This book is an exploration of how Chinese communites in the United States and Germany create and disseminate a sense of diasporic Chinese identity. It not only compares the local conditions of the Chinese communities in the two locations, but also moves to a global dimension to track the Chinese transnational imaginary. Van Ziegert analyzes three strategies that overseas Chinese use to articulate their identities as diasporic subjects: being more American/German being more Chinese hybridizing and commodifying Chinese culture through trans-cultural performances. These three strategies are not mutually exclusive and they often intersect and supplement each other in unexpected ways. The author also analyzes how the everyday lives of overseas Chinese connect with global and local factors, and how these experiences contribute to the formation of a global Chinese identity.
All cultures and times have their own notions of time and space. Being one of the fundamental ideas in every society they influence virtually every aspect of society. In this book the authors explain the notions of time and space in China, how culturally concrete and particularly Chinese they are and how significant such Chinese cultural-ness of these notions is. Seventeen scholars of various disciplinary backgrounds have treated topics within this general perspective in a comprehensive way.
This book is an exploration of how Chinese communites in the United States and Germany create and disseminate a sense of diasporic Chinese identity. It not only compares the local conditions of the Chinese communities in the two locations, but also moves to a global dimension to track the Chinese transnational imaginary. Van Ziegert analyzes three strategies that overseas Chinese use to articulate their identities as diasporic subjects: being more American/German being more Chinese hybridizing and commodifying Chinese culture through trans-cultural performances. These three strategies are not mutually exclusive and they often intersect and supplement each other in unexpected ways. The author also analyzes how the everyday lives of overseas Chinese connect with global and local factors, and how these experiences contribute to the formation of a global Chinese identity.
One of the oldest cities in the world, Beijing was an imperial capital for centuries. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Beijing became not only the political center of the new communist country, but also the signifier of socialist ideol-ogy and revolutionary culture. Now, in the 21st century, Beijing embodies global conflicts and global connections. Over the course of the last century, then, Beijing moved from the quintessential “traditional” capital to the symbol of communist urban form and finally to a cosmopolitan metropolis. These three stages in the history of Beijing and its shifting representations are the topic of this study. Like other capitals, Beijing is much more than its physical entity. It also functions as a concept, a representation. As city planners have (and continue to) present Beijing to the world as a model, the fluctuating images of Beijing have become solidified in urban space. Today, the urban form of Beijing juxtaposes diverse spaces that span centuries, embodying the various representations of the city by its planners in different eras. These representations of space also provide possibilities for writers to rethink and rebuild the city in their literary works. Chinese writers and filmmakers often essentialize those urban spaces by making them symbols of different urban cultures, the old houses representing “traditional,” “patriarchal” Chinese culture while soviet-style buildings reflect revolu-tionary culture. Finally, the more recent sprouting of apartments, condos, and townhouses stands for the invasion of western modernity and provides evidence of global capitalism in contemporary China. Inspired by Henri Lefebvre, this study establishes a framework that connects urban spaces (representations of space) to writers and literary productions (representational space). I analyze the three major urban spatial forms of traditional, communist, and glob-alized Beijing and examine what these urban spaces mean to Chinese writers and filmmakers as well as how they use them to configure particular images of Beijing. I argue that these different configurations are actually the projections of those writers and filmmakers’ own cultural imaginations; they provoke a form of emotional catharsis and also produce alternative visions of the cityscape.
Presenting the collaborative work of 13 international specialists of contemporary Chinese culture and society, this book explores the spaces of creation, production, and diffusion of "youth cultures" in China among generations born since the 1980s. Defining the concept of "youth culture" as practices and activities that catalyze self-expression and creativity, this book investigates the emergence of new physical spaces, including large avenues, parks, shopping malls, and recreation areas. Building on this, it also examines the influence of non-physical places, especially digital cultures, such as online social networks, shopping platforms, Cosplay, cyberliterature, and digital calligraphy and argues that these may in fact play a more significant role in Chinese civil society today. As an exploration of how youth can be creative even in a coercive environment, China’s Youth Cultures and Collective Spaces will be valuable to students and scholars of Chinese society, as well those working on the links between space, youth, and culture.
