Kate Merkel-Hess's Books

Women and Their Warlords

Domesticating Militarism in Modern China

By: Kate Merkel-Hess

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Women and Their Warlords

Domesticating Militarism in Modern China

By: Kate Merkel-Hess

Explores the complex history and legacy of elite wives, concubines, and daughters of warlords in twentieth-century China. In Women and Their Warlords, historian Kate Merkel-Hess examines the lives and personalities of the female relatives of the military rulers who governed regions of China from 1916 to 1949. Posing for candid photographs and sitting for interviews, these women did not merely advance male rulers’ agendas. They advocated for social and political changes, gave voice to feminist ideas, and shaped how the public perceived them. As the first publicly political partners in modern China, the wives and concubines of Republican-era warlords changed how people viewed elite women’s engagement in politics. Drawing on popular media sources, including magazine profiles and gossip column items, Merkel-Hess draws unexpected connections between militarism, domestic life, and state power in this insightful new account of gender and authority in twentieth-century China.

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Page Count

266

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

022683431X

ISBN 13

9780226834313

The Rural Modern

Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China

By: Kate Merkel-Hess

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The Rural Modern

Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China

By: Kate Merkel-Hess

The Rural Modern" by historian Kate Merkel-Hess is the first book to discuss the importance of rural China in the nation s efforts to define itself as modern in the twentieth century. Discussions of modernization efforts in twentieth-century China have usually focused on modernity s manifestations from ironworks to banking to dancehalls in China s cities. As a result, the Communist peasant revolution appears to be a historical break. But Merkel-Hess shows that the countryside was crucial for reformers in Republican China, much before the peasant revolution of the communist period. Reformers hoped that, once the rural masses were educated enough to realize how China had been taken advantage of by imperial powers, they would act to repel foreign intervention. The Rural Reconstruction Movement s agenda was not a partisan plan for revitalization but rather a fundamentally Chinese one, a reconfiguration of traditional ways of engaging the countryside. In international Shanghai, modernity usually signaled what was foreign and new, but, as Merkel-Hess argues, it was the rural modern that captured the Chinese people s desire for a modernity rooted in Chinese tradition, and rural reform thus became crucial to China s self-definition. The book sheds much-needed light on the tensions--between foreign and traditional Chinese, urban and rural, tradition and reconstruction--that roiled the Chinese intellectual world in the early twentieth century, tensions that informed people s actions and social relations, government policies, and subsequent efforts to create a modern nation during the communist period.

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Page Count

256

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

022638327X

ISBN 13

9780226383279

The Rural Modern

Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China

By: Kate Merkel-Hess

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The Rural Modern

Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China

By: Kate Merkel-Hess

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 China long before the success of the communist revolution. In The Rural Modern, Merkel-Hess shows that Chinese reformers and intellectuals created an idea of modernity that was not simply about what was foreign and new, as in Shanghai and other cities, but instead captured the Chinese people’s desire for social and political change rooted in rural traditions and institutions. She traces efforts to remake village education, economics, and politics, analyzing how these efforts contributed to a new, inclusive vision of rural Chinese life. Merkel-Hess argues that as China sought to redefine itself, such rural reform efforts played a major role, and tensions that emerged between rural and urban ways deeply informed social relations, government policies, and subsequent efforts to create a modern nation during the communist period.

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Page Count

256

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

022638330X

ISBN 13

9780226383309

Book's by Kate Merkel-Hess

Women and Their Warlords

Women and Their Warlords

The Rural Modern

The Rural Modern

The Rural Modern

The Rural Modern

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