Mandarin

If--IF--you really want to keep the option of legal academia open, then the range of viable schools is actually very small. Looking at the list of American legal historians who have gotten law school jobs in the past five years, all but one got their PhDs at Yale, Princeton, UPenn, or UVA, and the one outlier did an American Studies PhD at Michigan and was a SCOTUS clerk. Name brand is incredibly important for law schools, wisely or not. But then again, most legal historians from these places or comparable schools (Harvard, Chicago, UCB, NYU, Columbia, etc.) completely strike out on the law school market. There are, at maximum, 2 to 3 American legal history positions open each year in legal academia (for at least 10-15 people with JD-History PhDs), and usually only 1-2, so as czsec said, you probably want to look at backup options in history departments, in which case name brand is somewhat less important.

This is just an educated guess, but "basic standard" at Berkeley, or any other top school, would likely be 95% verbal (a few percentage points lower probably won't kill you), somewhat above average in math, and a 5.5 or 6.0 on the writing section. And sure, if you're doing straight up literature and textual analysis, you probably shouldn't apply to Perdue, Pomeranz, Rowe, etc. anyway.

Having received some funding packages from the schools you speak of (and being a China specialist myself), I can tell you for sure that funding from Chicago, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale has no relationship to GRE whatsoever--all students in any given program receive the same level of funding at these schools, and there are no merit-based scholarships. Harvard and Columbia are undoubtedly the same. Berkeley, like most public universities, DOES offer merit-based scholarships, and students differ fairly dramatically in the level of funding they receive (in my year, standard package was 17000 a year, but that could go up to 28000 with a merit-based scholarship), but GRE is hardly much of a consideration there, so long as you meet their basic standards. It is also almost certainly true that the existence of Chinese students in the pool of applicants will drag the average GRE verbal score UP, rather than down, as they tend to be excellent test-takers, regardless of their actual level of English fluency. In addition, don't assume the math score is meaningless. Several senior scholars in the Chinese History field, including Pomeranz, Rowe, Bin Wong, and Perdue, are known for preferring students with some quantitative background.

"Very well," perhaps, but likely not quite as well as a Stanford PhD--the personal connections and network of your program or advisor (which matter deeply, regardless of what the perception on these boards may be) will be much stronger if s/he works in the US, unless you work in British history. It's also vastly easier to network and "get your name out" in the US if you're in the country, rather than across the Atlantic. Similarly, can you get a job in Europe with a Stanford PhD? Of course you can, and plenty of people do, but it won't be as easy as if you got your degree at Oxford. We're talking in comparative terms here, not absolutes.

While I would usually agree that backup plans don't necessarily have to be easier, if your "backup" plan in life is something as excruciatingly difficult as becoming a law professor--indeed far more difficult than becoming a history professor (and because legal scholarship utilizes a very similar intellectual toolset, the respective difficulty of the two tracks can actually be logically compared to each other)--well, I was just a bit struck. You do realize that the 800-900 people who apply each year for law teaching positions were generally top of their class or close at top schools? Yale and Harvard alone account for some 120 candidates a year, and most were on law review. This is not like history or social science PhD programs: generally speaking, only the top students at top law schools even bother to apply, and their success rate, even in good years, is no higher than 20 percent across the board. And after following the law school job market for years (I'm a legal historian who doesn't have a JD, but considered making the leap for a while), I can tell you that legal academic hiring for the past 5 years has been going down, down, down, with no end in sight. This year, as I said, the success rate will be closer to 10 percent, again for a group of candidates that is already highly self-selective credential-wise. Of course, if you're actually a former Yale Law Journal or Harvard Law Review editor with a SCOTUS clerkship, then forget I said any of this (although, in this case, I would wonder why you're even considering going after a History TT job, considering that law faculty positions pay double or triple the salary, have lower teaching loads, and have vastly higher tenure rates). But if you're someone who hasn't even applied to law school yet but is considering the law professor track (which is what it sounds like), I should warn you that the odds of succeeding in that are literally 1 in 100 at a school like UVA, Michigan, or Duke, 1 in 20 at Harvard, and 1 in 7-8 even at Yale. It's just not the kind of thing that is a viable backup option.

Right... because there were 70-90 tenure track law school jobs this year in the entire country for, what, 800-900 applicants--and therefore, this is easier than getting a history TT offer?

Oh, I forgot Mary Gallagher at UMich and Lily Tsai at MIT.

I suspect you'll find many people in political science/government/Sociology departments, or even law schools, who might be willing to direct such a project, but history professors may balk at the "contemporary" nature of your interests. People to look at would include Roderick Macfarquhar (Harvard), Elizabeth Perry (Harvard), Susan Shirk (UCSD), Kevin O'Brien (UCB), James Tong (UCLA), Pierre Landry (Pitt), Deborah Davis (Yale), Tom Christensen (Princeton), etc., but none of these people are "historians" in the strict sense, with the possible exceptions of Macfarquhar and Perry, who are both close to retirement and may not be taking students. Faculty in history departments seem to stop their advising range at the early PRC--that doesn't necessarily stop students from applying and then switching to a more contemporary focus later on, but I suspect you'll have a hard time getting in if you state your interests clearly from the outset.

