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Author: Deborah Davis
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 1993-10-02
Total Pages: 404
ISBN-13: 9780520082229
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis collection of essays concerns both urban and rural Chinese communities, ranging from professional to working-class families. The contributors attempt to determine whether and to what extent the policy shifts that followed Mao Zedong's death affected Chinese families.
Author: Wang Min’an
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-12-06
Total Pages: 195
ISBN-13: 1351855921
DOWNLOAD EBOOKUnconventional, creative, and highly original, Wang Min’an’s work centres on the assemblage of household machines that create the space of contemporary domesticity. It offers pathways to a new understanding of how the sudden commodification of domestic space in China beginning in the late 1980s has transformed Chinese domestic life beyond recognition. In terms of modern urban Chinese family life, people do not just move into new apartments; they move into new modes of living which involve new ways of relating to the world. Wang’s discussion on the reconstitution of Chinese domestic life—its founding moral, aesthetic, political values—is tremendously useful and enlightening. In these essays, the author stages a Latourian collapse of subject and object in adopting the point of view of both human and non-human actants. This volume brings a new sensibility to bear on objects of modern everyday life. This work is not a "China book," but rather a work marked profoundly by China. Wang experiments with the applicability of "theory" to what might be thought of as a transcultural common life embedded in mundane technologies. The book is particularly concerned with rescuing everyday materiality and bodily life from the numb obscurity to which things have been relegated by modern consumerism and bourgeois hygiene. This book is not an oddity from the mysterious East; it is a playful experiment in writing from a unique scholar, a leading thinker and theorist in the humanities in China, and will be of interest to scholars and students of East Asian, particularly Chinese, political and domestic studies.
Author: Felix Wemheuer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2019-03-28
Total Pages: 349
ISBN-13: 1107123704
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis new social history of Maoist China provides an accessible view of the complex and tumultuous period when China came under Communist rule.
Author: Teresa Wright
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2015-05-06
Total Pages: 153
ISBN-13: 0745691498
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn recent decades, China has become a quasi-capitalist economic powerhouse. Yet it continues to be ruled by the same Communist Party-dominated government that has been in power since 1949. But how has China’s political system achieved such longevity? And what does its stability tell us about the future of authoritarian versus liberal democratic governance? In this detailed analysis of the deeply intertwined relationship between the ruling Communist Party and governing state, noted China expert Teresa Wright provides insightful answers to these important questions. Though many believe that the Chinese party-state has maintained its power despite its communist and authoritarian features, Wright argues that the key to its sustained success lies in its careful safeguarding of some key communist and authoritarian characteristics, while simultaneously becoming more open and responsive to public participation. She contends that China’s post-Mao party-state compares well to different forms of political rule, including liberal democratic government. It has fulfilled the necessary functions of a stable governing regime: satisfying key demographic groups and responding to public grievances; maintaining economic stability and growth; and delivering public services - without any real reduction in CCP power and influence. Questioning current understandings of the nature, strengths, and weaknesses of democracy and authoritarianism, this thought-provoking book will be essential reading for all students and scholars of Chinese politics and international relations.
Author: Philip P. Pan
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2008
Total Pages: 371
ISBN-13: 1416537058
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn inside analysis of modern cultural and political upheavals in China by a fluent Beijing correspondent describes the power struggles currently taking place between the party elite and supporters of democracy, the outcome of which the author predicts will significantly affect China's rise to a world super-power. 125,000 first printing.
Author: Xiaofei Kang
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2019-11-11
Total Pages: 321
ISBN-13: 9004415939
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis volume includes 14 articles translated from the leading academic history journal in China, Historical Studies of Contemporary China (Dangdai Zhongguo shi yanjiu). It offers a rare window for the English speaking world to learn how scholars in China have understood and interpreted central issues pertaining to women and family from the founding of the PRC to the reform era. Chapters cover a wide range of topics, from women’s liberation, women’s movement and women’s education, to the impact of marriage laws and marriage reform, and changing practices of conjugal love, sexuality, family life and family planning. The volume invites further comparative inquiries into the gendered nature of the socialist state and the meanings of socialist feminism in the global context.
Author: Lan Yan
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-01-28
Total Pages: 406
ISBN-13: 0062899821
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThrough the sweeping cultural and historical transformations of China, entrepreneur Lan Yan traces her family’s history through early 20th Century to present day. The history of the Yan family is inseparable from the history of China over the last century. One of the most influential business leaders of China today, Lan Yan grew up in the company of the country’s powerful elite, including Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and Deng Xiaoping. Her grandfather, Yan Baohang, originally a nationalist and ally of Chiang Kai-shek, later joined the communists and worked as a spy during World War II, never falling out of favor with Soong May-ling, aka Mrs. Chiang Kai-shek. Lan’s parents were diplomats, and her father, Yan Mingfu, was Mao’s personal Russian translator. In spite of their elevated status, the Yan’s family life was turned upside down by the Cultural Revolution. One night in 1967, in front of a terrified ten-year-old Lan, Red Guards burst into the family home and arrested her grandfather. Days later, her father was arrested, accused of spying for the Soviet Union. Her mother, Wu Keilang, was branded a counter-revolutionary and forced to go with her daughter to a re-education camp for five years, where Lan came of age as a high school student. In recounting her family history, Lan Yan brings to life a century of Chinese history from the last emperor to present day, including the Cultural Revolution which tore her childhood apart. The reader obtains a rare glimpse into the mysteries of a system which went off the rails and would decimate a large swathe of the intellectual, economic and political elite country. The little girl who was crushed by the Cultural Revolution has become one of the most active businesswomen in her country. In telling her and her family’s story, Lan Yan serves up an intimate account of the history of contemporary China.
