Experimental Beijing
Experimental Beijing

Author: Sasha Su-Ling Welland

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2018-03-29

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 0822372479

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

During the lead-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the censorious attitude that characterized China's post-1989 official response to contemporary art gave way to a new market-driven, culture industry valuation of art. Experimental artists who once struggled against state regulation of artistic expression found themselves being courted to advance China's international image. In Experimental Beijing Sasha Su-Ling Welland examines the interlocking power dynamics in this transformational moment and rapid rise of Chinese contemporary art into a global phenomenon. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and experience as a videographer and curator, Welland analyzes encounters between artists, curators, officials, and urban planners as they negotiated the social role of art and built new cultural institutions. Focusing on the contradictions and exclusions that emerged, Welland traces the complex gender politics involved and shows that feminist forms of art practice hold the potential to reshape consciousness, produce a nonnormative history of Chinese contemporary art, and imagine other, more just worlds.

China Experiments
China Experiments

Author: Ann M. Florini

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2012-01-06

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 081572201X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

All societies face a key question: how to empower governments to perform essential governmental functions while constraining the arbitrary exercise of power. This balance, always in flux, is particularly fluid in today's China. This insightful book examines the changing relationship between that state and its society, as demonstrated by numerous experiments in governance at subnational levels, and explores the implications for China's future political trajectory. Ann Florini, Hairong Lai, and Yeling Tan set their analysis at the level of townships and counties, investigating the striking diversity of China's exploration into different governance tools and comparing these experiments with developments and debates elsewhere in the world. China Experiments draws on multiple cases of innovation to show how local authorities are breaking down traditional models of governance in responding to the challenges posed by the rapid transformations taking place across China's economy and society. The book thus differs from others on China that focus on dynamics taking place at the elite level in Beijing, and is unique in its broad but detailed, empirically grounded analysis. The introduction examines China's changing governance architecture and raises key overarching questions. It addresses the motivations behind the wide variety of experiments underway by which authorities are trying to adapt local governance structures to meet new demands. Chapters 2–5 then explore each type of innovation in detail, from administrative streamlining and elections to partnerships in civil society and transparency measures. Each chapter explains the importance of the experiment in terms of implications for governance and draws upon specific case studies. The final chapter considers what these growing numbers of experiments add up to, whether China is headed towards a stronger more resilient authoritarianism or evolving towards its own version of democracy, and suggests a serie

The Shenzhen Experiment
The Shenzhen Experiment

Author: Juan Du

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2020-01-07

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0674975286

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

An award-winning Hong Kong–based architect with decades of experience designing buildings and planning cities in the People’s Republic of China takes us to the Pearl River delta and into the heart of China’s iconic Special Economic Zone, Shenzhen. Shenzhen is ground zero for the economic transformation China has seen in recent decades. In 1979, driven by China’s widespread poverty, Deng Xiaoping supported a bold proposal to experiment with economic policies in a rural borderland next to Hong Kong. The site was designated as the City of Shenzhen and soon after became China’s first Special Economic Zone (SEZ). Four decades later, Shenzhen is a megacity of twenty million, an internationally recognized digital technology hub, and the world’s most successful economic zone. Some see it as a modern miracle city that seemingly came from nowhere, attributing its success solely to centralized planning and Shenzhen’s proximity to Hong Kong. The Chinese government has built hundreds of new towns using the Shenzhen model, yet none has come close to replicating the city’s level of economic success. But is it true that Shenzhen has no meaningful history? That the city was planned on a tabula rasa? That the region’s rural past has had no significant impact on the urban present? Juan Du unravels the myth of Shenzhen and shows us how this world-famous “instant city” has a surprising history—filled with oyster fishermen, villages that remain encased within city blocks, a secret informal housing system—and how it has been catapulted to success as much by the ingenuity of its original farmers as by Beijing’s policy makers. The Shenzhen Experiment is an important story for all rapidly urbanizing and industrializing nations around the world seeking to replicate China’s economic success in the twenty-first century.

