Publications

Shanghai Tai Chi: The Art of Being Ruled in Mao’s China (Cambridge Studies in the History of the People’s Republic of China)

Shanghai Tai Chi offers a masterful portrait of daily urban life under socialism in a rich social and political history of one of the world’s most complex cities. Hanchao Lu explores the lives of people from all areas of society – from capitalists and bourgeois intellectuals to women and youth. Utilizing the metaphor of Tai Chi, he reveals how people in Shanghai experienced and adapted to a new Maoist political culture from 1949. Exploring the multifaceted complexity of everyday life and material culture in Mao’s China, Lu addresses the survival of old bourgeois lifestyles under the new proletarian dictatorship, the achievements of intellectuals in an age of anti-intellectualism, the pleasure that urban youth derived from reading taboo literature, the emergence of women’s liberation and the politics of greening and horticulture. This captivating, epitomizing, and vivid history transports readers to history as lived on Shanghai’s streets and back alleyways.

Street Criers: A Cultural History of Chinese Beggars

This is a rich and comprehensive study of beggars’ culture and the institution of mendicancy in China from late imperial times to the mid-twentieth century, with a glance at the resurgence of beggars in China today. Generously illustrated, the book brings to life the concepts and practices of mendicancy including organized begging, state and society relations as reflected in the issues of poverty, public opinions of beggars and various factors that contribute to almsgiving, the role of gender in begging, and street people and Communist politics. Panoramically, the reader will see that the culture and institution of Chinese mendicancy, which had its origins in earlier centuries, remained remarkably consistent through time and space and that there were perennial and lively interactions between the world of beggars and mainstream society.

Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century

How did ordinary people live through the extraordinary changes that have swept across modern China? How did peasants transform themselves into urbanites? How did the citizens of Shanghai cope with the epic upheavals—revolution, war, and again revolution—that shook their lives? Even after decades of scholarship devoted to modern Chinese history, our understanding of the daily lives of the common people of China remains sketchy and incomplete. In this carefully researched study, Hanchao Lu weaves rich documentary data with ethnographic surveys and interviews to reconstruct the fabric of everyday life in China’s largest and most complex city in the first half of this century.

China in Family Photographs: A Peoples History of Revolution and Everyday Life

This book is a collection of translations from Old Photos, a Chinese bimonthly publication launched in 1996 that presents photographs and narratives from ordinary readers and professional historians in a manner that proclaims: this is our history, not the history those above would have us believe. The magazine was concerned with the everyday lives of ordinary people while also covering the momentous, often traumatic, political life of the People’s Republic. It became clear it would also serve as a forum and archive for people’s experiences and reflections about life in the People’s Republic. Old Photos presented an open format where readers’ contributions were published alongside that of professional writers, historians’, and novelists.

The Birth of a Republic: Francis Stafford’s Photographs of China’s 1911 Revolution and Beyond 

China’s 1911 Revolution ended the rule of both the 267-year-old Manchu Qing dynasty and the more than 2,000-year-old imperial system, establishing Asia’s first, if not lasting, republic. Because war correspondence was not an established profession in China and the camera was a rare apparatus in Chinese life at the time, photographs of the revolution are rare. Francis E. Stafford (1884-1938), an American working as a photographer for Asia’s largest publishing company, Commercial Press in Shanghai, had unusual access to both sides of the conflict. The Birth of a Republic documents this tumultuous period through Stafford’s photographic eye.

Stafford trained his lens on the leaders of the revolutionaries, the imperial court, and the generals and foot soldiers, as well as on the common people. His images thus capture the stock in trade of war correspondents and photo journalists, but he also documented scenes of everyday life, from the streets of China’s cities to the muddy lanes of its villages, from paddy rice fields to factory workshops, from open-air food markets to the inner chambers of Buddhist temples and Christian churches. His remarkable photographs reveal sweeping social and political change, as well as the tenacity of tradition.

The 162 photographs presented here are from the collection of Stafford’s grandson, Ronald Anderson, and are set in historical and cultural context through an interpretive introduction and extensive captions. This book will appeal to historians and general readers interested in modern China, revolution, and war.

A Man of Two Worlds: The Life of Sir Robert Hart, 1835-1911

《中国 客卿:鹭宾·赫德传》内容简介：中国历史上不乏客卿。元明以来，就有马可·波罗、龙华民、邓玉函、利玛窦、汤若望、南怀仁诸人。但真正为中国政府长期聘用，有职有权，对中国政治、经济、文化起了举足轻重影响的，则非19世纪来华、掌控中国海关几近半个世纪的鹭宾·赫德（Robert Hart，1835-1911）莫属，洵为中国 客卿。

Time, Space, and Hierarchy: The Subaltern Culture of Chinese Mendicants 

Chinese mendicants possessed some distinguishing incongruities that made them more than a bunch of vagabonds who begged on the street. They were paupers who took mendicancy for a living, yet in soliciting alms they verged on providing a variety of performances and services. As a group, they came from a predominately rural background, yet their profession as mendicants was clearly seen as an urban calling. They were subaltern to mainstream society, yet they had a recognizable influence on higher culture. This book explores these paradoxes and their complex origins in time, space, and social hierarchy.

It provides a panoramic picture of the world of mendicancy hitherto little known to the world outside the urban underclass.

Pioneers: Conversations with Renowned Historians (Chinese Edition)

Pioneers collects interviews of more than 10 contemporary historians from home and abroad. Experts interviewed in the book are all the pioneers in their own fields, who contribute to the foundation or improvement for the subject. In these interviews, the interviewees look back to their academic life, comment, rethink the researches of history in current time and indicate the ways of the future of the subject. When reading, just like talk them face to face, readers may obtain joy and harvest, i.e. a single conversation across the table with a wise man worth a months study of book.

Modernity & Cultural Identity in Taiwan

The articles focus on Taiwan’s development for the past 50 years in terms of its modernization and cultural identification, from the aspect of economic development, legislation, women, popular culture and etc.