Books in the The Cambridge China Library series

This is the first English translation of Lu Zongli's study of how rumor formed and spread through non-official channels in early Chinese history. Utilising popular songs, mythology and prophetic texts, Lu explores rumors in all their diverse forms, dissecting their nature, function and implications for politics and culture.

This volume is a vision of contemporary China from the inside. Eight recent essays by the prominent public intellectual Xu Jilin offer a liberal reaction to China's economic rise, critiquing China's rejection of universal values, the nation's embrace of particularism and the cult of the state.

The Opium War of 1839-42 is a subject of enduring interest. The Chinese historian Mao Haijian presents a revisionist reading of the conflict and its main Chinese protagonists, offering a comprehensive explanation as to why the Qing Empire was so badly defeated by the British.

The first English translation of Li Bozhong's pioneering study An Early Modern Economy in China, which uses sophisticated analysis to reconstruct the GDP of the Lower Yangzi Delta. An innovative economic history that contributes to the Great Divergence debate, Li draws comparisons the Netherlands in the same period.

This is the first English translation of one of the most authoritative and significant studies of its kind. Utilising a broad range of literary genres from the late Qing through the Republican period, Fan Boqun's innovative, illustrated analysis charts the historical blueprint of modern Chinese popular literature.

This is the first English translation of Deng Yunte's classic study of famine relief in Chinese history. Richly researched, Deng both plots the history of famine from ancient times to the Republican period and provides a fascinating example of historical scholarship from twentieth-century China.

The History of Chinese Civilisation makes accessible a wealth of historical research and sources that have not previously been translated, and provides insights into the views of leading Chinese scholars. There is no other work in the English language that covers this range of subjects in a single history.

Known internationally as 'Mr Share Holding', the economist Li Yining has had a transformative impact on China's economic transition. Incorporating original research, policy proposals and theoretical thinking, these papers trace the development of Li's thought and the process through which the 'China Miracle' has occurred over the last three decades.

A valuable reference work for the social history of the Song, Liao, Western Xia and Jin Dynasties (960-1279) from leading Chinese scholars, exploring topics including material culture, food, technology, ritual, religion, medicine, gender, family and language.

The seminal work on the evolution, aesthetics and politics in the late Qing period of wuxia, a genre of modern Chinese martial arts fiction, from one of China's leading literary scholars, presented here in English translation for the first time.

The Tokyo Trial was held from 1946-8 to try Japanese military and civil officials for war crimes committed during World War II. The trial proceedings were controversial at the time and remain an emotive subject. This collection of translated essays represents a distinctively Chinese approach to the interpretation of the trial.

A lavishly illustrated study of the development of art and artists in China since 1949. The art of this period is of historical, political and cultural interest, being first used to promote the revolutionary cause, later to criticise and, more recently, charting changes that have taken place since 1978.

Volume 1 of the official Chinese Communist Party biography of Mao Zedong. This volume covers Mao's career in the pre-revolutionary period, 1893-1949. This is a unique source through which to view the ways in which the transformative events of the twentieth century have been understood and portrayed in contemporary China.

In this illustrated cultural history of the emergence of modern literature in China from the late nineteenth century to 1949, Wu Fuhui argues that this transformative period was informed both by developments in China's domestic history and the dynamics of global circulation and encounter.