R Bin Wong
Biographic Data
| ID | 75436 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R Bin Wong |
| GIVEN NAMES | R Bin |
| FAMILY NAME | Wong |
| SIGNATURE | BIN WONG R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Los Angeles |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 68 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1978 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
What The Cambridge Economic History of China Teaches Us about China and Tells Us About Economic History
Considering the 1500+ pages making up the 39 chapters of this work on Chinese economic history from ancient times to the present, this review essay suggests ways The Cambridge Economic History of China contributes new perspectives on economic history more generally and on plausible connections between the pathways of Chinese economic change that begin in the distant past and point toward the future. The essay addresses specifically Chinese elemen…
Citizenship in Chinese and Global History Before and After the 1890s
Maarten Prak's Citizens without Nations merits praise for what he has added to our understanding of early modern and modern European history. He presents persuasive arguments and evidence for how variations among early modern European cities and their citizens together with subsequent variations among relations between cities and state shaped the modern relations between European national states and their citizens. Prak also extends the concept o…
Public Goods Provision in the Early Modern Economy: Comparative Perspectives from Japan, China, and Europe
Scholarly discussions on economic development in history, specifically those linked to industrialization or modern economic growth, have paid great attention to the formation and development of the market economy as a set of institutions able to augment people’s welfare. The role of nonmarket practices for promoting economic development and success has been an area of interest, typically involving discussion of the state’s economic policies. How …
Public Goods Provision in the Early Modern Economy: Comparative Perspectives from Japan, China, and Europe
Historically, for sustaining and reproducing their economic lives, people have obtained goods and services through various ways. How did people tackle issues that the market did not handle well? This volume compares early modern efforts to provide “public goods”—defined in contraposition to market-mediated goods and goods provided through personal relations, such as kinship ties. We examine poverty and famine relief, infrastructure building, and …
Coping with Poverty and Famine: Material Welfare, Public Goods, and Chinese Approaches to Governance
This chapter, by R. Bin Wong, discusses eighteenth-century Chinese approaches to poverty, including efforts to store grain for subsistence relief (such as granaries), one of the last lines of defense against famine that could impoverish much of the population. To address the root causes of poverty, Chinese officials and bureaucracy made efforts to expand agricultural production and ensure the wide circulation of commercial grain flows. These effo…
Modern China and Global Futures in C. A. Bayly's Vision of Twentieth-Century History
Commenting on Christopher Bayly's Remaking the Modern World, 1900–2015 is a bittersweet exercise. My assignment for this forum is to consider Remaking the Modern World, 1900–2015 from the vantage point of China studies. I will do so by framing my remarks with respect to some of the ways this major South Asia historian took his expertise into larger projects, the last of which is the volume under discussion
The Last Millennium of Chinese Imperial Rule and the Emergence of China's Modern Economy
This article presents a brief introduction to the relationship between the Chinese state c. tenth–early twentieth centuries and the emergence of China’s modern economy that contains shared points of view with Dingxin Zhao’s The Confucian-Legalist State: A New Theory of Chinese History as well as the identification of different key causal mechanisms to explain economic change
Seunghyun Han. After the Prosperous Age: State and Elites in Early Nineteenth-Century Suzhou
After the Prosperous Age contributes to the understanding of early-nineteenth-century Chinese state-local elite relations through a case study of Suzhou elites’ roles in local public works, their symbolic recognition by the state, and the degree to which local elites expressed views distinctive from those of people in positions of official authority over them. Seunghyun Han argues strongly for the thesis that elite activism substituting for state…
The Art of Being Governed: Everyday Politics in Late Imperial China
It is unusual for a work about Ming Dynasty (1368–1643) history to be anchored deeply in sources and yet able to move nimbly through multiple stories of ordinary people. Even more surprising is a carefully argued research monograph about the early modern era that has little connection to events or people in Europe but manages to make a compelling argument for why historians who do not work on China should be drawn to reading it. Szonyi’s subject …
The Chinese State, Social Order and Economic Change
Tonio Andrade. The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History
