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Qiu Jie: "Mirror Image of The OfficialDom of the Late Qing Dynasty: A Study of Du Fengzhi's Diary"
Social Science Literature Press, May 2021
As an important historical source, diaries have always received great attention from historians. For more than two decades, research based on the diaries of various characters has been in the ascendant. Compared with the major figures who have attracted much attention, although some middle- and lower-class figures have not heard of important military matters because of their own status, their diaries also have academic value that cannot be ignored. This is because such characters are multi-oriented to the grassroots, so there is a lot of information about the operation of grassroots society in the diary, and these situations will be intentionally or unintentionally obscured in the official history books. The diary of Du Fengzhi, the subject of study in this book, is such a written material written by a "small person", which is three or four million words long. Professor Qiu Jie of the Department of History of Sun Yat-sen University spent twenty years sorting out and studying it, and the cave vaguely sorted out many aspects of the late Qing officialdom.
Du Fengzhi was a county in Guangdong Province during the same light years. For ZhiXian County, handling judicial cases in the jurisdiction is an important part of its work. Du Fengzhi recorded a large number of cases in his diary, and what is particularly valuable is that he also wrote down his thoughts on hearing lawsuits and judging cases. This book provides a detailed analysis of these contents, allowing readers to see the implementation of the legal system at the grass-roots level in the Qing Dynasty.
Du Fengzhi's more than ten years of immersion in the officialdom made him very familiar with the "unspoken rules" and "lubricants" of the eunuch sea outside the official articles. This book tells the reader that although the Qing court emphasized strict law and formulated large and small "rules and regulations", in the actual operation process, officials had another set of "conventions" to deal with it. For example, they often deliberately seek improper income for themselves through bad rules in tax collection and "public gifts" submitted by scribes and merchants. According to the statistics in the book, when Du Fengzhi resigned and returned to his hometown, he had accumulated at least 45,000 taels of silver family wealth. From the perspective of the people, the folk saying "three years of Qing prefect, 100,000 snowflakes of silver" although exaggerated, but not unfounded. For example, in general, the Qing Dynasty officialdom pays attention to the dignity and inferiority of the upper and lower levels, and the officials must be careful in their words and deeds when communicating, and abide by the distinction, but they sometimes discuss the right and wrong of their superiors in private, and the superiors will also tell their contradictions with their colleagues in front of their subordinates, and everyone uses this special way to consolidate mutual trust and compile interpersonal networks.
Du Fengzhi was very disgusted by the continuous expansion of power in China by the great powers of the Tongguang dynasty and the two dynasties, and was even more indignant because he had handled foreign-related cases several times and had suffered a lot of "foreign popularity." However, he is not completely repelled by foreign affairs. The book mentions that Du Fengzhi had purchased Western clocks and watches and taken photos, but his interest in the West was limited to playing with specific objects, and his understanding of the external world as a whole was still ignorant of contradictions. It is written in the book that Du Fengzhi has roughly known the fact that the moon revolves around the earth through reading books such as "Yinghuan Zhiluo", but he still prays every time there is a solar eclipse and a lunar eclipse. All of the above information enriched the study of the collective mentality of middle and lower-level officials in the late Qing Dynasty. Professor Qiu's treatise can therefore be said to be a historical version of the "Chronicle of the Appearance of Officialdom".
[Japanese] Ishikawa Akihiro, Yuan Guangquan translation: "Red Star" - How did the world know Mao Zedong? 》
Peking University, Publishers, June 2021
This book is a treatise dissecting the shaping and dissemination of Mao Zedong's early political image. The author, Professor Ishikawa Zhenhao, is well-known in the field of modern Chinese historiography for his delicate research and vivid narrative. These academic qualities of his are once again fully reflected in this book. Using a variety of materials in Chinese, English, Russian and Japanese, combined with macro historical events, the author conducts an in-depth investigation of the pictures and biographies of Mao Zedong in multiple versions of the 1930s.
In 1936, after the American journalist Edgar Snow went to northern Shaanxi to cover the interview, he wrote "The Red Star Shines on China". The book successfully popularized Mao Zedong's charismatic image to the world, and became a classic work for the study of Mao Zedong in the future. In his treatise, Professor Ishikawa focuses on Snow's trip to northern Shaanxi and the repercussions of The Red Star Shines on China, especially the different spread of the masterpiece in China, the Soviet Union, and Japan, as well as their respective reasons. Readers can see the correlation between the spread of characters and the evolution of political conditions.
Zheng Xiaoyou, Tachibana Xuanya, Summer: "The Nine Kings Seize the Concubine"
Shanxi Publishing and Media Group April 2021
Kang Yong's conquest of the throne is a topic that has long attracted attention in the field of Qing history research, and the relevant academic discussions have been heard for nearly a hundred years. This book is a new work on this turbulent history. The author, Dr. Zheng Xiaoyou, graduated from the Department of History of Peking University and is now an associate research librarian at the National Library of China, specializing in the political history of the Qing Dynasty. In this book, the author continues his in-depth and simple writing style, and at the same time, combined with the Manchu archives that have been less involved in previous research, he dissects the royal party struggle shrouded in the veil of fatherly kindness and filial piety and brotherhood. Therefore, this "Nine Kings And Concubines" not only allows readers to understand the high-level ecology of Kang Yong's alternation, but also helps to deepen the understanding of traditional court politics.
Huang Jun