Rural Modern
Subtitle: Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 264
ISBN-13: 9780226383279
Subjects: Rural development, china; Education, rural; China, history
Description: "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"--Jacket.