These stimulating essays address such topics as histories of public health, emotional life, law, and sexuality, notions of borders and frontiers, the relationship between native place identities and nationalism, the May Fourth Movement, and the periodization of the Chinese revolution.
China, Sex and Prostitution is a topical and important critique of recent scholarship in China studies concerning sexuality, prostitution and policing. Jeffrey's arguments are constructed in the form of detailed analysis of a wide range of primary texts, including documents, press reports, police report, and policy and legal pronouncements, and secondary literature in both English and Chinese. The work engages with some key debates in the fields of cultural and gender studies and will be welcomed by scholars in these areas as well as by China specialists, sociologists and anthropologists.
The aim of this book is to examine the transformation of the geography of China in the years since the start of China's policy of reform and opening-up in 1978, as seen through the eyes of Chinese geographers. Throughout that period, Chinese geographers have studied these environmental, economic, political and cultural processes closely, drawing on sources that are far from easy to access, and have published their results in Chinese. Much of this research has underpinned the Chinese government's assessment of policies and the policy choices at different levels, yet it is not well known outside of China. This volume deals with aspects of the socio-economic geography of China's transformation including its changing relations with the rest of the world, although it also deals with the impact of China's development path on the country's ecological systems. Each chapter deals with aggregate trends and specific cases to show the ways in which the particular characteristics of China's economic and social order (economic organization, political system and cultural model and values) have shaped and are shaped by its geography.
Elaine Jeffreys explores the issues of sex and sexuality in a non-Western context by examining debates surrounding the emergence of new sexual behaviours, and the appropriate nature of their regulation, in the People's Republic of China. Commissioned from Western and mainland Chinese scholars of sex and sexuality in China, the chapters in this volume are marked by a diversity of subject material and theoretical perspectives, but turn on three related concerns. First, the book situates China’s changing sexual culture and the nature of its governance in the socio-political history of the PRC. Second, it shows how China’s shift to a rule of law has generated conflicting conceptions of citizenship and the associated rights of individuals as sexual citizens. Finally, the book demonstrates that the Chinese state does not operate strictly to repress ‘sex’; it also is implicated in the creation of new spaces for sexual entrepreneurship, expertise and consumption. This comprehensive study is a valuable resource for scholars in the fields of sexuality studies and post-socialist societies and culture, directly appealing to both East Asia and China specialists.
A provocative account showing that “China”—and its 5,000 years of unified history—is a national myth, created only a century ago with a political agenda that persists to this day China’s current leadership lays claim to a 5,000-year-old civilization, but “China” as a unified country and people, Bill Hayton argues, was created far more recently by a small group of intellectuals. In this compelling account, Hayton shows how China’s present-day geopolitical problems—the fates of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, and the South China Sea—were born in the struggle to create a modern nation-state. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reformers and revolutionaries adopted foreign ideas to “invent’ a new vision of China. By asserting a particular, politicized version of the past the government bolstered its claim to a vast territory stretching from the Pacific to Central Asia. Ranging across history, nationhood, language, and territory, Hayton shows how the Republic’s reworking of its past not only helped it to justify its right to rule a century ago—but continues to motivate and direct policy today.
China's Thought Management argues that by re-emphasizing and modernizing propaganda and thought work since 1989, the CCP has managed to overcome a succession of local and national level crises - the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, the impact of the collapse Socialism in the Eastern bloc, SARS, ethnic clashes in Tibet and Xinjiang, to name but a few - emerging re-strengthened and as dominant in Chinese society as ever. The contributors to this book address such crucial issues as the new emphasis on economic propaganda, the continued importance of the PLA propaganda system in China’s overall propaganda work and political stability, how the CCP uses "Confu-talk" in its foreign and domestic propaganda, and new approaches to mass persuasion such as "campaigns of mass distraction". Each chapter is a case study of the multiple ways in which the CCP has modified and adjusted its propaganda to reflect China’s changed economic and political environment. Challenging readers to reconceptualise mainstream understandings of the CCP’s hold on power and the means the CCP government adopts to maintain its authority to rule, this book will be invaluable reading for anyone interested in the Chinese media and Chinese politics.
In this milestone work, prominent China film scholar Yingjin Zhang proposes "polylocality" as a new conceptual framework for investigating the shifting spaces of contemporary Chinese cinema in the age of globalization. Questioning the national cinema paradigm, Zhang calls for comparative studies of underdeveloped areas beyond the imperative of transnationalism. The book begins by addressing theories and practices related to space, place, and polylocality in contemporary China before focusing on the space of scholarship and urging scholars to move beyond the current paradigm and explore transnational and comparative film studies. This is followed by a chapter that concentrates on the space of production and surveys the changing landscape of postsocialist filmmaking and the transformation of China’s urban generation of directors. Next is an examination of the space of polylocality and the cinematic mappings of Beijing and a persistent "reel" contact with polylocality in hinterland China. In the fifth chapter Zhang explores the space of subjectivity in independent film and video and contextualizes experiments by young directors with various documentary styles. Chapter 6 calls attention to the space of performance and addresses issues of media and mediation by way of two kinds of playing: the first with documentary as troubling information, the second with piracy as creative intervention. The concluding chapter offers an overview of Chinese cinema in the new century and provides production and reception statistics. Combining inspired critical insights, original observations, and new information, Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China is a significant work on current Chinese film and a must-read for film scholars and anyone seriously interested in cinema more generally or contemporary Chinese culture.
This region - which marks the meeting of China and post-Soviet Central Asia - is increasingly important militarily, economically and geographically. Yet we know little of the people that live there, beyond a romanticised 'Silk Road' sense of fraternity. In fact, relations between the people of this region are tense, and border violence is escalating - even as the identity and nationality of the people on the ground shifts to meet their new geopolitical realities. As Steven Parham shows, many of the world's Soviet borders have proved to be deeply unstable and, in the end, impermanent. Meanwhile, the looming presence of Modern China and Russia, who are funneling money and military resources into the region - partly to fight what they see as a growing Islamic activism - are adding fuel to the fire. This lyrical, intelligent book functions as part travelogue, part sociological exploration, and is based on a unique body of research - five months trekking through the checkpoints of the border regions. As China continues to grow and become more assertive, as it has been recently in Africa and in the South China Seas - as well as in Xinjiang - China's borderlands have become a battleground between the Soviet past and the Chinese future.
This volume contains a number of articles on modern Chinese history and historiography written by one of the leading academic experts on the subject. The author provides a critique of older approaches to nineteenth-century history and offers powerful reinterpretations of such key events in the recent history of China as the boxer rebellion, Mao's ascension to power in 1949, and the process of political and economic reform in the post-Mao era. This is a strong collection which will be of enormous interest to scholars of East Asian history.