Death in Beijing

Daniel Asen is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Rutgers University, Newark. His published research has investigated the social and cultural contexts of science and medicine in late imperial and twentieth-century China, with attention to transnational and global perspectives. His work has been published in Social History of Medicine and East Asian Science, Technology and Society, as well as within edited volumes on legal history and the history of medicine in China. He is a member of the American Historical Association, the Association for Asian Studies, and the International Society for Chinese Law and History.

• Introduction; 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; Bibliography; Index.

'Dealing with the dead involved many important things in Republican Beijing. In this profoundly original study in political, urban, and intellectual change, Asen shows how methods of forensic examination with a millennial pedigree paradoxically participated in the construction of the modern state.' Pierre-Étienne Will, Collège de France