Over the past three decades, the production of historical scholarship on non-European world regions has shown that history’s global turn allows us to place the histories of Europe and its white settler societies into a revised frame of reference. We no longer privilege the traits distinctive to those countries as the sole indicators for what to expect to happen in other places as cultural, economic, political, and social connections become thicke…
Borderland Capitalism: Turkestan Produce, Qing Silver, and the Birth of an Eastern Market
This book provides a distinctive perspective on Chinese history that delves deeply into the economic activities occurring on the Qing dynasty’s frontiers, which Kim places within the changing global economy and relates to the status of Turkestan within the Qing polity. It offers a persuasive account of the different economic interests of Muslims in the region, moving beyond the conventional ethnic taxonomies that other historians have used to exp…
Peter Zarrow. After Empire: The Conceptual Transformation of the Chinese State, 1885–1924
This is a book on turn-of-the-twentieth-century Chinese intellectual history evaluating texts written in the four decades after 1885. It considers the arguments made by Chinese intellectuals, famous and otherwise, about what a government should do and how it should relate to Chinese people and their concerns. The book's subtitle alerts the reader to Peter Zarrow's focus on “the conceptual transformation of the Chinese state.” In contrast to Wang …
Explaining the Emergence of Modern Economies and Societies
Centennial perspectives on China's 1911 Revolution
Both within and beyond China, contemporary reflections on the end of two millennia of imperial rule in China frequently focus upon the failure of the new republic to form a strong state and an effective parliamentary form of representative government. For many the agenda for political change in China today is traced back to unfulfilled opportunities in the past. This presentation suggests another set of perspectives that asks what political chall…
Rightful Resistance in Rural China
Rightful Resistance in Rural China. By Kevin J. O'Brien and Lianjiang Li. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 200 pages. $70.00 cloth, $24.99 paper. Studies of contemporary China move between two poles of presentation—richly detailed analyses of phenomena that seem specific to China and more sweeping panaromas that leap to broad generalities without always marking their steps forward clearly. Kevin J. O'Brien and Lianjiang Li offer an ins…
Les politiques de dépenses sociales avant ou sans démocratie
Dans un livre marquant -Growing public- Peter Lindert propose d'analyser les dépenses publiques de redistribution en examinant l'économie politique des mesures prises dans un large éventail de pays au cours des trois derniers siècles. L'ambition est de rendre compte de l'histoire des politiques sociales, du rythme de leur développement, de leurs variations d'un pays à l'autre et des effets qu'elles ont eus.Par l'éclairage nouveau qu'il apporte su…
Early Modern Economic History in the Long Run
Eurocentrism, Sinocentrism and World History: A Symposium
The Search for European Differences and Domination in the Early Modern World: A View from Asia
The Political Economy of Chinese Rural Industry And Commerce in Historical Perspective
The studies of Chinese reform era rural industry and commerce usually do not consider the political economy before 1949. This article suggests several ways in which an understanding of the political economy of Chinese handicraft industry and commerce in the eighteenth, late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as in the period since 1949 can strengthen understanding of current practices and future possibilities. It considers especiall…
Formal and Informal Mechanisms of Rule and Economic Development: The Qing Empire in Comparative Perspective
FORMAL AND INFORMAL MECHANISMS OF RULE AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT: THE QING EMPIRE IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE R. BIN WONG Universiry of California, Irvine Two Problems: A 'Theoretical Prologue The creation of stable political systems and economic development share certain important abstract characteristics. Both depend, at least in part, on different parties satisfying the expectations others hold of them. Eflective rule requires officials to strik…
Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
Acknowlegments ix Introduction: The Idea of Provincializing Europe 3 Part One: Historicism and the Narration of Modernity Chapter 1. Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History 27 Chapter 2. The Two Histories of Capital 47 Chapter 3. Translating Life-Worlds into Labor and History 72 Chapter 4. Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts 97 Part Two: Histories of Belonging Chapter 5. Domestic Cruelty and the Birth of the Subject 117 Chapter 6. Nation and …
Entre monde et nation: Les régions braudéliennes en Asie
Partant de l'inspiration que les historiens de l'Asie ont tirée de La Méditerranée de Fernand Braudel, cet article interroge l'importance des unités régionales d'analyse pour l'histoire de l'Asie. Alors que, dans de nombreux cas, la formation des gouvernements et leur population de sujets sont étudiées de manière optimale dans un contexte régional, les parties d'un empire agricole comme la Chine sont mieux à leur place dans différents contextes r…
China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience
