Suchergebnisse

Intro -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- The Han abolition of universal military service -- Dou Jiande's dilemma: Logistics, strategy, and state formation in seventh-century China -- Tibet in Tang's grand strategy -- Waging war for peace? The peace accord between the Song and the Liao in AD 1005 -- Mountain fortress defence: The experience of the Southern Song and Korea in resisting the Mongol invasions -- Culture, history, and imperial Chinese strategy: Legacies of the Qing conquests -- Military dimensions of the 'Boxer Uprising' in Shanxi, 1898-1901 -- New states of war: Communist and Nationalist warfare and state building (1928-1934) -- Defending China: The battles of the Xuzhou campaign -- Conclusion -- Index.

This article focuses on Robert Hart during the Boxer Rebellion. My reconstruction of his activities is based on a recently discovered file in the archives of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service held at the Second Historical Archives in Nanjing. While it has long been known that Hart corresponded with Qing officials during the Siege itself and while a few letters have been published, the file contains more than one hundred exchanges between Hart and Qing officials written after the end of the Siege of the Legations. I have further relied on a box of documents dealing with the Boxer Rebellion in the Hart Manuscript Collection at the Queen's University of Belfast, including Hart's notes on his meetings with Qing officials. These materials provide insight into the way Hart was able to persuade the Qing and foreign countries to begin negotiations and illustrate the critical role he played in fashioning the Boxer Protocol signed on 7 September 1901.

Any historian with a serious interest in China's modern economic history will be grateful for Thomas Lyons's study of the trade statistics produced by the Chinese Maritime Customs Service. Those wishing to use the Customs' statistics will find it indispensable. By means of a detailed demonstration of how to reconstruct statistics for the Fujian tea trade between 1862 and 1948, Lyons shows all the pitfalls and dangers of using Customs data, and how to deal with them.Lyons, who has published on Fujian's and China's economic history in the past, constructs his study as a test of the tea trade statistics used by Robert Gardella and Chen Ciyu. He convincingly demonstrates that both made errors, which in the case of Gardella were of relatively minor consequence but in that of Chen of a much more serious nature. But his study is not a pedantic exercise in cliometric propriety. Rather, Lyons provides us with a sourcebook to the statistical publications of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service. He sets out in brief form the Service's organizational history and its bureaucratic structures. He then explains the Maritime Customs Service's accounts, the statistics it produced, and their dangers. He finally applies the lessons learned to a reconstruction of the Fujian tea trade.

van de Ven reviews DECISIVE ENCOUNTERS: The Chinese Civil War, 1946-1950 by Odd Arne Westad.

The arrest in May 1942 of Liao Chengzhi -- a CCP spy chief as well as the son of a celebrated KMT elder assassinated in 1925 -- is considered a Big Case in China. Using the original KMT case file on Liao Chengzhi, the author describes how the KMT's secret service turned the Jiangxi Provincial Committee & then arrested leading members of the CCP in south China & thereby eliminated its organization there. The article further uses letters by prominent CCP & KMT personalities involved in the case to suggest the existence of a revolutionary aristocracy bound by personal relations & with an elite code of conduct. When the political will was present, members of this elite deployed their personal connections in the search for solutions to complex political problems. Adapted from the source document.

This article argues for a historically aware approach in current discussions about Western diplomatic policy toward the People's Republic of China, a field that has become dominated by the realist & culturalist approaches. The initial focus is on the diplomacy of Chinese nationalism during the Republican period, noting similarities with current Chinese diplomacy. Next is a discussion of the role of diplomatic issues in domestic factional policies. The final substantial section explores cultural & ideological underpinnings of Western as well as Chinese diplomacy, locating these in European scholarly & religious discourses about the nature of nations & their maturation. The conclusion argues for the abandonment of idealist notions about either China or the "international community"; the rejection of paternalistic attitudes toward China; a greater awareness in international diplomacy of the importance of Chinese domestic factional relations; & for the abandonment of the imperialist lens through which Chinese policymakers continue to see the West. 84 Tables. Adapted from the source document.