Research Catalog

Title

Realms of freedom in modern China / edited by William C. Kirby.

Publication

Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 2004.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Additional Authors

Kirby, William C.

Description

xii, 396 p.; 24 cm.

Summary

"This volume explores a variety of issues surrounding questions of human rights and freedom in China." "The chapters in this volume suggest that one can speak of very significant realms of freedom, with or without the protection of law, in the personal, social, and economic lives of people in china before the twentieth century. This was recognized, and partly codified, in the early twentieth century, when legal experts sought to establish a republic of laws and limits. The process of legal reform however, would be placed firmly in the service of strengthening the post-imperial Chinese nation-state. The rule of the Guomindang and then the Communist Party would result in an ever-increasing level of state control, culminating after 1949 in a despotism that was felt more widely and deeply than any in Chinese history. Yet the last decades of the twentieth century and the first years of our own would witness a slow, steady, but unmistakable reassertion of realms of personal and communal autonomy, accompanied by experiments in electoral democracy on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, that show, even in an era of strong states, at least the prospect of institutionalized freedoms of a kind that J.H. Hexter, too, might have recognized and applauded."--Jacket.

Series Statement

Making of modern freedom

Uniform Title

Making of modern freedom

Subject

• China > Politics and government
• Freedom
• Human rights > China
• Liberty
• Social control > China

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. [317]-381) and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Introduction / William C. Kirby -- The moral autonomy of the individual in Confucian tradition / Irene Bloom -- Chinese law and liberty in comparative historical perspective / William C. Jones -- Economic greedom in late imperial China / Madeleine Zelin -- Rights, freedoms, and customs in the making of Chinese civil law, 1900-1936 / Jérôme Bourgon -- The Chinese party-state under dictatorship and democracy on the mainland and on Taiwan / William C. Kirby -- Workers' patrols in the Chinese revolution: a case of institutional inversion / Elizabeth J. Perry -- Discourses of dissent in post-imperial China / Wen-Hsin Yeh -- The Stalinization of the People's Republic of China / Arlen Meliksetov, Alexander Pantsov -- Have you eaten? Have you divorced? Debating the meaning of freedom in marriage in China / William P. Alford, Yuanyuan Shen -- Realms of freedom in post-Mao China / Jean C. Oi -- Worship, teachings, and state power in China and Taiwan / Robert P. Weller.

ISBN

• 0804748780 (cloth : alk. paper)
• 080475232X (pbk. : alk. paper)

LCCN

^^2003009924

OCLC

52197425

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library