Updating Wilkinson: An Annotated Bibliography of Reference Works on Imperial China Published since 1973 (review)

Reviews 387 NOTES1. See, for example, Wilbur Zelinsky's article "The Twinning ofthe World: Sister Cities in Geographic and Historical Perspective," Annals ofthe Association ofAmerican Geographers 81, no. 1 (1991): 1-31. 2.Paul A Cohen, DiscoveringHistory in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). 3.David Strand, Rickshaw Beijing: City People and Politics in the 1920s (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1989); William T. Rowe, Hankow: Commerce and Society in a Chinese City, 1796-1889 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984); and William T. Rowe, Hankow: Conflict and Community in a Chinese City, 1796-1895 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989). James H. Cole. Updating Wilkinson: An Annotated Bibliography ofReference Works on Imperial China Published since 1973. New York: James H. Cole, 1991. viii, 111 pp. Paperback $12.00, isbn 0-9629122-0-4. Since its publication in 1973, Endymion Wilkinson's The History ofImperial China: A Research Guide has served successive generations of graduate students as an invaluable introduction to research on all aspects of the history of China up to the end of the empire in 1911. Meanwhile, of course, many additional reference works have appeared. Working at three major libraries, those of the University of Toronto, Columbia University in New York and the Hoover Institution at Stanford , James Cole has made notes ofthis new material and put together a useful compendium that will supplement, without replacing, Wilkinson for present-day students. The material is arranged topically but not, as one might expect from the tide, under Wilkinson's headings. In the first section, topics follow one another alphabetically from Anthropology, Archaeology, Bibliographical Dictionaries, and Handbooks to Turpan Studies, Weights and Measures, and Women's Studies, after which come two more sections, on Biography and on Local History and Historical Geography, respectively, each with alphabetically arranged subheadings. Unfortunately there is no index. Chinese characters are rather untidily but on the whole legibly written in, presumably by the author. While I admire the author's industry, I cannot help feeling that with die resources now available for desktop publishing by computer he could have turned it, without an exorbitant amount of additional labor, into a more useful manual and one that would have been© 1996 by University ofHawai'iPressmuch easier on the eyes. Edwin G. Pulleyblank University of British Columbia 388 China Review International: Vol. 3, No. 2, Fall 1996 Edwin G. Pulleyblank is a professor emeritus in the Department ofAsian Studies at the University ofBritish Columbia. He haspublished extensively in variousfields of Chinese history and historical linguistics. Frank Dikötter. Sex, Culture and Modernity in China: Medical Science and the Construction ofSexual Identities in the Early Republican Period. Honolulu : University ofHawai'i Press, 1995. ix, 233 pp. Hardcover $28.00, isbn 0-8248-1676-5. Frank Dikötter is opening up new areas in the study ofmodern China. His book, The Discourse on Race in Modern China (Stanford, 1992) drew on political, social, and medical literature to challenge the common opinion that, apart from what was learned directly from the West, Chinese thought had been relatively free from racism. This new book may be somewhat less controversial, but it, too, draws a picture oftwentieth-century attitudes toward, or discourse about, sex in China that differs widely from the presumably Western-derived liberal or humanistic values that are supposed to have inspired many Republican-era writers and intellectuals. However, even if it implicitly rejects some assumptions by intellectual or literary historians of modern China, Sex, Culture and Modernity is more a new exploration than a revisionist thesis. For his sources Dikötter draws on a wide range ofpublications from the new commercial presses of the early twentieth century, mostiy located in Shanghai, often by the Commercial Press. These publications include medical treatises, sex-education pamphlets, university textbooks, scientific journals, the popular press, and periodicals. In this "relatively coherent web" ofpublications intended for the new, urban, educated classes, a broad range of experts and pseudo-experts—all drawing on the prestige of science and modernity—created a new discourse on sexuality in China. The subjects they covered (treated serially in five consecutive chapters) were: the construction or reconstruction of female identity, the nature of...