"This bold, intellectually ambitious, and wholly original book challenges the way in which Western social science understands China.... It will set the standard for all future comparative and theoretical research on China."—Timothy Brook, Stanford University"This is a most extraordinary book. Wong's approach is to explore carefully similarities and differences between Chinese and European development over the long term, highlighting themes relate…
Revising the Malthusian Narrative: The Comparative Study of Population Dynamics in Late Imperial China
Ever since malthus, it has been conventional to cast the Chinese and European preindustrial demographic systems as opposing archetypes-Europe as a model of demographic restraint, China as demographic profligate. Europe's moderate population growth, fertility control keyed to economic conditions, and favorable living standards are contrasted with China's rapid growth, periodic mortality crises, and precarious balance of population and resources. A…
China and Historical Capitalism: Genealogies of Sinological Knowledge
This book addresses the historical relationship that has arisen between the concept of capitalism and the idea of China. Formulated by European intellectuals in order to identify the social formation in which they found themselves, capitalism was portrayed as unique to Europe and as an organic outgrowth of Western civilization. In this way, China was rejected as a model of civilization, and seen merely as despotic, feudal or stagnant. This Euroce…
Food Riots in the Qing Dynasty
Competition over grain supplies produced conflict when the people controlling large stores of grain failed to sell or lend grain at prices and in quantities demanded by the people needing grain. These conflicts, known generally as food riots, took place within a general political economy of grain circulation that spanned a wide variety of local situations. A brief sketch of different types of grain circulation and forms of food rioting establishe…
Eurocentrism, Sinocentrism and World History: A Symposium
Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
Acknowlegments ix Introduction: The Idea of Provincializing Europe 3 Part One: Historicism and the Narration of Modernity Chapter 1. Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History 27 Chapter 2. The Two Histories of Capital 47 Chapter 3. Translating Life-Worlds into Labor and History 72 Chapter 4. Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts 97 Part Two: Histories of Belonging Chapter 5. Domestic Cruelty and the Birth of the Subject 117 Chapter 6. Nation and …
Famine's Foes in Ch'ing China
Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
Journal Article Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed Get access Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by Gary W. Selnow. Westport, CT, Praeger Press, 1998. 264 pp. Cloth, $59.95; paper, $19.95. R. Bin Wong R. Bin Wong University of California, Irvine Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarterly, Volu…
Chinese Economic History and Development: A Note on the Myers—Huang Exchange
Ramon myers recently reviewed in this journal four books analyzing China's prewar economy and Philip Huang added a reply to some of Myers's criticisms. They clearly disagree about how best to characterize China's Republican-period economy. Myers suggests that books by Loren Brandt, David Faure, and Thomas Rawski collectively reveal different aspects of modern economic development, while Huang presents the concept of “involutionary growth” as a me…
The Political Economy of Chinese Rural Industry And Commerce in Historical Perspective
The studies of Chinese reform era rural industry and commerce usually do not consider the political economy before 1949. This article suggests several ways in which an understanding of the political economy of Chinese handicraft industry and commerce in the eighteenth, late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as in the period since 1949 can strengthen understanding of current practices and future possibilities. It considers especiall…
Formal and Informal Mechanisms of Rule and Economic Development: The Qing Empire in Comparative Perspective
FORMAL AND INFORMAL MECHANISMS OF RULE AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT: THE QING EMPIRE IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE R. BIN WONG Universiry of California, Irvine Two Problems: A 'Theoretical Prologue The creation of stable political systems and economic development share certain important abstract characteristics. Both depend, at least in part, on different parties satisfying the expectations others hold of them. Eflective rule requires officials to strik…
China and World History
Les émeutes de subsistances en Chine et en Europe occidentale
Entre la fin du XVII e et le milieu du XIX e siècle, les problèmes de subsistances sont une cause fréquente d'agitation populaire en Europe occidentale. La recherche récente s'est attachée à décrire ces événements et en a analysé non sans force les relations avec les réalités politiques et économiques du temps. On connaît moins les types de conflits extrêmement semblables dont la Chine a été le théâtre à la fin de l'ère impériale. En Chine aussi …
Citizenship in Chinese and Global History Before and After the 1890s
Maarten Prak's Citizens without Nations merits praise for what he has added to our understanding of early modern and modern European history. He presents persuasive arguments and evidence for how variations among early modern European cities and their citizens together with subsequent variations among relations between cities and state shaped the modern relations between European national states and their citizens. Prak also extends the concept o…