By the early twentieth century, Chinese residents of the northern treaty-port city of Tianjin were dwelling in the world. Divided by nine foreign concessions, Tianjin was one of the world’s most colonized and cosmopolitan cities. Residents could circle the globe in an afternoon, strolling from a Chinese courtyard house through a Japanese garden past a French Beaux-Arts bank to dine at a German café and fall asleep in a British garden city-style semi-attached brick house. Dwelling in the World considers family, house, and home in Tianjin to explore how tempos and structures of everyday life changed with the fall of the Qing Empire and the rise of a colonized city. Elizabeth LaCouture argues that the intimate ideas and practices of the modern home were more important in shaping the gender and status identities of Tianjin’s urban elites than the new public ideology of the nation. Placing the Chinese home in a global context, she challenges Euro-American historical notions that the private sphere emerged from industrialization. She argues that concepts of individual property rights that emerged during the Republican era became foundational to state-society relations in early Communist housing reforms and in today’s middle-class real estate boom. Drawing on diverse sources from municipal archives, women’s magazines, and architectural field work to social surveys and colonial records, Dwelling in the World recasts Chinese social and cultural history, offering new perspectives on gender and class, colonialism and empire, visual and material culture, and technology and everyday life.
This book examines the formation of the Chinese empire through its reorganization and reinterpretation of its basic spatial units: the human body, the household, the city, the region, and the world. The central theme of the book is the way all these forms of ordered space were reshaped by the project of unification and how, at the same time, that unification was constrained and limited by the necessary survival of the units on which it was based. Consequently, as Mark Edward Lewis shows, each level of spatial organization could achieve order and meaning only within an encompassing, superior whole: the body within the household, the household within the lineage and state, the city within the region, and the region within the world empire, while each level still contained within itself the smaller units from which it was formed. The unity that was the empire's highest goal avoided collapse back into the original chaos of nondistinction only by preserving within itself the very divisions on the basis of family or region that it claimed to transcend.
This edited collection will examine the way in which cities are imagined, experienced and shaped by those who reside within them, those who manage or govern them, and those who, as visitor, tourist or traveller, pass through them. Attention will be paid to the influence that these various inhabitants have on city life and living and the dialectic that exists between their sometimes collective and sometimes divergent, perceptions and uses of city space. In conjunction with this, the collection will explore the ways in which local culture and cultural policy are used by public and private interests as the framework for changing the image and amenity of the city in order to raise its profile and attract tourists. The book contributes to discussions of the increasingly high profile place that cultural programs have in urban regeneration initiatives and explore the tensions, conflicts and negotiations that emerge in urban spaces as a result of policy and culture coming together. Papers will be sought from researchers around the world with a view to examining the nexus between tourism, leisure and cultural programming from a number of perspectives and with reference to a range of international case studies. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events.
The global implications of China's rise as a global actor In 2005, a senior official in the George W. Bush administration expressed the hope that China would emerge as a “responsible stakeholder” on the world stage. A dozen years later, the Trump administration dramatically shifted course, instead calling China a “strategic competitor” whose actions routinely threaten U.S. interests. Both assessments reflected an underlying truth: China is no longer just a “rising” power. It has emerged as a truly global actor, both economically and militarily. Every day its actions affect nearly every region and every major issue, from climate change to trade, from conflict in troubled lands to competition over rules that will govern the uses of emerging technologies. To better address the implications of China's new status, both for American policy and for the broader international order, Brookings scholars conducted research over the past two years, culminating in a project: Global China: Assessing China's Growing Role in the World. The project is intended to furnish policy makers and the public with hard facts and deep insights for understanding China's regional and global ambitions. The initiative draws not only on Brookings's deep bench of China and East Asia experts, but also on the tremendous breadth of the institution's security, strategy, regional studies, technological, and economic development experts. Areas of focus include the evolution of China's domestic institutions; great power relations; the emergence of critical technologies; Asian security; China's influence in key regions beyond Asia; and China's impact on global governance and norms. Global China: Assessing China's Growing Role in the World provides the most current, broad-scope, and fact-based assessment of the implications of China's rise for the United States and the rest of the world.
This book reexamines the historical thinking of Liang Qichao (1873-1929), one of the few modern Chinese thinkers and cultural critics whose appreciation of the question of modernity was based on first-hand experience of the world space in which China had to function as a nation-state. It seeks to demonstrate that Liang was not only a profoundly paradigmatic modern Chinese intellectual but also an imaginative thinker of worldwide significance. By tracing the changes in Liang's conception of history, the author shows that global space inspired both Liang's longing for modernity and his critical reconceptualization of modern history. Spatiality, or the mode of determining spatial organization and relationships, offers a new interpretive category for understanding the stages in Liang's historical thinking. Liang's historical thinking culminated in a global imaginary of difference, which became most evident in the shift from his earlier proposal for a uniform national history to one that mapped "cultural history." His reaffirmation of spatiality, a critical concept overshadowed by the modernist obsession with time and history, made it both necessary and possible for him to redesign the project of modernity. Finally, the author suggests that the reconciliation of anthropological space with historical time that Liang achieved makes him abundantly contemporary with our own time, both inextricably modern and postmodern.
