Death in Beijing: murder and forensic science in Republican China

by Asen, Daniel S.

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Title Statements

Full title :Death in Beijing : murder and forensic science in Republican China / Daniel Asen (Rutgers University--Newark).

Summary

"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 examines the process through which imperial China's old tradition of forensic science came to serve the needs of a changing state and society under these dramatically new circumstances. This is a story of the unexpected outcomes and contingencies of modernity, presenting new perspectives on China's transition from empire to modern nation state, competing visions of science and expertise, and the ways in which the meanings of death and dead bodies changed amid China's modern transformation"--

Edition Statements

Publication Date:2016.

Publication Statements

Publisher(s):Cambridge University Press
Place of Publication:Cambridge, United Kingdom
Language:eng
Publication Date:2016.

The Physical Object

Description:ix, 258 pages ; : 24 cm.

Edition Identifiers

ISBN:9781107126060, 1107126061, 9781107571600, 110757160X
oclc:ocn946726014
LC Classification:HV9960.C532
Dewey Decimal:363.25/95230951156

1. Suspicious deaths and city life in Republican Beijing -- 2. On the case with the Beijing procuracy -- 3. Disputed forensics and skeletal remains -- 4. Publicity, professionals, and the cause of forensic reform -- 5. Professional politics of a crime scene -- 6. Dissection and its discontents -- 7. Legal medicine during the Nanjing decade -- Conclusion: A history of forensic modernity -- Glossary.

Subjects

Beijing (China) -- History -- 20th cent… China China -- Beijing China -- History -- Republic, 1912-1949 Chine -- Histoire -- 1912-1949 (Républi… Citadins City and town life City and town life -- History -- 20th c… City dwellers Criminalistique -- Histoire -- 20e sièc… Death -- Social aspects Death -- Social aspects -- 20th century… Forensic Sciences Forensic sciences -- History Forensic sciences -- History -- 20th ce… Forensik Gesellschaft History History, 20th Century Homicide -- history