Bureaucracy and the State in Early China

Bureaucracy and the State in Early China PDF Author: Feng Li
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521884470
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
This ook redefines the bureaucracy of Ancient Chinese society during the Western Zhou period. The analysis is based on inscriptions of royal edicts from the period carved into bronze vessels. The inscriptions clarify the political and social construction of the Western Zhou and the ways in which it exercised its authority.

Bureaucracy and the State in Early China

Bureaucracy and the State in Early China PDF Author: Feng Li
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521884470
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
This ook redefines the bureaucracy of Ancient Chinese society during the Western Zhou period. The analysis is based on inscriptions of royal edicts from the period carved into bronze vessels. The inscriptions clarify the political and social construction of the Western Zhou and the ways in which it exercised its authority.

Early China

Early China PDF Author: Li Feng
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521895529
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
A critical new interpretation of the early history of Chinese civilization based on the most recent scholarship and archaeological discoveries.

State Power in Ancient China and Rome

State Power in Ancient China and Rome PDF Author: Walter Scheidel
Publisher: Oxford Studies in Early Empire
ISBN: 0190202246
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
The Chinese and the Romans created the largest empires of the ancient world. Separated by thousands of miles of steppe, mountains and sea, these powerful states developed independently and with very limited awareness of each other's existence. This parallel process of state formation served as a massive natural experiment in social evolution that provides unique insight into the complexities of historical causation. Comparisons between the two empires shed new light on the factors that led to particular outcomes and help us understand similarities and differences in ancient state formation. The explicitly comparative perspective adopted in this volume opens up a dialogue between scholars from different areas of specialization, encouraging them to address big questions about the nature of imperial rule. In a series of interlocking case studies, leading experts of early China and the ancient Mediterranean explore the relationship between rulers and elite groups, the organization and funding of government, and the ways in which urban development reflected the interplay between state power and communal civic institutions.0Bureaucratization, famously associated with Qin and Han China but long less prominent in the Roman world, receives special attention as an index of the ambitions and capabilities of kings and emperors. The volume concludes with a look at the preconditions for the emergence of divine rulership. Taken together, these pioneering contributions lay the foundations for a systematic comparative history of early empires.

Chinese Civilization and Bureaucracy

Chinese Civilization and Bureaucracy PDF Author: Etienne Balazs
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300094565
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Born in Hungary, trained in Chinese studies in Germany, Etienne Balazs was, until his sudden and premature death in 1963, a professor at the Sorbonne and an intellectual leader among European specialists on China. In this book, a selection of Dr. Balazs’ essays are presented for the first time in English. Arthur F. Wright, professor of history at Yale, and John K. Fairbank, professor of history at Harvard, have written a joint Preface and Mr. Wright has written an Introduction. Scholars and interested laymen will find a rich feast here in essays ranging over two thousand years of China’s social, economic, political, and intellectual history. A wealth of data supports the various theories Dr. Balazs develops, in a graceful translation by Hope N. Wright. Because Etienne Balazs regarded the Chinese past not as a curiosity but as a repository of relevant human experience, his essays are significant for anyone interested in the past and future of civilization. "If a reader should disagree with some of the brilliant points, he would still find them challenging and refreshing."—Journal of Asian Studies.

Brief History of the Official System in China

Brief History of the Official System in China PDF Author: Xie Baocheng
Publisher: Paths International Ltd
ISBN: 1844641538
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
A detailed academic examination into ancient China's numerous systems of bureaucracy, administration and governance. China has a rich history of administrative systems with each major dynasty developing their own civil and state mechanisms, together with the officials needed to staff the system. This fascinating book reveals all. Author Xie Baocheng breaks the authoritative coverage down into eight distinct sections: Introducing the Official System in Ancient China; Pre-Qin Royal Power and Post-Qin Imperial Power; The Central Decision-making System; The Central Government System; Territorial Administration; The Surveillance System; The Military System; Personnel Administration. This major new work, which is being made available outside of China for the very first time, will appeal to people studying ancient China. Published in association with Social Sciences Academic Press (China).

State Formation in China and Taiwan

State Formation in China and Taiwan PDF Author: Julia C. Strauss
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108476864
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
An ambitious comparative study of regime consolidation in the 'revolutionary' People's Republic of China and 'conservative' Taiwan in the early 1950s.

