The Rise And Fall Of Imperial China

Author : Yuhua Wang
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691237514
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Rise and Fall of Imperial China written by Yuhua Wang and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-11 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Frederic Wakeman
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 0029336805
Total Pages : 296 pages
Book Rating : 4.09/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Fall of Imperial China written by Frederic Wakeman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1977 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Simon & Schuster, The Fall of Imperial China is Frederic Wakeman, Jr.'s exploration of Imperial China—both its astronomic rise and steep decline. From the Introduction: "Historians of modern China are used to contrasting the dizzying changes in post-renaissance Europe with the glacial creep of Confucian civilization. The West's global expansion to new vistas of discovery thus distorts our perspective of those older worlds that resisted European conquest. The most tenacious of these ancient civilizations was the Chinese empire."

Author : Mark Edward Lewis
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674060350
Total Pages : 351 pages
Book Rating : 4.57/5 ( download)

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Download or read book China Between Empires written by Mark Edward Lewis and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-30 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the collapse of the Han dynasty in the third century CE, China divided along a north-south line. Mark Lewis traces the changes that both underlay and resulted from this split in a period that saw the geographic redefinition of China, more engagement with the outside world, significant changes to family life, developments in the literary and social arenas, and the introduction of new religions. The Yangzi River valley arose as the rice-producing center of the country. Literature moved beyond the court and capital to depict local culture, and newly emerging social spaces included the garden, temple, salon, and country villa. The growth of self-defined genteel families expanded the notion of the elite, moving it away from the traditional great Han families identified mostly by material wealth. Trailing the rebel movements that toppled the Han, the new faiths of Daoism and Buddhism altered every aspect of life, including the state, kinship structures, and the economy. By the time China was reunited by the Sui dynasty in 589 ce, the elite had been drawn into the state order, and imperial power had assumed a more transcendent nature. The Chinese were incorporated into a new world system in which they exchanged goods and ideas with states that shared a common Buddhist religion. The centuries between the Han and the Tang thus had a profound and permanent impact on the Chinese world.

Author : DK
Publisher : National Geographic Books
ISBN 13 : 0744020476
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Imperial China written by DK and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explore the long and rich history of China's great dynasties. From the clans and legends of prehistory to the last Qing emperor, this book brings China's imperial history to life through its pivotal events, political forces, and powerful people, in a stunning collaboration between British and Chinese publishing houses. Covering more than 5,000 years of history and featuring images of artifacts not previously seen outside of China, this definitive visual guide will captivate readers with the key events that shaped Chinese history and laid the foundations of the modern nation. Starting with prehistory and early humans, Imperial China sets the scene for the arrival of China's first dynasty and reveals how the warring states of early China gave birth to the emperor-led dynasties - and China's long imperial age. With illuminating features on important historical figures, cultural achievements, and philosophy - such as the rise of Confucianism and the silk and tea trades - Imperial China explores how the Chinese empire flourished and declined over the course of two millennia - from the unifying "first emperor" of the Qin and the golden ages of Tang and Song, to the final fall of the Manchu Qing dynasty. With stunning photography of art and artifacts to bring key events to life, this exquisite and comprehensive history is ideal for anyone who wants to learn more about China's extraordinary heritage.

Author : Stephen Wynn
Publisher : Pen and Sword Military
ISBN 13 : 1473865506
Total Pages : 162 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Rise & Fall of Imperial Japan written by Stephen Wynn and published by Pen and Sword Military. This book was released on 2020-08-30 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nearly a century of Japanese Imperial rule, from the 1868 Meiji Restoration to the end of WWII, is explored in this sweeping history. Under Emperor Meiji’s rule, Imperial Japan established itself as a world power through rapid industrialization and militarization. Aligned with the Entente Powers during the First World War, Japan made a proposal for racial equality at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference—only to be overruled by American President Woodrow Wilson. In the 1920s, the empire began its military conquest of numerous countries and islands throughout Asia and the Pacific regions. Author Stephen Wynn examines Japan’s various military conflicts and colonial efforts, including its invasion of China that coincided with the Second World War. The book culminates with the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which finally brought about Japan’s surrender and the end of the war in Asia and the Pacific.