Author: Xiaomei Chen
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2002
Total Pages: 292
ISBN-13: 9780847698752
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis revised and expanded edition of the first comprehensive study of Occidentalism in post-Mao China includes a new preface, foreword, and chapter on Chinese diaspora writings in the Chinese language. Xiaomei Chen offers an insightful account of the unremittingly favorable depiction of Western culture and its negative characterization of Chinese culture in post-Mao China since 1978. She examines the cultural and political interrelationship between the East and West from a vantage point more complex than that accommodated by most current theories of Western imperialism and colonialism. Going beyond Edward Said's construction in Orientalism of cross-cultural appropriations as a defining facet of Western imperialism, Chen argues that the appropriation of Western discourse--what she calls "Occidentalism"--can actually have a politically and ideologically liberating effect on contemporary non-Western culture. She maintains that simplistic allegations of Orientalism frequently found in current critical discourses seriously underestimate the complexities of intercultural and multicultural relationships. Using China as the focus of her analysis, Chen examines a variety of cultural media, from Shakespearean drama, to modernist poetry, to contemporary Chinese television and popular fiction. She thus places sinology in the general context of Western theoretical discourses, such as Eurocentrism, postcolonialism, nationalism, modernism, feminism, and literary hermeneutics, showing that it has a vital role to play in the study of Orient and Occident and their now unavoidable symbiotic relationship. Occidentalism presents a new model of comparative literary and cultural studies that reenvisions cross-cultural appropriation. It will be indispensable to future discussions of Orientalism, Occidentalism, and postcolonialism, as well as subaltern studies, Asian studies, comparative literature, cultural studies, and non-Western drama.
Author: Edward Vickers
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2017-06-26
Total Pages: 409
ISBN-13: 1351719742
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe post-Mao period has witnessed rapid social and economic transformation in all walks of Chinese life – much of it fuelled by, or reflected in, changes to the country’s education system. This book analyses the development of that system since the abandonment of radical Maoism and the inauguration of ‘Reform and Opening’ in the late 1970s. The principal focus is on formal education in schools and conventional institutions of tertiary education, but there is also some discussion of preschools, vocational training, and learning in non-formal contexts. The book begins with a discussion of the historical and comparative context for evaluating China’s educational ‘achievements’, followed by an extensive discussion of the key transitions in education policymaking during the ‘Reform and Opening’ period. This informs the subsequent examination of changes affecting the different phases of education from preschool to tertiary level. There are also chapters dealing specifically with the financing and administration of schooling, curriculum development, the public examinations system, the teaching profession, the phenomenon of marketisation, and the ‘international dimension’ of Chinese education. The book concludes with an assessment of the social consequences of educational change in the post-Mao era and a critical discussion of the recent fashion in certain Western countries for hailing China as an educational model. The analysis is supported by a wealth of sources – primary and secondary, textual and statistical – and is informed by both authors’ wide-ranging experience of Chinese education. As the first monograph on China's educational development during the forty years of the post-Mao era, this book will be essential reading for all those seeking to understand the world’s largest education system. It will also be crucial reference for educational comparativists, and for scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds researching contemporary Chinese society.
Author: Hui Faye Xiao
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 2014-04-01
Total Pages: 260
ISBN-13: 029580498X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAs state control of private life in China has loosened since 1980, citizens have experienced an unprecedented family revolution—an overhaul of family structure, marital practices, and gender relationships. While the nuclear family has become a privileged realm of romance and individualism symbolizing the post-revolutionary “freedoms” of economic and affective autonomy, women’s roles in particular have been transformed, with the ideal “iron girl” of socialism replaced by the feminine, family-oriented “good wife and wise mother.” Problems and contradictions in this new domestic culture have been exposed by China's soaring divorce rate. Reading popular “divorce narratives” in fiction, film, and TV drama, Hui Faye Xiao shows that the representation of marital discord has become a cultural battleground for competing ideologies within post-revolutionary China. While these narratives present women’s cultivation of wifely and maternal qualities as the cure for family disintegration and social unrest, Xiao shows that they in fact reflect a problematic resurgence of traditional gender roles and a powerful mode of control over supposedly autonomous private life.