Empires of Ancient Eurasia

Empires of Ancient Eurasia PDF Author: Craig Benjamin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107114969
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
Introduces a crucial period of world history when the vast exchange network of the Silk Roads connected most of Eurasia.

Rome and China

Rome and China PDF Author: Walter Scheidel
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199714292
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Transcending ethnic, linguistic, and religious boundaries, early empires shaped thousands of years of world history. Yet despite the global prominence of empire, individual cases are often studied in isolation. This series seeks to change the terms of the debate by promoting cross-cultural, comparative, and transdisciplinary perspectives on imperial state formation prior to the European colonial expansion. Two thousand years ago, up to one-half of the human species was contained within two political systems, the Roman empire in western Eurasia (centered on the Mediterranean Sea) and the Han empire in eastern Eurasia (centered on the great North China Plain). Both empires were broadly comparable in terms of size and population, and even largely coextensive in chronological terms (221 BCE to 220 CE for the Qin/Han empire, c. 200 BCE to 395 CE for the unified Roman empire). At the most basic level of resolution, the circumstances of their creation are not very different. In the East, the Shang and Western Zhou periods created a shared cultural framework for the Warring States, with the gradual consolidation of numerous small polities into a handful of large kingdoms which were finally united by the westernmost marcher state of Qin. In the Mediterranean, we can observe comparable political fragmentation and gradual expansion of a unifying civilization, Greek in this case, followed by the gradual formation of a handful of major warring states (the Hellenistic kingdoms in the east, Rome-Italy, Syracuse and Carthage in the west), and likewise eventual unification by the westernmost marcher state, the Roman-led Italian confederation. Subsequent destabilization occurred again in strikingly similar ways: both empires came to be divided into two halves, one that contained the original core but was more exposed to the main barbarian periphery (the west in the Roman case, the north in China), and a traditionalist half in the east (Rome) and south (China). These processes of initial convergence and subsequent divergence in Eurasian state formation have never been the object of systematic comparative analysis. This volume, which brings together experts in the history of the ancient Mediterranean and early China, makes a first step in this direction, by presenting a series of comparative case studies on clearly defined aspects of state formation in early eastern and western Eurasia, focusing on the process of initial developmental convergence. It includes a general introduction that makes the case for a comparative approach; a broad sketch of the character of state formation in western and eastern Eurasia during the final millennium of antiquity; and six thematically connected case studies of particularly salient aspects of this process.

Communication and Cooperation in Early Imperial China

Communication and Cooperation in Early Imperial China PDF Author: Charles Sanft
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438450370
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Challenges traditional views of the Qin dynasty as an oppressive regime by revealing cooperative aspects of its governance. This revealing book challenges longstanding notions of the Qin dynasty, China’s first imperial dynasty (221–206 BCE). The received history of the Qin dynasty and its founder is one of cruel tyranny with rule through fear and coercion. Using a wealth of new information afforded by the expansion of Chinese archaeology in recent decades as well as traditional historical sources, Charles Sanft concentrates on cooperative aspects of early imperial government, especially on the communication necessary for government. Sanft suggests that the Qin authorities sought cooperation from the populace with a publicity campaign in a wide variety of media—from bronze and stone inscriptions to roads to the bureaucracy. The book integrates theory from anthropology and economics with early Chinese philosophy and argues that modern social science and ancient thought agree that cooperation is necessary for all human societies.

The Bureaucracy of Han Times

The Bureaucracy of Han Times PDF Author: Hans Bielenstein
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521101127
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This is a comprehensive and fully documented study of Chinese bureaucracy during the Han period, when many of the basic lines of Chinese government practice were laid down. It is also more detailed and wider in scope than similar works on other periods of Chinese history. The book covers the time from 202 BC to AD 9 and from AD 25 to 189, analysing and describing the central and local administrations, the army, official salaries, civil service recruitment and power in government. Professor Bielenstein translates all Chinese official titles and includes alphabetical lists of these titles with their English and Chinese equivalents. Thus his book will serve both as a description for the names of offices at every level of government. The book will be of interest to all scholars of Chinese history, as well as to experts in other fields of institutional history, government and political science.