Studies of the Qing’s dynastic degeneration include Jean Chesneaux (comp.), Secret Societies in China in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1971; originally published in French, 1965); Kung-chuan Hsiao, Rural China: Imperial Control in the Nineteenth Century (1960, reprinted 1967); Gilbert Rozman (ed.), The Modernization of China (1981), an interdisciplinary study of China’s modernization between the Opium Wars and 1980; Philip A. Kuhn, Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China: Militarization and Social Structure, 1794–1864 (1970, reprinted 1980); and Susan Naquin, Millenarian Rebellion in China: The Eight Trigrams Uprising of 1813 (1976). A more revisionist treatment of the period is in William T. Rowe, China’s Last Empire: The Great Qing (2009).
External challenges to the Qing are surveyed in Masataka Banno, China and the West, 1858–1861: The Origins of the Tsungli Yamen (1964); Hsin-pao Chang, Commissioner Lin and the Opium War (1964, reissued 1970); John K. Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast, 2 vol. (1953, reissued in 1 vol., 1969); Immanuel C.Y. Hsu, China’s Entrance into the Family of Nations: The Diplomatic Phase, 1858–1880 (1960); Peter Ward Fay, The Opium War, 1840–1842 (1976, reprinted 1997); and Frederic Wakeman, Jr., Strangers at the Gate: Social Disorder in South China, 1839–1861 (1966, reprinted 1997).
Studies of the Taiping Rebellion include Vincent Y.C. Shih, The Taiping Ideology: Its Sources, Interpretations, and Influences (1967, reprinted 1972); Franz H. Michael and Chang Chung-li, The Taiping Rebellion: History and Documents, 3 vol. (1966–71); and Albert Feuerwerker, Rebellion in Nineteenth-Century China (1975); and among those for the Nian Rebellion are Siang-tseh Chiang, The Nien Rebellion (1954, reprinted 1967); S.Y. Teng, The Nien Army and Their Guerrilla Warfare, 1851–1868 (1961, reprinted 1984); and Elizabeth J. Perry, Rebels and Revolutionaries in North China, 1845–1945 (1980).
Efforts on reform are discussed in Albert Feuerwerker, China’s Early Industrialization: Sheng Hsüan-huai (1844–1916) and Mandarin Enterprise (1958, reissued 1970); Yen-p’ing Hao, The Comprador in Nineteenth Century China: Bridge Between East and West (1970); Paul A. Cohen, Between Tradition and Modernity: Wang T’ao and Reform in Late Ch’ing China (1974, reissued 1987); William T. Rowe, Hankow: Commerce and Society in a Chinese City, 1796–1889 (1984); Luke S.K. Kwong, A Mosaic of the Hundred Days: Personalities, Politics, and Ideas of 1898 (1984); and Kung-ch’uan Hsiao, A Modern China and a New World: K’ang Yu-wei, Reformer and Utopian, 1858–1927 (1975).
Studies of the Boxer Rebellion include Paul A. Cohen, China and Christianity: The Missionary Movement and the Growth of Chinese Antiforeignism, 1860–1870 (1963), and History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (1997); Victor Purcell, The Boxer Uprising (1963, reprinted 1974); and Joseph W. Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (1987). Kenneth G. Lieberthal Benjamin Elman Lynn White
Republican China
The start of the Republic is the focus of John H. Fincher, Chinese Democracy, rev. and expanded (1989); Mary B. Rankin, Early Chinese Revolutionaries: Radical Intellectuals in Shanghai and Chekiang, 1902–1911 (1971); Edward J.M. Rhoads, China’s Republican Revolution: The Case of Kwangtung, 1895–1913 (1975); and Joseph W. Esherick, Reform and Revolution in China: The 1911 Revolution in Hunan and Hubei (1976, reissued 1998).
Interpretive texts on the period include Lucien Bianco, Origins of the Chinese Revolution, 1915–1949 (1971; originally published in French, 1961); and James E. Sheridan, China in Disintegration: The Republican Era in Chinese History, 1912–1949 (1975). O. Edmund Clubb, 20th Century China, 3rd ed. (1978), is also a standard work. For the revolution of 1911–12 and the early Republican period, scholarly essays are found in Mary C. Wright (ed.), China in Revolution: The First Phase, 1900–1913 (1968). The immediate consequences of the revolution of 1911–12 and the search for an appropriate political form for China are analyzed in Edward Friedman, Backward Toward Revolution: The Chinese Revolutionary Party (1974); and Ernest P. Young, The Presidency of Yuan Shih-K’ai: Liberalism and Dictatorship in Early Republican China (1977). Intellectual and political movements in China in the late teens are presented in the classic work Tse-tung Chow, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (1960). A more critical view of some of the leading participants is Yü-sheng Lin, The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Antitraditionalism in the May Fourth Era (1979).
Warlordism has been treated in Hsi-sheng Ch’i, Warlord Politics in China, 1916–1928 (1976); Andrew J. Nathan, Peking Politics, 1918–1923 (1976, reissued 1998); and Donald E. Sutton, Provincial Militarism and the Chinese Republic: The Yunnan Army, 1905–25 (1980). Collections of biographies of the leading figures of the period include Howard L. Boorman and Richard C. Howard (eds.), Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, 5 vol. (1967–79); and Donald W. Klein and Anne B. Clarke, Biographic Dictionary of Chinese Communism, 1921–65, 2 vol. (1971).
Economic conditions are discussed in R.H. Tawney, Land and Labour in China (1932, reprinted 1972), a prophetic and still valuable study. Dwight H. Perkins (ed.), China’s Modern Economy in Historical Perspective (1975), is a collection of essays. A penetrating analysis of China’s rural order is Philip C.C. Huang, The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China (1985).
C. Martin Wilbur and Julie Lien-ying How (eds.), Documents on Communism, Nationalism, and Soviet Advisers in China, 1918–1927 (1956, reissued with corrections, 1972), discusses the Nationalist revolution. The struggles that displaced warlords from centre stage are set forth in C. Martin Wilbur, The Nationalist Revolution in China, 1923–1928 (1984). Richard W. Rigby, The May 30 Movement: Events and Themes (1980), is a study of one of the most energizing of these struggles. The new national government that emerged has been portrayed in Lloyd E. Eastman, The Abortive Revolution: China Under Nationalist Rule, 1927–1937 (1974, reissued 1990). Among the rebuttals to some of Eastman’s arguments is Joseph Fewsmith, Party, State, and Local Elites in Republican China: Merchant Organizations and Politics in Shanghai, 1890–1930 (1985). Events of the war with Japan are discussed in Lloyd E. Eastman, Seeds of Destruction: Nationalist China in War and Revolution, 1937–1949 (1984). Kenneth G. Lieberthal Lynn White