With a history as lengthy and complex as China's, it should come as no surprise that the scholarly effort to understand its historical experience has undergone a remarkable transformation in recent years. A Companion to Chinese History is a comprehensive overview of the latest intellectual developments in the study of China's history from antiquity to the present day. Offering cutting-edge scholarship by top historians from both China and around the globe, essays provide readers with an understanding of the current state of the field of Chinese history, including exciting recent developments, and promising future directions. Initial readings present an overview of Chinese historiography while covering such topics as China's changing position in global and world history, the role of history in contemporary Chinese politics, and the current state of the field from European, Chinese, and Japanese perspectives. The full chronology of China's history is covered next-with individual essays often challenging more conventional approaches to the periodization of Chinese history. Thematic approaches to Chinese history are then addressed, with essays touching on such diverse topics as sexuality and gender, literature, environmental history, science and technology, intellectual history, Taiwan, religion, economic and urban history, and many more. Timely and important, A Companion to Chinese History offers illuminating insights into the formidable history of one of the most important and least understood regions of the world.

Michael Szonyi is Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and Professor of Chinese History at Harvard University. He is the author of Practicing Kinship: Lineage and Descent in Late Imperial China (2002), Cold War Island: Quemoy on the Front Line (2008; Chinese edition 2016), and the forthcoming Everyday Politics in Late Imperial China: Soldiers and their families in the Ming dynasty.

Notes on Contributors x

Acknowledgments xv

1 Introduction 1
Michael Szonyi

Part I States of the Field 9

2 How Do We Know What We Know about Chinese History? 11
Endymion Wilkinson

3 Chinese History in China: The State of the Field (1980s-2010s) 28
May¿bo Ching

4 Chinese History in Japan: The State of the Field 44
Shiba Yoshinobu

5 Chinese History in Europe: The State of the Field 53
Harriet Zurndorfer

6 Chinese History in the Era of the China Dream 64
Geremie R. Barmé and Michael Szonyi

7 Chinese History in World History 71
Gregory Blue

Part II Chronologies 87

8 Early China in Eurasian History 89
Michael Puett

9 Was Medieval China Medieval? (Post¿Han to Mid¿Tang) 106
Charles Holcombe

10 A Tang-Song Turning Point 118
Nicolas Tackett

11 Periods of Non-Han Rule 129
Michal Biran

12 Song to Qing: Late Imperial or Early Modern? 143
R. Kent Guy

13 Nineteenth¿Century China: The Evolution of American Historical Approaches 154
Paul A. Cohen

14 Republican History 168
Janet Y. Chen

15 Rethinking the History of Maoist China 179
S.A. Smith

16 The Reform Era as History 191
Timothy Cheek

Part III Themes and Approaches 205

17 Women, Gender, the Family, and Sexuality 207
Weijing Lu

18 History of Premodern Chinese Literature 221
Graham Sanders

19 Modern Chinese Literature 235
David Der¿wei Wang

20 The Environmental History of China: Past, Present, and Future 252
Peter C. Perdue

21 Science, Technology, and Medicine 265
Carla Nappi

22 Legal History 277
William P. Alford and Eric T. Schluessel

23 Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Identity in the Study of Modern China 290
Thomas S. Mullaney

24 The Religious Core of Local Social Organization 304
Barend J. ter Haar

25 Beyond the Great Divergence: Current Scholarship on the Economic History of Premodern China 315
Richard von Glahn

26 Taiwan: Margin, Center, Node 327
Shelley Rigger

27 Chinese Migrations 343
Henry S.N. Yu

28 China in the World: Beyond the Tribute System 360
John E. Wills, Jr.

Glossary of Selected Terms 372

References 378

Index 437