Critiques the idea of a Chinese cultural identity and argues that such identities are instead determined by geopolitical and economic forces. Forget Chineseness provides a critical interpretation of not only discourses of Chinese identityChinesenessbut also of how they have reflected differences between Chinese societies, such as in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Peoples Republic of China, Singapore, and communities overseas. Allen Chun asserts that while identity does have meaning in cultural, representational terms, it is more importantly a product of its embeddedness in specific entanglements of modernity, colonialism, nation-state formation, and globalization. By articulating these processes underlying institutional practices in relation to public mindsets, it is possible to explain various epistemic moments that form the basis for their sociopolitical transformation. From a broader perspective, this should have salient ramifications for prevailing discussions of identity politics. The concept of identity has not only been predicated on flawed notions of ethnicity and culture in the social sciences but it has also been acutely exacerbated by polarizing assumptions that drive our understanding of identity politics.
Wang follows the Chinese Communist Party's ideological re-education of the public through the exploitation of China's humiliating modern history, tracking the CCP's use of history education to glorify the party, re-establish its legitimacy, consolidate national identity, and justify one-party rule in the post-Tiananmen and post-Cold War era.
At long last the approach that has helped thousands of learners memorize Japanese kanji has been adapted to help students with Chinese characters. Book 1 of Remembering Simplified Hanzi covers the writing and meaning of the 1,000 most commonly used characters in the simplified Chinese writing system, plus another 500 that are best learned at an early stage. (Book 2 adds another 1,500 characters for a total of 3,000.) Of critical importance to the approach found in these pages is the systematic arranging of characters in an order best suited to memorization. In the Chinese writing system, strokes and simple components are nested within relatively simple characters, which can, in turn, serve as parts of more complicated characters and so on. Taking advantage of this allows a logical ordering, making it possible for students to approach most new characters with prior knowledge that can greatly facilitate the learning process. Guidance and detailed instructions are provided along the way. Students are taught to employ "imaginative memory" to associate each character’s component parts, or "primitive elements," with one another and with a key word that has been carefully selected to represent an important meaning of the character. This is accomplished through the creation of a "story" that engagingly ties the primitive elements and key word together. In this way, the collections of dots, strokes, and components that make up the characters are associated in memorable fashion, dramatically shortening the time required for learning and helping to prevent characters from slipping out of memory.
Written by a team of international scholars from China, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand and the UK, this book provides interdisciplinary studies on the construction and transformation of Chinese national identity in the age of globalisation. It addresses a wide range of issues central to national identity in the context of Chinese culture, politics, economy and society, and explores a diverse set of topics including the formation of an embryonic form of national identity in the late Qing era, the influence of popular culture on national identity, globalisation and national identity, the interaction and discourse between ethnic identity and national identity, and identity construction among overseas Chinese. It highlights the latest developments in the field and offers a distinctive contribution to our knowledge and understanding of national identity.
Chinese in Africa explores the complexities of identities and forms in which the Chinese Migrants in Africa express their ‘Chineseness’. In its study of the Chinese diaspora in Africa, the book eschews tendencies to compound the Chinese by showing their distinctiveness in terms of history, culture, identity, and adaptation mechanisms. It pushes beyond the boundaries of ethnic and cultural homogenisation based on a perceived ‘Chinese’ physiognomy. The diversity and hybridity of the Chinese identity and expressions of Chineseness explored in this book’s seven chapters is essential to making sense of the historical and contemporary people to people engagements in Africa-China relations. The book brings together scholars from international relations, political science, sociology and area studies and draws from their field research and expertise in China and several African countries. A multidisciplinary volume, Chinese in Africa will be invaluable to scholars, students and policymakers interested in identities, and expressions of those identities. The chapters originally published as a special issue of Asian Ethnicity.
A systematic, building block-style plan for mastering the most daunting aspect of learning Chinese--how to remember the meaning of more than 2,000 of the most common characters--is provided in this handbook. Beginning with the simplest of strokes, such as those for numbers, scepter, and earth, and progressing to the extremely complex, such as destroy, insert, and mouse, this manual presents a methodology employing memory techniques to associate meanings with the characters' visual components. A sequence of numbered panels displays each character in two font styles, and a notation in the adjacent margin describes the character's pinyin pronunciation. Graphics that identify the components or characters from which the featured characters are drawn, and a listing of both the names of these root components, and the panel numbers that cite their location in the book augment the presentation. Beginners will be best served by using this guide in conjunction with the development of language skills, while those who are familiar with the language will find this book to be a comprehensive reference and refresher.
