Almost nine months since the first recorded case, the novel betacoronovirus; severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has now passed 18 million confirmed cases. The multi-disciplinary work of researchers worldwide has provided a far deeper understanding of COVID-19 pathogenesis, clinical treatment and outcomes, lethality, disease-spread dynamics, period of infectivity, containment interventions, as well as providing a wealth of relevant epidemiological data. With 27 vaccines currently undergoing human trials, and countries worldwide continuing to battle case numbers, or prepare for resurgences, the need for efficient, high-quality pipelines for peer-reviewed research remains as crucial as ever.

"This book explores the Daoist encounter with modernity through the activities of Chen Yingning (1880–1969), a famous lay Daoist master, and his group in early twentieth-century Shanghai. In contrast to the usual narrative of Daoist decay, with its focus on monastic decline, clerical corruption, and popular superstitions, this study tells a story of Daoist resilience, reinvigoration, and revival. Between the 1920s and 1940s, Chen led a group of urban lay followers in pursuing Daoist self-cultivation techniques as a way of ensuring health, promoting spirituality, forging cultural self-identity, building community, and strengthening the nation. In their efforts to renew and reform Daoism, Chen and his followers became deeply engaged with nationalism, science, the religious reform movements, the new urban print culture, and other forces of modernity. Since Chen and his fellow practitioners conceived of the Daoist self-cultivation tradition as a public resource, they also transformed it from an “esoteric” pursuit into a public practice, offering a modernizing society a means of managing the body and the mind and of forging a new cultural, spiritual, and religious identity."

Wensheng Wang argues that a dramatic combination of internal uprising and transnational piracy during Emperor Jiaqing's reign, rather than being a hallmark of dynastic decline, propelled the Manchu court to reorganize itself through modifications in policymaking and bureaucracy that sustained the Qing Empire for another century.

Chinese in the twentieth century, intent on modernizing their country, condemned their inherited culture in part on the grounds that it was oppressive to the young. The authors of this pioneering volume provide us with the evidence to re-examine those charges. Drawing on sources ranging from art to medical treatises, fiction, and funerary writings, they separate out the many complexities in the Chinese cultural construction of childhood and the ways it has changed over time. Listening to how Chinese talked about children--whether their own child, the abstract child in need of education or medical care, the ideal precocious child, or the fictional child--lets us assess in concrete terms the structures and values that underlay Chinese life.

In this multidimensional analysis, Benjamin A. Elman uses over a thousand newly available examination records from the Yuan, Ming, and Ch'ing dynasties, 1315-1904, to explore the social, political, and cultural dimensions of the civil examination system, one of the most important institutions in Chinese history. For over five hundred years, the most important positions within the dynastic government were usually filled through these difficult examinations, and every other year some one to two million people from all levels of society attempted them. Covering the late imperial system from its inception to its demise, Elman revises our previous understanding of how the system actually worked, including its political and cultural machinery, the unforeseen consequences when it was unceremoniously scrapped by modernist reformers, and its long-term historical legacy. He argues that the Ming-Ch'ing civil examinations from 1370 to 1904 represented a substantial break with T'ang-Sung dynasty literary examinations from 650 to 1250. Late imperial examinations also made "Tao Learning," Neo-Confucian learning, the dynastic orthodoxy in official life and in literati culture. The intersections between elite social life, popular culture, and religion that are also considered reveal the full scope of the examination process throughout the late empire.

"The study of apocryphal texts is probably the single most important task facing Chinese Buddhist studies today. This volume has done much to get it off on the right foot." --Journal of Asian Studies 50 (1991) "Few books of scholarly essays are this ambitious. The editor ... intends to introduce not just new studies, but a new field of study.... However, rather than marking the birth of Buddhist apocrypha studies, the book ... successfully demonstrates its early maturity." --Monumenta Serica 40 (1992) "The essays are without exception meticulous in scholarship and path-finding in significance." --Journal of Chinese Religions 20 (1992)

"Papers ... presented at the 1957 and 1958 conferences sponsored by the Committee on Chinese Thought ... of the Association for Asian Studies." Bibliographical references included in "Notes" (p. [335]-373).

Crazy Ji: Chinese Religion and Popular Literature is the first study in any language of one of the most colorful deities in the pantheon of late imperial and modern China: Sire Ji - or, as he is better known, Crazy Ji. The author uses the evolution of the cult of this eccentric deity to address central questions regarding the nature of the Chinese religious tradition, its relation to the Chinese social structure, and the role of vernacular fiction and popular media in shaping religious beliefs in China. His analysis of the cult of Crazy Ji shows that far from being, as is often argued, a mirror of the Chinese bureaucratic order, Chinese religion offers a means of liberation from it. Finally, this study of the cult of Crazy Ji illustrates how lay believers influenced the practices of organized religion (in this case, monastic Buddhism)

This groundbreaking book offers the first full analysis of the long-neglected and controversial subject of female infanticide in China. Although infanticide and child abandonment were worldwide phenomena from antiquity down to the nineteenth century when massive numbers of children were still being abandoned in Europe, China was unique in targeting girls almost exclusively. Yet despite its persistence for two thousand years, little has been published on a practice that is deeply sensitive within China and little understood by outsiders. Drawing on little-known Chinese documents and illustrations, noted historian D. E. Mungello describes the causes and continuation of female infanticide since 1650 despite efforts by Confucian moralists, Buddhist teachings, government officials, and even imperial edicts to stop the practice. The arrival of Christian missionaries led to foreign involvement as well, with Catholic priests baptizing abandoned and dying infants in Nanjing and Beijing beginning in the early 1600s. Mission efforts peaked in the nineteenth century when the European-based Society of the Holy Childhood urged Catholic children to contribute their pennies to help neglected children in China. However, most of the infant victims were drowned at birth in the privacy of their homes, thereby escaping the scrutiny of the law and the public. Mungello brings this secretive practice to light with a nuanced and balanced analysis of the cultural, economic, and social causes of early infanticide and its contemporary manifestation in sex-selected abortion as a result of the government's one-child policy. Presenting female infanticide as a human rather than a distinctly Chinese problem, he estimates the tragic loss of girls in the millions.