In this innovative and engaging history of homicide investigation in Republican Beijing, Daniel Asen explores the transformation of ideas about death in China in the first half of the twentieth century. In this period, those who died violently or under suspicious circumstances constituted a particularly important population of the dead, subject to new claims by police, legal and medical professionals, and a newspaper industry intent on covering urban fatality in sensational detail. Asen ex...

Today China is a major player in advancing the frontiers of biomedicine, yet previous accounts have examined only whether medical ideas and institutions created in the West were successfully transferred to China. This is the firstbook to demonstrate the role China played in creating a globalized biomedicine between 1850 and 1950. This was China's "Century of Humiliation" when imperialist powers dominated China's foreign policy and economy, forcing it to join global trends that included lim...

A bold rethinking of public discourse, Public Modalities explores how people shape civic life through protest, media, and identity in an ever-evolving public sphere.This book explores the ways that scholars, journalists, politicians, and citizens conceive of “the public” or “public life,” and how those entities are defined and invented. For decades, scholars have used the metaphors of spheres, systems, webs, or networks to talk about, describe, and map var...