The Transpacific Experiment
The Transpacific Experiment

Author: Matt Sheehan

Publisher: Catapult

Published: 2019-08-13

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1640092153

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A timely, vital account of California’s unique relationship with China, told through the exploits of the entrepreneurs, activists, and politicians driving transformations with international implications. Tensions between the world’s superpowers are mounting in Washington, D.C., and Beijing. Yet, the People's Republic of China and the state of California have built deep and interdependent socioeconomic exchanges that reverberate across the globe, making California and China a microcosm of the most important international relationship of the twenty–first century. In The Transpacific Experiment, journalist and China analyst Matt Sheehan chronicles the real people who are making these connections. Sheehan tells the story of a Southern Californian mayor who believes a Chinese electric bus factory will save his town from meth labs and skinheads. He follows a Chinese AI researcher who leaves Google to compete with his former employer from behind the Great Firewall. Sheehan joins a tour bus of wealthy Chinese families shopping for homes in the Bay Area, revealing disgruntled neighbors and raising important questions about California’s own narratives around immigration and the American Dream. Sheehan’s on–the–ground reporting reveals movie sets in the “Hollywood of China,” Chinese–funded housing projects in San Francisco, Chinese immigrants who support Donald Trump, and more. Each of these stories lays bare the new reality of twenty–first–century superpowers: the closer they get to one another, the more personal their frictions become. “Cuts right to the heart of the relationship between Silicon Valley and China: the tangled history, the current tensions, and the uncertain future . . . a must–read.”—Kai–Fu Lee, former president of Google China and founder of Sinovation Ventures

Desiring China
Desiring China

Author: Lisa Rofel

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2007-05-10

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 0822389908

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Through window displays, newspapers, soap operas, gay bars, and other public culture venues, Chinese citizens are negotiating what it means to be cosmopolitan citizens of the world, with appropriate needs, aspirations, and longings. Lisa Rofel argues that the creation of such “desiring subjects” is at the core of China’s contingent, piece-by-piece reconfiguration of its relationship to a post-socialist world. In a study at once ethnographic, historical, and theoretical, she contends that neoliberal subjectivities are created through the production of various desires—material, sexual, and affective—and that it is largely through their engagements with public culture that people in China are imagining and practicing appropriate desires for the post-Mao era. Drawing on her research over the past two decades among urban residents and rural migrants in Hangzhou and Beijing, Rofel analyzes the meanings that individuals attach to various public cultural phenomena and what their interpretations say about their understandings of post-socialist China and their roles within it. She locates the first broad-based public debate about post-Mao social changes in the passionate dialogues about the popular 1991 television soap opera Yearnings. She describes how the emergence of gay identities and practices in China reveals connections to a transnational network of lesbians and gay men at the same time that it brings urban/rural and class divisions to the fore. The 1999–2001 negotiations over China’s entry into the World Trade Organization; a controversial women’s museum; the ways that young single women portray their longings in relation to the privations they imagine their mothers experienced; adjudications of the limits of self-interest in court cases related to homoerotic desire, intellectual property, and consumer fraud—Rofel reveals all of these as sites where desiring subjects come into being.

Pop Goes the Avant-garde
Pop Goes the Avant-garde

Author: Rossella Ferrari

Publisher:

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Pop Goes the Avant-Garde: Experimental Theatre in Contemporary China is the first comprehensive review of the history and development of avant-garde drama and theater in the People's Republic of China since 1976. Drawing on a range of critical perspectives in the fields of comparative literature, theater, performance, and culture studies, the book explores key artistic movements and phenomena that have emerged in China's major cultural centers in the last several decades. It surveys the work of China's most influential dramatists, directors and performance groups, with a special focus on Beijing-based playwright, director and filmmaker Meng Jinghui--the former enfant terrible of Beijing theater, who is now one of Asia's foremost theater personalities. Through an extensive critique of theories of modernism and the avant-garde, the author reassesses the meanings, functions and socio-historical significance of this work in non-Western contexts by proposing a new theoretical construct--the pop avant-garde--and exploring new ways to understand and conceptualize aesthetic practices beyond Euro-American cultures and critical discourses.

