The Rural Modern: Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China
Zoomicon-zoom-in
The Rural Modern: Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China

The Rural Modern: Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China

By
Kate Merkel-Hess (Author)  

Hardback

Available / dispatched within 1 - 4 weeks

Quantity

Also available on eBook for £25.99. Click here to purchase from Rakuten Kobo

Discussions of China's early twentieth-century modernization efforts tend to focus almost exclusively on cities, and the changes, both cultural and industrial, seen there. As a result, the communist peasant revolution appears as a decisive historical break. Kate Merkel-Hess corrects that misconception by demonstrating how crucial the countryside was for reformers in rural China long before the success of the communist revolution. In The Rural Modern, Merkel-Hess shows that Chinese reformers and intellectuals created a modernity that was not the foreign and new modernity of Shanghai and other cities, but instead one that captured the Chinese people's desire for an agenda for social and political change rooted in rural Chinese traditions and institutions. She traces efforts to remake village education, social and cultural life, economics, and politics, analyzing how these efforts contributed to a new, inclusive vision of rural Chinese political life. Merkel-Hess argues that as China sought to redefine itself politically and culturally, such rural reform efforts played a major role, and tensions that thus emerged between rural and urban ways deeply informed social relations, government policies, and subsequent efforts to create a modern nation during the communist period.
Kate Merkel-Hess is assistant professor of history and Asian studies at Penn State University. She has written for the Times Literary Supplement and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and she is coeditor of China in 2008: A Year of Great Significance.
  • Contributor: Kate Merkel-Hess
  • Imprint: University of Chicago Press
  • ISBN13: 9780226383279
  • Number of Pages: 264
  • Packaged Dimensions: 16x24x2mm
  • Packaged Weight: 510
  • Format: Hardback
  • Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
  • Release Date: 2016-08-16
  • Binding: Hardback
  • Biography: Kate Merkel-Hess is assistant professor of history and Asian studies at Penn State University. She has written for the Times Literary Supplement and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and she is coeditor of China in 2008: A Year of Great Significance.

Delivery Options

Home Delivery

Store Delivery

Free Returns

We hope you are delighted with everything you buy from us. However, if you are not, we will refund or replace your order up to 30 days after purchase. Terms and exclusions apply; find out more from our Returns and Refunds Policy.