This book, published by Columbia University Press in December 2015, investigates how the dominant images of China or Chinese law were created and how and why they acquired extraordinary and lasting power in the context of Sino-Western encounters from approximately the 1740s through the 1840s. By...

"China's industrial reform has traditionally been depicted as the dissolution of central party state control and the development of an increasingly open, market-oriented, decentralized system, adhering to the standards of liberal market economy. This book, on the other hand, argues that these...