Modern China and Global Futures in C. A. Bayly's Vision of Twentieth-Century History
Commenting on Christopher Bayly's Remaking the Modern World, 1900–2015 is a bittersweet exercise. My assignment for this forum is to consider Remaking the Modern World, 1900–2015 from the vantage point of China studies. I will do so by framing my remarks with respect to some of the ways this major South Asia historian took his expertise into larger projects, the last of which is the volume under discussion
Centennial perspectives on China's 1911 Revolution
Both within and beyond China, contemporary reflections on the end of two millennia of imperial rule in China frequently focus upon the failure of the new republic to form a strong state and an effective parliamentary form of representative government. For many the agenda for political change in China today is traced back to unfulfilled opportunities in the past. This presentation suggests another set of perspectives that asks what political chall…
Rightful Resistance in Rural China
Rightful Resistance in Rural China. By Kevin J. O'Brien and Lianjiang Li. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 200 pages. $70.00 cloth, $24.99 paper. Studies of contemporary China move between two poles of presentation—richly detailed analyses of phenomena that seem specific to China and more sweeping panaromas that leap to broad generalities without always marking their steps forward clearly. Kevin J. O'Brien and Lianjiang Li offer an ins…
Early Modern Economic History in the Long Run
Entre monde et nation: Les régions braudéliennes en Asie
Partant de l'inspiration que les historiens de l'Asie ont tirée de La Méditerranée de Fernand Braudel, cet article interroge l'importance des unités régionales d'analyse pour l'histoire de l'Asie. Alors que, dans de nombreux cas, la formation des gouvernements et leur population de sujets sont étudiées de manière optimale dans un contexte régional, les parties d'un empire agricole comme la Chine sont mieux à leur place dans différents contextes r…
The City in Late Imperial China
Food Riots in the Qing Dynasty
Competition over grain supplies produced conflict when the people controlling large stores of grain failed to sell or lend grain at prices and in quantities demanded by the people needing grain. These conflicts, known generally as food riots, took place within a general political economy of grain circulation that spanned a wide variety of local situations. A brief sketch of different types of grain circulation and forms of food rioting establishe…
Les émeutes de subsistances en Chine et en Europe occidentale
Entre la fin du XVII e et le milieu du XIX e siècle, les problèmes de subsistances sont une cause fréquente d'agitation populaire en Europe occidentale. La recherche récente s'est attachée à décrire ces événements et en a analysé non sans force les relations avec les réalités politiques et économiques du temps. On connaît moins les types de conflits extrêmement semblables dont la Chine a été le théâtre à la fin de l'ère impériale. En Chine aussi …
Famine's Foes in Ch'ing China
China and World History
Local Merchants and the Chinese Bureaucracy, 1750-1950
Nourish the People: The State Civilian Granary System in China, 1650–1850
The Qing state, driven by Confucian precepts of good government and urgent practical needs, committed vast resources to its granaries. Nourish the People traces the basic practices of this system, analyzes the organizational bases of its successes and failures, and examines variant practices in different regions. The volume concludes with an assessment of the granary system’s social and economic impact and historical comparison with the food supp…
Chinese Economic History and Development: A Note on the Myers—Huang Exchange
Ramon myers recently reviewed in this journal four books analyzing China's prewar economy and Philip Huang added a reply to some of Myers's criticisms. They clearly disagree about how best to characterize China's Republican-period economy. Myers suggests that books by Loren Brandt, David Faure, and Thomas Rawski collectively reveal different aspects of modern economic development, while Huang presents the concept of “involutionary growth” as a me…
Dimensions of State Expansion and Contraction in Imperial China
Culture and State in Chinese History: Conventions, Accommodations, and Critiques
Many observers of late imperial China have noted the relatively small size of the state in comparison to the geographic size and large population of China and have advanced various theories to account for the ability of the state to maintain itself in power. One of the more enduring explanations has been that the Chinese state, despite its limited material capacities, possessed strong ideological powers and was able to influence cultural norms in…
Revising the Malthusian Narrative: The Comparative Study of Population Dynamics in Late Imperial China
Ever since malthus, it has been conventional to cast the Chinese and European preindustrial demographic systems as opposing archetypes-Europe as a model of demographic restraint, China as demographic profligate. Europe's moderate population growth, fertility control keyed to economic conditions, and favorable living standards are contrasted with China's rapid growth, periodic mortality crises, and precarious balance of population and resources. A…
Saeki Yuuichi 1923-1998
