20th century
A01=Kate Merkel-Hess
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asia
Author_Kate Merkel-Hess
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Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=RPG
China
cities
communist
contemporary
COP=United States
countryside
cultural
culture
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
eastern world
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
historical
history
industrial
industry
intellectuals
Language_English
modern
modernity
modernization
nation
PA=Available
peasant revolution
political
politics
Price_€20 to €50
progress
PS=Active
reconstruction
reformers
republic
republican
self
shanghai
small town
social studies
softlaunch
state
urban
Product details
- ISBN 9780226383279
- Weight: 510g
- Dimensions: 16 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 17 Aug 2016
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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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.
