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Acknowledgments In the mid-1990s, I worked on my PhD dissertation at the Nankai University, Tianjin, under the guidance of Professor Liu Zehua 劉澤華. Already then I began contemplating how to introduce insights regarding traditional Chinese political culture of Professor Liu and his disciples, Ge Quan 葛荃, Zhang Fentian 張分田, and Zhang Rongming 張榮明, to the Western audience. It is to Liu Zehua and to Nankai friends that I owe my deepest intellectual debt, and it is to them that this book is dedicated. My second debt is to myWestern colleagues, who offered plenty of insightful comments and criticisms of the drafts of this manuscript or portions thereof and of my earlier publications. I am particularly grateful to (in alphabetic order ) Michal Biran, Erica Brindley, Miranda Brown, Nicola Di Cosmo, Patricia Crone, Lothar von Falkenhausen, Carol Gluck, Paul R. Goldin, Martin Kern, Michael Nylan,Andrew Plaks,Charles Sanft,and Gideon Shelach.Many others, with whom I communicated at conferences and informal meetings and who shared with me their publications, further contributed toward maturation of my research and the completion of this book, and I am indebted to them. While working on the manuscript, I benefited from the support of the Israeli Science Foundation (grant No.726/02-1) and the MichaelWilliam Lipson Chair in Chinese Studies. I am particularly grateful for Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro Membership in the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton NJ (2006), where extraordinarily favorable intellectual atmosphere greatly bolstered my research. And, of course, it is to my friends, most specifically Wang Yu 王宇, whom I am must thank for their multifaceted assistance during these years. vii [This page intentionally left blank.] ...

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