In the past decades, China has achieved a great success in poverty reduction by helping more than 800 million of poor farmers out of poverty trap. However, Chinese government has made a series of serious efforts on social policy implementation in rural areas, poverty as a problematic persistent issue is still perplexing owing to institutional […]

This illustrated lecture, entitled “China and the World in 1900: Stories of the Boxers and the First Global War,” revisits the anti-Christian uprising and international invasion that convulsed the Qing Empire during the final year of the nineteenth century, paying particular attention to the varied ways these events were understood in different places at the […]

Maritime trade during the late Ming was characterised by the intermingling of tributary trade, private trade and piracy. The establishment of the ban on maritime trade (海禁 haijin) gave way to a scarcity of goods entering China and to a great profitability of smuggling activities. While the ban on maritime trade never succeded in eliminating […]