Author : Mark Edward Lewis
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 067403306X
Total Pages : 367 pages
Book Rating : 4.61/5 ( download)

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Download or read book China’s Cosmopolitan Empire written by Mark Edward Lewis and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Tang dynasty is often called China’s “golden age,” a period of commercial, religious, and cultural connections from Korea and Japan to the Persian Gulf, and a time of unsurpassed literary creativity. Mark Lewis captures a dynamic era in which the empire reached its greatest geographical extent under Chinese rule, painting and ceramic arts flourished, women played a major role both as rulers and in the economy, and China produced its finest lyric poets in Wang Wei, Li Bo, and Du Fu. The Chinese engaged in extensive trade on sea and land. Merchants from Inner Asia settled in the capital, while Chinese entrepreneurs set off for the wider world, the beginning of a global diaspora. The emergence of an economically and culturally dominant south that was controlled from a northern capital set a pattern for the rest of Chinese imperial history. Poems celebrated the glories of the capital, meditated on individual loneliness in its midst, and described heroic young men and beautiful women who filled city streets and bars. Despite the romantic aura attached to the Tang, it was not a time of unending peace. In 756, General An Lushan led a revolt that shook the country to its core, weakening the government to such a degree that by the early tenth century, regional warlordism gripped many areas, heralding the decline of the Great Tang.

Author : Paul U. Unschuld
Publisher : Reaktion Books
ISBN 13 : 178023225X
Total Pages : 202 pages
Book Rating : 4.56/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Fall and Rise of China written by Paul U. Unschuld and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2013-08-15 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, China is a global power, home to the world’s fastest-growing economy and largest standing army—which makes it hard to believe that only 150 years ago, China was enduring defeats by Western imperial powers and neighboring Japan. For a time, the Middle Kingdom seemed like it was on the verge of being overtaken by foreign interests—but the country has quickly and ambitiously become a player on the world stage once again. In this absorbing account of how China refashioned itself, Paul U. Unschuld traces the course of the country’s development in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Faced with evidence of the superiority of Western science and technology, Unschuld shows, China delivered an unsparing self-diagnosis, identifying those aspects of Western civilization it had to adopt in order to remove the cultural impediments to its own renaissance. He reveals that China did not just express its many aversions to the West as collective hatred for its aggressors; rather, the country chose the path of reason and fundamental renewal, prescribing for itself a therapy that followed the same principles as Chinese medicine: the cause of an illness lies first and foremost within oneself. In curing its wounds by first admitting its own deficiencies and mistakes, China has been able to develop itself as a modern country and a leading competitor in science, technology, and education. Presenting an entirely new analysis of China’s past, this crisp, concise book offers new insights into the possibilities of what China may achieve in the future.

Author : Michael Loewe
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000508471
Total Pages : 331 pages
Book Rating : 4.75/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Imperial China written by Michael Loewe and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-30 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1966, Imperial China sets out to explain China’s past histories to non-specialists. Too often the West has misunderstood the East. China is credited with an excessively long cultural history; with a continuous line of dynastic succession; with uniformly practised institutions; or with intellectual stagnation. Michael Loewe sets out here to dispel some of these misconceptions, and to mark the stages in the evolution of China’s political forms, social organizations and economic progress that can be traced from the days of the first empire (from 221 B.C.) until the dynamic changes of the nineteenth century. He believes that a full understanding of modern China depends on a more than perfunctory glance at her past and has tried to provide the general historical context. The author is well aware that, thanks to the research of the last fifty years, it is now possible and indeed requisite to reach a deeper understanding of China's past. This book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of Chinese history, Asian history, history in general.

Author : William T. Rowe
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674054555
Total Pages : 369 pages
Book Rating : 4.54/5 ( download)

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Download or read book China's Last Empire written by William T. Rowe and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-15 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a brisk revisionist history, William Rowe challenges the standard narrative of Qing China as a decadent, inward-looking state that failed to keep pace with the modern West. This original, thought-provoking history of China's last empire is a must-read for understanding the challenges facing China today.

Author : Ross Anthony
Publisher : Real African Publishers Pty Ltd.
ISBN 13 : 192065593X
Total Pages : 412 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Rise and Decline and Rise of China written by Ross Anthony and published by Real African Publishers Pty Ltd.. This book was released on 2015-09-14 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Running like a red thread through this book are the manifestations of Sino-African relations dating back many centuries. In this way, The Rise and Decline and Rise of China: Searching for an Organising Philosophy takes forward the work MISTRA conducted on the Mapungubwe society, one of the advanced states that existed in southern Africa some 800 years ago. What makes this research report unique, though, is that the treatment of these issues has been undertaken primarily from an African perspective.