China & Inner Asia

This book explores global history as an emerging field of scholarly studies in China today. Readers are invited to rethink the origin of global history in China and to examine its current state. Chinese scholarship is rooted in a warm appreciation of globalization in the age of Opening-up and Reform and presented as a trendy transnational intellectual movement at the opening of the twenty-first century. On the one hand, global history claims an identity of the new eager to criticize the Eurocentric bias embedded in the narratives of the old, ones from world history; on the other hand, as an emerging field, it is yet to face competitions from national histories and area studies, which are nurtured by latest state initiatives with outspoken political agendas. As a whole, global history captures Chinese scholars tenacious interest in studying globalization through the lens of history. This book will interest historians, China scholars, and those trying to grasp the Chinese perspective on the world.

The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Language and Culture represents the first English anthology that delves into the fascinating and thought-provoking relationship between the Chinese language and culture, exploring various macro and micro perspectives. Chinese culture boasts a history of ten thousand years, while the Chinese language's recorded history spans at least three thousand years, dating back to the Shang dynasty oracle bone inscriptions (OBI). This handbook is comprised of 17 chapters from 18 scholars. Many chapters approach their respective topics with a comprehensive and historical outlook. Certain extensive subjects are addressed in multiple chapters, complementing one another. These topics include: The languages and peoples of China, and the southern Chinese dialects Mandarin's evolution into a national language and its related writing reforms Language as a propaganda tool in the Cultural Revolution and in contemporary China Chinese idioms and colloquialisms. This book offers an approachable exploration of the subject, appealing to both specialists and enthusiasts of the Chinese language and culture.

The Occupy Central/Umbrella Movement of 2014 and the anti-extradition protests of 2019 revealed how much Hong Kong's relationship with mainland China has deteriorated since the former British colony returned to Chinese sovereignty in July 1997. With mutual distrust and suspicion at an all-time high, many Hong Kong people have become increasingly hostile toward the Chinese government and the mainland in general, identifying themselves as Hongkongers rather than as Chinese. Yet, as John Carroll shows, for more than 150 years, colonial Hong Kong and China not only coexisted with but benefited each other, even during the anti-imperialist campaigns of the Republican and Communist eras. The porous boundary between Hong Kong and China enabled the two to use each other economically, politically, socially, and culturally. The Hong Kong-China nexus, although firmly embedded in global dynamics of colonialism, Cold War politics, and capitalist expansion, defies many common assumptions about nationalism, colonialism, and decolonization.

The first extended history of the Chinese picture-scroll.   The Chinese picture-scroll, a long, horizontal painting or calligraphic work, has been China's pre-eminent aesthetic form throughout the last two millennia. This first history of the picture-scroll explores its extraordinary longevity and adaptability to social, political, and technological change. The book describes what the picture-scroll demands of a viewer, how China's artists grappled with its cultural power, and how collectors and connoisseurs left their marks on scrolls for later generations to judge.

With the rise of projects to create global histories and art histories, the Mongol Empire is now widely taken as a fundamental watershed. In the later thirteenth century, the Mongol states reconfigured the basic zones of Eurasian trade and contact. For those they conquered, and for those who later overthrew them, new histories and narratives were needed to account for the Mongol rise. And as people, ideas, and commodities circulated in these vast and interconnected spaces, new types of objects and new visual languages were created, shifting older patterns of artistic production. The Mongol rise is now routinely cast as the first glimmering of an early modernity, defined as an ever-increasing acceleration in systems of contact, exchange, and cultural collision. Yet what is at stake in framing the so-called Pax Mongolica in this way? What was changed by the Mongol rise, and what were its lasting legacies? It is the goal of essays in this book to address these and other questions about the Mongol impact and their modern role, and to make these debates more widely available. Contributors include specialists of Mongol history and historiography as well as Islamic, East Asian, and European art, writing on topics from historical chronicles to contemporary historiography, and case studies from textile production to mapmaking and historical linguistics.

An expansion of the field of Sinophone studies through the notion of sinoglossia.Sinoglossia places embodiment, mediality, and translation at the center of this analytical inquiry into Chinese and Sinophone cultures. This book introduces a theory defined by cultural formations not overdetermined by Sinitic linguistic ties. The concept of sinoglossia combines a heteroglossic and heterotopian approach to the critical study of mediated discourses of China and "Chineseness." From the history of physical examinations and queer subalternity to the cinematic inscription of "Chineseness-as-landscape," and from Sinopop to the translational writings of Eileen Chang and Syaman Rapongan, this book argues for a flexible conceptualization of cultural objects, conditions, and contexts that draws attention to an array of polyphonic, multi-discursive, and multilingual articulations. In this new horizon of understanding, place or theme create a source of friction and innovation.