Routledge Handbook of Chinese Gender & Sexuality
Routledge Handbook of Chinese Gender & Sexuality

Author: Jamie J. Zhao

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-05-10

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 1040015190

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This Handbook offers a rich survey of topics concerning historical, modern and contemporary Chinese genders and sexualities. Exploring gender and sexuality as key dimensions of China’s modernisation and globalisation, this Handbook effectively situates Chinese gender and sexuality in transnational and transcultural contexts. It also spotlights nonnormative practices and emancipatory potentials within mainstream, heterosexual-dominated and patriarchally structured settings. It serves as a definitive study, research and resource guide for emerging gender and sexuality issues in the Chinese-speaking world. This Handbook covers interdisciplinary methodologies, perspectives and topics, including: History Literature Art Fashion Migration Translation Sex and desire Film and television Digital media Star and fan cultures Fantasies and lives of women and LGBTQ+ groups Social movements Transnational feminist and queer politics Paying acute attention to nonnormative genders and sexualities and emphasising the intersectionality of gender, sexuality, nationality, ethnicity and class, this Handbook offers an essential, field-defining text to Chinese gender and sexuality studies.

The 21st Century Mathematics Education in China
The 21st Century Mathematics Education in China

Author: Yiming Cao

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-10-11

Total Pages: 487

ISBN-13: 3662557819

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book intends to provide a comprehensive introduction to the status of development of Chinese mathematics education in the 21st century. To this end, the book summarizes and presents the research and practices of Chinese mathematics education in the following aspects: (1) characteristics of Chinese school mathematics curriculum and textbooks, (2) Chinese ways and strategies of teaching mathematics and the characteristics of mathematics classroom instruction in China, (3) Chinese instructional practices in developing (both gifted and underachieving) students’ mathematical capabilities, (4) how professional development of mathematics teachers is promoted in China, including mathematics teachers’ pre-service and in-service education, and how Chinese mathematics teachers design and implement teaching and research activities, and (5) how mathematics education is assessed and evaluated, including how to evaluate teachers’ teaching and students’ achievements. Relevant research in Chinese mathematics education involving methods of surveys, interviews, text analysis, etc., are reviewed and analyzed. Results of a number of video studies of Chinese mathematics classroom teaching and learning are also integrated into this book.

School Culture Improvement
School Culture Improvement

Author: Zhang Dongjiao

Publisher: CRC Press

Published: 2022-09-01

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 1000791793

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

School Culture Improvement follows an abstract-concrete-abstract train of thought. The first three chapters answer the questions from the angle of abstract theory: what is the school culture and how is it managed? What is the school culture drive model? What is the school culture assessment? The two chapters thereafter solve major problems from the perspective of operations: how to develop the school culture solution and how to implement the school culture and promote cultural practices? The book concludes at the abstract theoretical level, on the position of sociological reflection, exploring what is the rationality and legitimacy of school culture and how does school culture happen?School Culture Improvement is one of the few school culture monographs which aims directly at management. Its contribution and features lie in two aspects: connecting school culture and school improvement and connecting research on project case and school culture, thus establishing a relatively complete system of school culture improvement theory. In this book, the author originates the following views and models: concept of school culture, school culture tripod structure theory, school culture spectrum theory, school culture drive model, and school culture unity and conflict.

Performance Art in China
Performance Art in China

Author: Thomas J. Berghuis

Publisher: Timezone 8 Limited

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 9789889926595

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Performance Art in China takes as its subject one of the most dynamic and controversial areas of experimental art practice in China. In his comprehensive study, Sydney-based theorist and art historian Thomas J. Berghuis introduces and investigates the idea of the "role of the mediated subject of the acting body in art," a notion grounded in the realization that the body is always present in art practice, as well as its subsequent, secondary representations. Through a series of in-depth case studies, Berghuis reveals how, during the past 25 years, Chinese performance artists have "acted out" their art, often in opposition to the principles governing correct behavior in the public domain. In addition to a 25-year chronology of events, a systematic index of places, names and key terms, as well as a bibliography and a glossary in English and Chinese, this study also offers the reader numerous previously unpublished photos and documents.