Skip to Main Content
With China’s development, the understanding of modern Chinese history has become ever more relevant because of its profound influence on contemporary China. Among the many perspectives for understanding modern China, social relief is particularly worthy of attention. Essentially, social relief is people's response to disasters, hygiene, poverty, and other issues. The history we are experiencing tells us that people's response to a major public health event can have a huge impact on the economy, social life, and even the world order. This course will be based on modern China, with the emergence, development, and transformation of modern social relief as its core content. It explores people's responses to disasters, hygiene, and other related social issues, and examines how those responses have profoundly affected modern China. This course requires students to read academic works and original materials in order to cultivate the ability to understand and analyze historical issues and then to understand the state, social structure, and culture of modern China through the perspective of social relief. Moreover, with the development of global crises such as the polarization between the rich and the poor and climate change, relief activities will affect more people in future society. For students interested in social relief activities, this course will provide historical reference points.
Opium was an empire-wide crisis to the control of the Qing State. This book examines the crisis from the perspective of Qing prohibition efforts. The author argues that opium prohibition, and not the opium wars, was genuinely imperial in scale and is hence much more representative of the actual drug problem faced by Qing administrators. The basis of the study is a division of the empire into spheres of operations linked by central government policy, but differentiated by the organization of their respective local administrations. Both the central government’s formation of prohibition policy, and case studies of the implementation on the southeast coast, Xinjiang and Southwestern China, are examined.
本书运用了微观史的思想探寻个体生命在历史洪河中的兴衰沉浮，以一位受过良好教育然而被排挤在政治权利中心之外的寒门塾师刘大鹏的生平展现了20世纪初中国山西的乡村生活。本书的创作主要基于刘大鹏的日记和其他作品、已出版的地方史资料和口述访谈等材料。沈爱娣以批判的眼光看待中国的现代化进程。微观层面上，刘大鹏在西化的新政的夹缝中苦苦追寻着中国古代圣贤的训诫，宏观层面上，山西的村落未受到国家整体现代化进程的青睐而踏上了衰败的路途。
This book investigates the lives of the urban poor in China in the early twentieth century. Chapter One examines how poverty emerged as a resonant concept for reforming elites in the early twentieth century. Chapter Two explores how the metaphor equating the nonworking poor with parasites became ingrained in sociological thinking. Chapter Three suggests that the Nationalist’s social engineering ambitions focused on creating a model capital in Nanjing by expunging social deviants. Chapter Four and Five examines the refugee crisis in both Shanghai and Beijing due to the outbreak of World War II in China, and shows how the Nationalist regime proved incapable of coping with increasing urban disorder.
This book offers a novel perspective on the political and scientific dimensions of experiments with early childhood education from the early Republican period through the first decade of the People’s Republic. Tillman examines the introduction and development of modern childhood in China through the child advocacy efforts of Christian missionaries, philanthropists, and philanthropic organizations. Part One charts the establishment of these institutions by scientific experts in cooperation with politicians. Part Two follows the ways in which the government began to assume control over these institutions and eventually, in the early 1950s, removed child experts from positions of prominence as public intellectuals.
This book is a revolutionary guide that focuses on three core concepts- a universal basic income, a fifteen-hour workweek, and open borders across the globe- and explores each of them through lively anecdotes, studies, and success stories. From a Canadian city that once completely eradicated poverty, to Richard Nixon’s near implementation of a basic income for millions of Americans, Bregman takes us on a journey through history, and beyond the traditional left-right divides, as he points us toward a wholly attainable new social order. Finally, Bregman gives two advices- realizing that most people have their hearts in the right place, and getting strong to be unrealistic, unreasonable, and impossible.
