Xiaoping Cong - Böcker

Teachers' Schools and the Making of the Modern ChineseNation-State is an innovative account of educational and socialtransformations in politically tumultuous early twentieth-centuryChina. It focuses on the unique nature of Chinese teachers'schools, which bridged Chinese and Western ideals, and the criticalrole that these schools played in the changes sweeping Chinese society.It also documents their role in the empowerment of women and theproduction of grassroots forces leading to the CommunistRevolution.Teachers' Schools and the Making of the Modern ChineseNation-State will attract attention from scholars in Asianstudies, Chinese history, educational history, and comparative studies,and will also appeal to graduate and undergraduate students in thesefields.

Xiaoping Cong examines the social and cultural significance of Chinese revolutionary legal practice in the construction of marriage and gender relations. Her book is an empirically rich investigation of the ways in which a 1943 legal dispute over an arranged marriage in a Chinese village became a legal, political and cultural exemplar on the national stage. This conceptually groundbreaking study revisits the Chinese Revolution and its impact on women and society by presenting a Chinese experience that cannot and should not be theorized in the framework of Western discourse. Taking a cultural-historical perspective, Cong shows how the Chinese Revolution and its legal practices produced new discourses, neologisms and cultural symbols that contained China's experience in twentieth-century social movements, and how revolutionary practice was sublimated into the concept of 'self-determination', an idea that bridged local experiences with the tendency of the twentieth-century world, and that is a revolutionary legacy for China today.