Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang is Chair of the Department of Asian studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She has written extensively on modern Taiwanese literature and is the author of Modernism and the Nativist Resistance: Contemporary Chinese Fiction (1993). She has edited, with Ann C. Carver, Bamboo Shoots After the Rain: Contemporary Stories by Women Writers of Taiwan (1990).
Chen Ch’iu-kun is a Research Associate in the Institute of Taiwan History of Academia Sinica. He studies and has written extensively on land policy and settlement patterns in Ch’ing Taiwan.
Cal Clark is a Professor of Political Science and the Director of the MPA Program at Auburn University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has previously taught at New Mexico State University, University of Wyoming, and Chung Yuan Christian University in Taiwan. He is the author and co-author of five books and co-editor of ten books. His recent books include the co-authored Comparative Development Patterns in Asia (1997) and the co-edited Beyond the Developmental State (1998) and Democracy and the Status of Women in East Asia (2000). He has also been President of the American Association for Chinese Studies (2002–4).
Robert Gardella is a member of the Social Sciences Faculty of the United States Merchant Marine Academy. He is a specialist in Chinese business history and is one of the founders of the Chinese Business Group of the Association of Asian Studies. He is the author of Harvesting Mountains: Fujian and the China Tea Trade, 1757–1937 (1994), and is co-editor with Jane K. Leonard and Andrea McElderry of Chinese Business History: Interpretive Trends and Priorities (1999). He has also published numerous articles in books and major scholarly journals.
Ronald G. Knapp is a member of the department of geography of The State University of New York/New Paltz. He is a specialist in the cultural geography of China and on the architecture of Central and South China. He is the author of China’s Vernacular Architecture: House Form and Culture (1989), and the editor of Chinese Landscapes: The Village as Place (1992).
Harry J. Lamley spent many years as a member of the history department of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He is a pioneer in the western study of the field of Taiwanese history and the history of South China. He is a series editor at SUNY Press and has written numerous articles for major collections. Among his articles are “The Formation of Cities: Initiative and Motivation in Building Three City Walls in Taiwan,” in The City in Late Imperial China, ed. G. William Skinner (1977); and “Lineage Feuding in Southern Fujian and Eastern Guangdong Under Qing Rule,” in Violence in China: Essays in Culture and Counterculture, ed. Jonathan N. Lipman and Stevan Harrell (1990).
Steven Phillips has recently completed his doctorate in Chinese History at Georgetown University. He has taught at Gettysburg College and is now on the staff of the Office of the Historian of the U.S. Department of State. He has done extensive work on the 2–28 period and has presented papers at conferences in the United States and on Taiwan.
Murray A. Rubinstein is a member of the History Department and the Program in Asian/Asian-American Studies at Baruch College of the City University of New York. He is also Chair of the Taiwan Studies Group of the Association of Asian Studies. He has done research on Chinese mission history and on the history of Taiwan, Fukien, and Kwantung. His monographs include The Protestant Community on Modern Taiwan: Mission, Seminary, and Church (1991), and The Origins of the Anglo-American Protestant Missionary Enterprise in China (1996). He is the editor of The Other Taiwan: 1945 to the Present (1991), and has written articles for books and scholarly journals.
John R. Shepherd is a member of the department of anthropology of the University of Virginia. He has studied patterns of land ownership, Han/Yuan-tzu-min relations, and demography in Dutch, Cheng-era, and Ch’ing Taiwan. His books include Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, 1600–1800 (1993). He has also written articles for books and scholarly journals, including “From Barbarians to Sinners: Collective Conversion Among the Plains Aborigines in Qing Taiwan, 1859–1895,” in Christianity in China: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present, ed. Daniel H. Bays (1996).
Michael Stainton worked with the Yuan-tzu-min while serving with the Presbyterian Church on Taiwan for over a decade. He is now completing a doctorate in anthropology at York University, studying the political consciousness and the political activism of the Yuan-tzu-min. He has also studied, written about, and organized conferences on the history Protestant Christianity on Taiwan.
Eduard B. Vermeer is a member of the Sinological Institute of the University of Leiden. He studies Chinese socioeconomic development. He is the author of Economic Development in Provincial China: The Central Shaanxi Since 1830 (1988). He has also edited, with Frank N. Pieke and Woei Lien Chang, Cooperative and Collective in China’s Rural Development: Between State and Private Interests (1998). He has also helped organize international conferences on China’s development.
Chen-main Peter Wang is a member of the history department of Chun-Cheng University in Chiayi, Taiwan. He has done research on the Ming-Ch’ing Transition, the history of Chinese Christianity, and Sino–American relations. His books include The Rise and Fall of the Wenshe: A Study of the Rise and Fall of Indigenization of Christianity in China in the 1920s (1993). His articles include “Contextualizing Protestant Publishing in China: The Wenshe, 1924–1928,” in Christianity in China: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present, ed. Daniel H. Bays (1996).
Robert P. Weller is a member of the Department of Anthropology of Boston University. He has done research on religion and society on Taiwan and China and is the author of Unities and Diversities in Chinese Religion (1987), and Resistance, Chaos, and Control in China: Taiping Rebels, Taiwanese Ghosts, and Tiananmen (1994). Among the books he has co-edited is Unruly Gods: Divinity and Society in China (1996).
John E. Wills, Jr. is a member of the History Department of the University of Southern California. He has done extensive research on the relationship between China and the West in the Late Imperial period. His monographs include Pepper, Guns, and Parleys: The Dutch East India Company and China, 1662–1681 (1974); Embassies and Illusions: Dutch and Portuguese Envoys to K’ang-hsi, 1666–1687 (1984); and Mountain of Fame: Portraits in Chinese History (1994).