Obituary| May 01 1998 Saeki Yuuichi 1923–1998 R. Bin Wong R. Bin Wong University of California, Irvine Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Asian Studies (1998) 57 (2): 631. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021911800003715 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Ci…
The political economy of agrarian empire and its modern legacy
The difficulties of adapting explanations of economic change in European history to the Chinese experience have challenged some of the best specialists working on Chinese history throughout the twentieth century, as well as a number of equally gifted social theorists and comparativists. Many scholars have developed expectations for economic change in China based on readings of economic change in Europe because this is the better studied area. Ind…
China and Historical Capitalism: Genealogies of Sinological Knowledge
This book addresses the historical relationship that has arisen between the concept of capitalism and the idea of China. Formulated by European intellectuals in order to identify the social formation in which they found themselves, capitalism was portrayed as unique to Europe and as an organic outgrowth of Western civilization. In this way, China was rejected as a model of civilization, and seen merely as despotic, feudal or stagnant. This Euroce…
Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
Journal Article Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed Get access Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by Gary W. Selnow. Westport, CT, Praeger Press, 1998. 264 pp. Cloth, $59.95; paper, $19.95. R. Bin Wong R. Bin Wong University of California, Irvine Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarterly, Volu…
Culture and State in Chinese History: Conventions, Accomodations, and Critiques
China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience
"This bold, intellectually ambitious, and wholly original book challenges the way in which Western social science understands China.... It will set the standard for all future comparative and theoretical research on China."—Timothy Brook, Stanford University"This is a most extraordinary book. Wong's approach is to explore carefully similarities and differences between Chinese and European development over the long term, highlighting themes relate…
Formal and Informal Mechanisms of Rule and Economic Development: The Qing Empire in Comparative Perspective
FORMAL AND INFORMAL MECHANISMS OF RULE AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT: THE QING EMPIRE IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE R. BIN WONG Universiry of California, Irvine Two Problems: A 'Theoretical Prologue The creation of stable political systems and economic development share certain important abstract characteristics. Both depend, at least in part, on different parties satisfying the expectations others hold of them. Eflective rule requires officials to strik…
Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
Acknowlegments ix Introduction: The Idea of Provincializing Europe 3 Part One: Historicism and the Narration of Modernity Chapter 1. Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History 27 Chapter 2. The Two Histories of Capital 47 Chapter 3. Translating Life-Worlds into Labor and History 72 Chapter 4. Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts 97 Part Two: Histories of Belonging Chapter 5. Domestic Cruelty and the Birth of the Subject 117 Chapter 6. Nation and …
Entre monde et nation: Les régions braudéliennes en Asie
Partant de l'inspiration que les historiens de l'Asie ont tirée de La Méditerranée de Fernand Braudel, cet article interroge l'importance des unités régionales d'analyse pour l'histoire de l'Asie. Alors que, dans de nombreux cas, la formation des gouvernements et leur population de sujets sont étudiées de manière optimale dans un contexte régional, les parties d'un empire agricole comme la Chine sont mieux à leur place dans différents contextes r…
The Search for European Differences and Domination in the Early Modern World: A View from Asia
The Political Economy of Chinese Rural Industry And Commerce in Historical Perspective
The studies of Chinese reform era rural industry and commerce usually do not consider the political economy before 1949. This article suggests several ways in which an understanding of the political economy of Chinese handicraft industry and commerce in the eighteenth, late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as in the period since 1949 can strengthen understanding of current practices and future possibilities. It considers especiall…
Eurocentrism, Sinocentrism and World History: A Symposium
Early Modern Economic History in the Long Run
Rightful Resistance in Rural China
Rightful Resistance in Rural China. By Kevin J. O'Brien and Lianjiang Li. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 200 pages. $70.00 cloth, $24.99 paper. Studies of contemporary China move between two poles of presentation—richly detailed analyses of phenomena that seem specific to China and more sweeping panaromas that leap to broad generalities without always marking their steps forward clearly. Kevin J. O'Brien and Lianjiang Li offer an ins…
Political science (31 works) · Chinese history and philosophy (26 works) · China (24 works) · History (24 works) · Law (21 works) · Economics (20 works) · Politics (17 works) · Sociology (17 works) · History (12 works) · Historical Economic and Social Studies (11 works)