I'd second the Princeton recommendation. While Ben Elman may not have written on obviously law-related topics the way that some people you mentioned have, he is one of the major pioneers in "East Asian" history, in that he is heading a large project designed specifically to promote China-Japan-Korea comparisons.

Well, if Elliott has decided to move beyond his previous era and topic, then maybe that changes things somewhat. That said, while we're on the subject of current book projects, Elman's is on Republican era Sino-Japanese intellectual and political interaction, whereas Perdue's is on 20th Century Chinese nationalism. When and whether these (including Elliott's project) become fully developed manuscripts is, I think it's fair to say, uncertain. Would I suggest that someone with an interest in Sino-American relations look seriously at Perdue and Elman? Absolutely. Perdue works, as much as anyone in the field, on diplomatic history and "global history" in general--in fact one of his students works precisely on Sino-American and Sino-Indian relations, although during the PRC. Elman, on the other hand, is heavily invested in his ongoing research in cross-border intellectual and political history, and has access to fairly unique resources in those areas. Come to think of it, three of the four Perdue students that I know work heavily on Republican history, perhaps more than they do on Late Qing history, as do two of Elman's. Besides, of all the flagship "Modern China" faculty (I'll just take this to mean mid-Qing and afterwards, you may disagree) at major schools, do any of them--apart from Yeh--"clearly focus on the Republic"? Plenty of junior faculty do, but again, they're less effective as advisors. My larger point, however, is that faculty who have successfully set themselves up as, to some degree, "generalists" who write and advise about a broad range of topics--Zelin, Perdue and Rowe are the most obvious examples of their generation, but the previous generation (Esherick, Kuhn, Spence and Wakeman) were all of this mold--are often preferable as advisors (or references) to those who work exclusively on one or two subfields. Of course, they don't usually get to that stage until fairly late in their careers, but then everyone I mentioned initially is significantly more senior than, say, Elliott, Ko, or Matt Sommer.

I'm sorry if my comment Harvard somehow offended, but Kirby has been almost completely disengaged from academic work for the past 15 years or so, so I didn't really think of him. I also assumed we were talking about historians per se, rather than people from other disciplines who have done historical work. Elliott and Szonyi were the people I were thinking of, and although Szonyi would be an interesting person to work with on Cold War history, neither of them have written on topics that fall within 1800 to 1949. Given OP's stated interests, I assumed he would want to cover both the late Qing and the Republic, and not merely the latter. Nonetheless, all the people I listed--including Perdue and Zelin, who are more known as Qing specialists--have published either a book or multiple articles/reviews over the past decade that cover both the late Qing and Republic. I was also clearly excluding junior faculty, as they are far less reliable as advisors--for example, it's pretty uncertain that Janet Chen will stay on at Princeton. Again, while I appreciate the need for fit, I wonder if "fit" should be defined as narrowly as it often is in this forum. Especially at the top schools, people do not always work on precisely the same subfields as their advisors. It seems sufficient, to me at least, to have an advisor who casts a broad intelletual net, knows the entire field very well, and has familiarity with your specific interests. Once those basic conditions are met, then his/her overall stature within the field may well be far more important than more narrow considerations of "fit"--in fact, people who are more generalist in their interests seem to enjoy higher stature and influence. And finally, "Modern China" is generally defined as late Imperial (particularly Qing), Republican and PRC China. Of course, Harvard does seem to have a different opinion of this, considering its insistence on a "post-1912" specialist during their junior search last year.

In terms of raw faculty quality, informal consensus within the field suggests the following schools, in no specific order: Yale (Perdue), Columbia (Zelin), Princeton (Elman), John Hopkins (Rowe), Chicago (after the Pomeranz hire), UCLA (Wong), Harvard (somewhat trickier after the Harrison departure, as they now lack a true 19th and 20th Century specialist). Berkeley has yet to really recover from Wakeman's passing away. UC San Diego was a powerhouse for many years, but is now in limbo following Esherick's retirement. The US News list is for overall Asian History, which differs significantly from Modern China. While it's true that fit matters tremendously, students from the above schools tend to monopolize the higher-end Modern China job placements. I have no idea what the placement scene is like for East Asian Studies--the two fields are closely related but treated quite differently on the job market. If you take funding into consideration, then clearly the best packages come from Yale, Columbia, Princeton and Harvard. Unsurprisingly, marticulation rate is very high (well above 60 percent) at those schools, whereas it's significantly lower at other places--this roughly means that you may have a somewhat more impressive (credential-wise) cohort at those places, if that means anything.