What to Read

By I.U. Faculty

The Business of Lobbying in China
Scott Kennedy
(Harvard University Press, 2005)

I.U. Bloomington Professor Scott Kennedy’s new book The Business of Lobbying in China is due to hit bookshelves at the end of February. Below is the publishers review of this work. Look for an in-depth student review in the April issue.

In this timely work, Scott Kennedy documents the rising influence of business, both Chinese and foreign, on national public policy in China.

China’s shift to a market economy has made businesses more sensitive to their bottom line and has seen the passage of thousands of laws and regulations that directly affect firms’ success. Companies have become involved in a tug of war with the government and with each other to gain national policy advantages, often setting the agenda, providing alternative options, and pressing for a favored outcome.

Kennedy’s comparison of lobbying in the steel, consumer electronics, and software industries shows that although companies operate in a common political system, economic circumstances shape the nature and outcome of lobbying. Factors such as private or state ownership, size, industry concentration, and technological sophistication all affect industry activism.

Based on over 300 in-depth interviews with company executives, business association representatives, and government officials, this study identifies a wide range of national economic policies influenced by lobbying, including taxes, technical standards, and intellectual property rights. These findings have significant implications for how we think about Chinese politics and economics, as well as government-business relations in general.

For more information on this book, please go to www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/KENBUS.html

Time Temporality and Imperial Transition: East Asian from Ming to Qing
Lynn Struve
(University of Hawai’i Press, 2005)

The Qing Formation in World-Historical Time
Lynn Struve
(Harvard University Press, 2004)

Another new book, Time Temporality and Imperial Transition: East Asian from Ming to Qing, edited by Professor Lynn Struve, is due out this month. This book is a companion volume to her other recent publication The Qing Formation in World-Historical Time, which was published in July of 2004. Below, you will find the publisher’s reviews of both works. Professor Struve is currently running a graduate seminar on these books.

Time Temporality and Imperial Transition: East Asian from Ming to Qing
Time is basic to human consciousness and action, yet paradoxically historians rarely ask how it is understood, manipulated, recorded, or lived. Cataclysmic events in particular disrupt and realign the dynamics of temporality among people. For historians, the temporal effects of such events on large polities such as empires-the power projections of which always involve the dictation of time-are especially significant. This important and intriguing volume is an investigation of precisely such temporal effects, focusing on the northern and eastern regions of the Asian subcontinent in the seventeenth century, when the polity at the core of East Asian civilization, Ming dynasty China, collapsed and was replaced by the Manchu-ruled Qing dynasty. For more information on this book, go to www.uhpress.hawaii.edu.

The Qing Formation in World-Historical Time
For many years, the Ming and Qing dynasties have been grouped as “late imperial China,” a temporal framework that allows scholars to identify and evaluate indigenous patterns of social, economic, and cultural change initiated in the last century of Ming rule that imparted a particular character to state and society throughout the Qing and into the twentieth century. This paradigm asserts the autonomous character of social change in China and has allowed historians to create a “China-centered history.” Recently, however, many scholars have begun emphasizing the singular qualities of the Qing. Among the eight contributors to this volume on the formation of the Qing, those who emphasize the Manchu ethos of the Qing tend to see it as part of an early modernity and stress parallel and sometimes mutually reinforcing patterns of political consolidation and cultural integration across Eurasia. Other contributors who examine the Qing formation from the perspective of those who lived through the dynastic transition see the advent of Qing rule as prompting attempts by the Chinese subjects of the new empire to make sense of what they perceived as a historical disjuncture and to rework these understandings into an accommodation to foreign rule. In contrast to the late imperial paradigm, the new ways of configuring the Qing in historical time in both groups of essays assert the singular qualities of the Qing formation. This review and others can be found at www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/STRQIN.html

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