Combining a historical approach of Chineseness and a contemporary perspective on the social construction of Chineseness, this book provides comparative insights to understand the contingent complexities of ethnic and social formations in both China and among the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia. This book focuses on the experiences and practices of these people, who as mobile agents are free to embrace or reject being defined as Chinese by moving across borders and reinterpreting their own histories. By historicizing the notion of Chineseness at local, regional, and global levels, the book examines intersections of authenticity, authority, culture, identity, media, power, and international relations that support or undermine different instances of Chineseness and its representations. It seeks to rescue the present from the past by presenting case studies of contingent encounters that produce the ideas, practices, and identities that become the categories nations need to justify their existence. The dynamic, fluid representations of Chineseness illustrate that it has never been an undifferentiated whole in both space and time. Through physical movements and inherited knowledge, agents of Chineseness have deployed various interpretive strategies to define and represent themselves vis-à-vis the local, regional, and global in their respective temporal experiences. This book will be relevant to students and scholars in Chinese studies and Asian studies more broadly, with a focus on identity politics, migration, popular culture, and international relations. “The Chinese overseas often saw themselves as caught between a rock and a hard place. The collection of essays here highlights the variety of experiences in Southeast Asia and China that suggest that the rock can become a huge boulder with sharp edges and the hard places can have deadly spikes. A must read for those who wonder whether Chineseness has ever been what it seems.” Wang Gungwu, University Professor, National University of Singapore. “By including reflections on constructions of Chineseness in both China itself and in various Southeast Asian sites, the book shows that being Chinese is by no means necessarily intertwined with China as a geopolitical concept, while at the same time highlighting the incongruities and tensions in the escapable relationship with China that diasporic Chinese subjects variously embody, expressed in a wide range of social phenomena such as language use, popular culture, architecture and family relations. The book is a very welcome addition to the necessary ongoing conversation on Chineseness in the 21st century.” Ien Ang, Distinguished Professor of Cultural Studies, Western Sydney University.
This book explores the role of Chineseness or lo chino in the production of Chilean national identity. It does so by discussing the many voices, images, and intentions of diverse actors who contribute to stereotyping or problematizing Chineseness in Chile. The authors argue that in general, representing and perceiving China or Chineseness as the Other is part of a broader cultural and political strategy for various stakeholders to articulate Chile as either a Western country or one that is becoming-Western. The authors trace the evolution of the symbolic role that China and Chineseness play in defining racial, gendered, and class aspects of Chilean national social imaginary. In doing so, they challenge a common idea that Chineseness is a stable signifier and the simplistic perception of the ethnic Chinese as the unassimilable foreigner within the nation. In response, the authors call for a postmigrant approach to understanding identities and Chilean society beyond stubborn Orient-Occident and us-them dichotomies.
This book examines the complexity of Chineseness in China and the Chinese diaspora. Using critical sociolinguistic and discourse analytical approaches, the chapters reveal the power dynamics and ideologies underlying the varied ways Chineseness is performed, represented and contested. Together they highlight four perspectives on Chineseness: the multiplicity of Chineseness, aspirational Chineseness, chronotopes of Chineseness and the cultural politics of Chineseness. It is argued that Chineseness is best understood as an ideologically-constructed variable, the articulation of which is deeply embedded within the dynamics of neoliberal globalization, rising nationalism, persistent Western hegemony, and shifting global geopolitics.
This book presents a multi-sited ethnographic study of the global development of the Taiwanese Buddhist order Fo Guang Shan. It explores the order’s modern Buddhist social engagements by examining three globally dispersed field sites: Los Angeles in the United States of America, Bronkhorstspruit in South Africa, and Yixing in the People’s Republic of China. The data collected at these field sites is embedded within the context of broader theoretical discussions on Buddhism, modernity, globalization, and the nation-state. By examining how one particular modern Buddhist religiosity that developed in a specific place moves into a global context, the book provides a fresh view of what constitutes both modern and contemporary Buddhism while also exploring the social, cultural, and religious fabrics that underlie the spatial configurations of globalization.
