit for China’s fall. Drawing on more than a thousand years of Chinese history, The Rise and Fall of Imperial China highlights the role of elite social relations in influencing the trajectories of state development.
This book explores the phenomenon of total power in East Asia, with particular attention to China, Korea, and Japan. It shows how total power enables an examination of regional experience as a part of global context in order to demarcate the connections with other countries and regions that have similar political cultures, such as those in Central Asia, the Middle East, and East Africa. Moreover, it elucidates that the phenomenon of total power unpacks the interrelations not only between different countries, but also between political, economic, religious, or cultural aspects of the region as a whole, and of each country in particular. This book takes East Asia as a classic example of where total power has achieved the highest forms of development during traditional periods in the form of absolute economic dependence of society on the state, ideologically enshrined by a system of moral obligations toward supreme power that allowed for the establishment of a monopoly on forced labour, and the appropriation and distribution of social products. The author emphasizes the importance of exploring the tradition of total power with reference to the ongoing global crisis of European democracy. In doing so, the book shows that democratization has not brought qualitative changes to the political culture of East Asia. An essential interdisciplinary read for scholars studying political science, particularly East-West relations, this book situates East Asian political culture within a global context.
Charles Hartman presents an ambitious analysis of the workings of governance in Imperial China centered on the Song Dynasty (960–1279). Here he develops a new model for thinking about the deeper structures of governance in Song and pre-imperial China – the 'technocratic–Confucian continuum' – which challenges the prevailing perception of Confucian political dominance and offers a vehicle for expanding the definition and scope of Song political culture to embrace all its actors. Building on his acclaimed work The Making of Song Dynasty History: Sources and Narratives, 960–1279 CE (2021), this richly detailed exploration of the Song court is of significance beyond the immediate period of study both in rethinking the nature of monarchy in China and in examining the constructive possibility of political dissent.
Since the second century BC the Confucian Classics, endorsed by the successive ruling houses of imperial China, had stood in tension with the statist ideals of “big government.” In Northern Song China (960–1127), a group of reform-minded statesmen and thinkers sought to remove the tension between the two by revisiting the highly controversial classic, the Rituals of Zhou: the administrative blueprint of an archaic bureaucratic state with the six ministries of some 370 offices staffed by close to 94,000 men. With their revisionist approaches, they reinvented it as the constitution of state activism. Most importantly, the reform-councilor Wang Anshi’s (1021–1086) new commentary on the Rituals of Zhou rose to preeminence during the New Policies period (ca. 1068–1125), only to be swept into the dustbin of history afterward. By reconstructing his revisionist exegesis from its partial remains, this book illuminates the interplay between classics, thinkers, and government in statist reform, and explains why the uneasy marriage between classics and state activism had to fail in imperial China.
This book is the winner of the 2020 Joseph Levenson Pre-1900 Book Prize, awarded by the Association for Asian Studies. In Song Dynasty Figures of Longing and Desire, Lara Blanchard analyzes images of women in painting and poetry of China’s middle imperial period, focusing on works that represent female figures as preoccupied with romance. She discusses examples of visual and literary culture in regard to their authorship and audience, examining the role of interiority in constructions of gender, exploring the rhetorical functions of romantic images, and considering connections between subjectivity and representation. The paintings in particular have sometimes been interpreted as simple representations of the daily lives of women, or as straightforward artifacts of heteroerotic desire; Blanchard proposes that such works could additionally be interpreted as political allegories, representations of the artist’s or patron’s interiorities, or models of idealized femininity.
This deeply researched book provides an original history of Chinese women during the pivotal Song and Yuan dynasties (960–1368). Bret Hinsch explores the most important aspects of female life in this era―political power, family, work, inheritance, religious roles, and emotions―and considers why the status of women declined during this period.
A three-thousand-year history of the Yellow River and the legacy of interactions between humans and the natural landscape From Neolithic times to the present day, the Yellow River and its watershed have both shaped and been shaped by human society. Using the Yellow River to illustrate the long-term effects of environmentally significant human activity, Ruth Mostern unravels the long history of the human relationship with water and soil and the consequences, at times disastrous, of ecological transformations that resulted from human decisions. As Mostern follows the Yellow River through three millennia of history, she underlines how governments consistently ignored the dynamic interrelationships of the river’s varied ecosystems—grasslands, riparian forests, wetlands, and deserts—and the ecological and cultural impacts of their policies. With an interdisciplinary approach informed by archival research and GIS (geographical information system) records, this groundbreaking volume provides unique insight into patterns, transformations, and devastating ruptures throughout ecological history and offers profound conclusions about the way we continue to affect the natural systems upon which we depend.