Liping Zhu – författare

Winner: Caroline Bancroft Prize

Denver in the Gilded Age may have been an economic boomtown, but it was also a powder keg waiting to explode. When that inevitable eruption occurred—in the Anti-Chinese Riot of 1880—it was sparked by white resentment at the growing encroachment of Chinese immigrants who had crossed the Pacific Ocean and journeyed overland in response to an expanding labor market. Liping Zhu’s book provides the first detailed account of this momentous conflagration and carefully delineates the story of how anti-Chinese nativism in the nineteenth century grew from a regional political concern to a full-fledged national issue.

Zhu tells a complex tale about race, class, and politics. He reconstructs the drama of the riot—with Denver’s Rocky Mountain News fanning the flames by labeling the Chinese “the pest of the Pacific”—and relates how white mobs ransacked Chinatown while other citizens took pains to protect their Asian neighbors. Occurring two days before the national election, it had a decisive impact on sectional political alignments that would undercut the nation’s promise of equal rights for all peoples made after the Civil War and would have repercussions lasting well into the next century.

By examining the relationship between the anti-Chinese movement and the rise of the West, this work sheds new light on our understanding of racial politics and sectionalism in the post-Reconstruction era. As the West’s newfound political muscle threatened Republican hegemony in national politics, many Republican legislators compromised their commitment to equal rights and unfettered immigration by joining Democrats to pass the noxious 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act—which was not repealed until 1943 and only earned congressional apologies in 2011 and 2012.

The Denver Anti-Chinese Riot strikes at the core of the national debate over race and region in the late nineteenth century as it demonstrates a correlation between the national retreat from the campaign for racial equality and the rise of the American West to national political prominence. Thanks to Zhu’s powerful narrative, this once overlooked event now has a place in the saga of American history—and serves as a potent reminder that in the real world of bare-knuckle politics, competing for votes often trumps fidelity to principle.

In four chapters and an introduction, this book systematically helps readers understand the development of the Geographical Sciences both in China and in the world during the past 30 years. 

Through data analysis of methodologies including CiteSpace, TDA, qualitative analysis, questionnaires, data mining and mathematical statistics, the book explains the evolution of research topics and their driving factors in the Geographical Sciences and its four branches, namely Physical Geography, Human Geography, Geographical Information Science and Environmental Geography. It also identifies the role of the Geographical Sciences in the analysis of strategic issues such as global change and terrestrial ecosystems, terrestrial water cycle and water resources, land change, global cryosphere evolution and land surface processes on the Tibetan Plateau, economic globalization and local responses, regional sustainable development, remote sensing modelling and parameter inversion, spatial analysis and simulation, and tempo-spatial processes and modelling of environmental pollutants. It then discusses research development and inadequacy of Chinese Geographical Sciences in the above-mentioned topics, as well as in the fields including Geomorphology and Quaternary environmental change, Ecohydrology, ecosystem services, the urbanization process and mechanism, medical and health geography, international rivers and transboundary environment and resources, detection and attribution of changes in land surface sensitive components, and uncertainty of spatial information and spatial analysis. It shows that the NSFC has driven the development in all these topics and fields. In addition, the book summarises trends of the Geographical Sciences in China and the research level in major countries of the world through an overview of geographical education in colleges and universities, the analysis of publications, citations and author networks of SCI/SSCI and CSCD indexed articles, and the description of Sino-USA, Sino-UK and Sino-German cooperation.

This book serves as an important reference to anyone interested in geographical sciences and related fields.