China's New Confucianism - Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society (New in Paper)

China is a country of long history with many changes. To know the history of China requires extensive study and research. A concise book on the complete history of China will be helpful and interesting. This book was written in order to provide important information on the entire history of China, so that much study and research are not needed in order to generally know about Chinese history.

The book is concise in writing, complete in coverage, and continuous through changes. Further, its contents are put in an outline format, organized with successively numbering system according to the sequence of events. In addition, a boundary map for each of the successive historical periods is inserted to help introduce realistic and definite impression on the background of China. This book will give readers general and overall ideas of the entire history of China.

In the early twentieth century, a time of political fragmentation and social upheaval in China, poverty became the focus of an anguished national conversation about the future of the country. Investigating the lives of the urban poor in China during this critical era, Guilty of Indigence examines the solutions implemented by a nation attempting to deal with "society's most fundamental problem." Interweaving analysis of shifting social viewpoints, the evolution of poor relief institutions, and the lived experiences of the urban poor, Janet Chen explores the development of Chinese attitudes toward urban poverty and of policies intended for its alleviation.

Chen concentrates on Beijing and Shanghai, two of China's most important cities, and she considers how various interventions carried a lasting influence. The advent of the workhouse, the denigration of the nonworking poor as "social parasites," efforts to police homelessness and vagrancy--all had significant impact on the lives of people struggling to survive. Chen provides a crucially needed historical lens for understanding how beliefs about poverty intersected with shattering historical events, producing new welfare policies and institutions for the benefit of some, but to the detriment of others.

Drawing on vast archival material, Guilty of Indigence deepens the historical perspective on poverty in China and reveals critical lessons about a still-pervasive social issue.

"The thing that got me about Shanghai in the Summer of 1948 was that nobody thought anything was going to happen. It was happening all around them and still they said nothing was going to happen.

When I got off the ship that day in July, I didn't know either. I went in there trying to keep my eyes open, trying to just look for a good adventure story, because adventure stories were marketable -- and because my exchequer was sadly in need of marketable writing. I should have been more knowledgeable then, about the great story of China's upheaval. But simply enough, I needed money. A woman had let me to this situation. Another woman was about to lead me into a more gratifying one."

Thus begins the story of Scott Osterman and beautiful photographer Martha Shoop, whose lives become inextricably bound together when they plunged headlong into the turmoil of the Chinese Civil War.

Their passionate love story is told against the background of exciting events and desperate situations in which only their devotion to each other and the cause of freedom sustained them.