Xiaoqun Xu – författare

Heaven Has Eyes is a comprehensive but concise history of Chinese law and justice from the imperial era to the post-Mao era. Never before has a single book treated the traditional Chinese law and judicial practices and their modern counterparts as a coherent history, addressing both criminal and civil justice. This book fills this void.Xiaoqun Xu addresses the evolution and function of law codes and judicial practices throughout China's long history, and examines the transition from traditional laws and practices to modern ones in the twentieth century. To the Chinese of the imperial era, justice was an alignment of heavenly reason (tianli), state law (guofa), and human relations (renqing). Such a conception did not change until the turn of the twentieth century, when Western-derived notions-natural rights, legal equality, the rule of law, judicial independence, and due process--came to replace the Confucian moral code of right and wrong. The legal-judicial reform agendas that emerged in the beginning of the twentieth century (and are still ongoing today) stemmed from this change in Chinese moral and legal thinking, but to materialize the said principles in everyday practices is a very different order of things, and the past century was fraught with legal dramas and tragedies. Heaven Has Eyes lays out how and why that is the case.

Xiaoqun Xu makes a compelling and original contribution to the study of China's modernization with this book on the rise of professional associations in Republican China in their birthplace of Shanghai, and of their political and socio-cultural milieu. This 2001 book is rich in detail about the key professional and political figures and organizations in Shanghai, filling an important gap in its social history. The professional associations were, as the author writes, 'unambiguously urban and modern in their origins and functions ... representing a new breed of educated Chinese' and they pioneered a new type of relationship with the state. Xu addresses a central issue in China studies, the relationship between state and society, and proposes an alternative to the Western-derived concept of civil society. This book illuminates the complexity of modernization and nationalism in twentieth-century China, and provides a concrete case for comparative studies of professionalization and class formation across cultures.

Xiaoqun Xu makes a compelling and original contribution to the study of China's modernization with this book on the rise of professional associations in Republican China in their birthplace of Shanghai, and of their political and socio-cultural milieu. This 2001 book is rich in detail about the key professional and political figures and organizations in Shanghai, filling an important gap in its social history. The professional associations were, as the author writes, 'unambiguously urban and modern in their origins and functions ... representing a new breed of educated Chinese' and they pioneered a new type of relationship with the state. Xu addresses a central issue in China studies, the relationship between state and society, and proposes an alternative to the Western-derived concept of civil society. This book illuminates the complexity of modernization and nationalism in twentieth-century China, and provides a concrete case for comparative studies of professionalization and class formation across cultures.

Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Individualism in Modern China analyzes important aspects of Chinese intellectual life and cultural practices that formed and informed the historical phenomenon known as the New Culture era. Through examining an influential newspaper supplement published in Beijing during 1918–1928, along with other contemporary sources, the book explores the full dimensions and rich textures of the intellectual-literary discourses of the time period and contributes to a re-consideration and re-appreciation of the New Culture phenomenon in modern China. It highlights a key intellectual-moral paradox in Chinese discourses between cosmopolitanism as an idealistic aspiration and nationalism as a practical imperative, both in complex relationship to individualism, a paradox that ultimately speaks to the constant negotiations between Chinese tradition and Western culture in the making of Chinese modernity. These issues have remained vitally relevant to China and the world nearly a century later.