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Informationen zum Autor Isabel Brown Crook is professor emerita at Beijing Foreign Studies University. Christina Kelley Gilmartin (1946-2012) was professor of history at Northeastern University. Yu Xiji (1914-2006) was professor emerita of child psychology at Teachers' Training College in Beipei, Sichuan. Gail Hershatter is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and past president of the Association for Asian Studies. Emily Honig is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Klappentext This classic in the annals of village studies will be widely read and debated for what it reveals about China's rural dynamics as well as the nature of state power, markets, the military, social relations, and religion. Built on extraordinarily intimate and detailed research in a Sichuan village that Isabel Crook began in 1940, the book provides an unprecedented history of Chinese rural life during the war with Japan. It is an essential resource for all scholars of contemporary China. The publication of this ethnographic material sheds precious light on an almost vanished world. Over seventy years ago, the daughter of Canadian missionaries was sent to study a village in rural Sichuan. Now in her nineties, she has collaborated with younger American scholars to bring out a volume that reconstructs the complexities and the hardships of pre-revolutionary rural China. -- Delia Davin, University of Leeds An extraordinary achievement, Prosperity's Predicament provides a window into a single village in Sichuan as it is thrust suddenly by war into the twentieth century. The book is both a well-told story of a year in the life of a market town and a perceptive microhistory of the failed effort by the state and well-meaning NGOs to effect reform and extract resources for the war effort. -- Stephen R. MacKinnon, Arizona State University This splendid achievement offers a worm's-eye view of how a Sichuan market community operated in wartime China, and focuses on the efforts of Republican-era reformers to win over local officials to the cause or rural reconstruction. Drawing on richly textured local history, and providing us with vivid snapshots of everyday material life, this presentation of Crook's research sheds light on the workings of a rural society that was not ready to surrender to the state-building plan of the Nationalist government. We owe much to Isabel Crook, as well as to the late Chris Gilmartin, for bringing the history of Prosperity and its predicament to our attention. -- Ralph A. Thaxton, Brandeis University Inhaltsverzeichnis IntroductionGail Hershatter and Emily HonigPart I: InsidersChapter 1: The Market Way of LifeChapter 2: Living Off the Land: Farm LaborChapter 3: Not Far Afield: Family Survival StrategiesChapter 4: Lineages, Landlords, and the Local Body PoliticChapter 5: The Paoge and Informal PowerPart II: OutsidersChapter 6: Wartime ReformersChapter 7: Taking Health Care PublicChapter 8: Marriage: Reformed and UnreformedChapter 9: Of Money and MenChapter 10: Trial of StrengthGlossaryWorks Cited...
