Download or read book Dislocating China written by Dru C. Gladney and published by C. HURST & CO. PUBLISHERS. This book was released on 2004 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book seeks to challenge the way in which China and Chinese-ness is generally understood, privileged on a central tradition, a core culture, that tends to marginalise or peripheralise anything or anyone who does not fit that essential core. The Hui Muslim Chinese discussed in this volume demonstrate that one can be an integral part of Chinese society and yet challenge many of ourassumptions about that society itself. For that reason they and other so-called minority ethnics have generally been ignored by Western scholarship.
Download or read book Dislocating China written by Dru C. Gladney and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2004-04 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Until quite recently, Western scholars have tended to accept the Chinese representation of non-Han groups as marginalized minorities. Dru C. Gladney challenges this simplistic view, arguing instead that the very oppositions of majority and minority, primitive and modern, are historically constructed and are belied by examination of such disenfranchised groups as Muslims, minorities, or gendered others. Gladney locates China and Chinese culture not in some unchanging, essential "Chinese-ness," but in the context of historical and contemporary multicultural complexity. He investigates how this complexity plays out among a variety of places and groups, examining representations of minorities and majorities in art, movies, and theme parks; the invention of folklore and creation myths; the role of pilgrimages in constructing local identities; and the impact of globalization and economic reforms on non-Han groups such as the Muslim Hui. In the end, Gladney argues that just as peoples in the West have defined themselves against ethnic others, so too have the Chinese defined themselves against marginalized groups in their own society.
Download or read book On the Trail of the Yellow Tiger written by Kenneth Swope and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 557 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Manchu Qing victory over the Chinese Ming Dynasty in the mid-seventeenth century was one of the most surprising and traumatic developments in China's long history. In the last year of the Ming, the southwest region of China became the base of operations for the notorious leader Zhang Xianzhong (1605-47), a peasant rebel known as the Yellow Tiger. Zhang's systematic reign of terror allegedly resulted in the deaths of at least one-sixth of the population of the entire Sichuan province in just two years. The rich surviving source record, however, indicates that much of the destruction took place well after Zhang's death in 1647 and can be attributed to independent warlords, marauding bandits, the various Ming and Qing armies vying for control of the empire, and natural disasters. On the Trail of the Yellow Tiger is the first Western study to examine in detail the aftermath of the Qing conquest by focusing on the social and demographic effects of the Ming-Qing transition. By integrating the modern techniques of trauma and memory studies into the military and social history of the transition, Kenneth M. Swope adds a crucial piece to the broader puzzle of dynastic collapse and reconstruction. He also considers the Ming-Qing transition in light of contemporary conflicts around the globe, offering a comparative military history that engages with the universal connections between war and society.
Download or read book China written by William A. Callahan and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2009-11-19 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise of China presents a long-term challenge to the world not only economically, but politically and culturally. Callahan meets this challenge in China: The Pessoptimist Nation by using new Chinese sources and innovative analysis to see how Chinese people understand their new place in the world. To chart the trajectory of its rise, the book shifts from examining China's national interests to exploring its national aesthetic. Rather than answering the standard social science question "what is China?" with statistics of economic and military power, this book asks "when, where, and who is China?" to explore the soft power dynamics of China's identity politics. China: The Pessoptimist Nation shows how the heart of Chinese foreign policy is not a security dilemma, but an identity dilemma. Through careful analysis, Callahan charts how Chinese identity emerges through the interplay of positive and negative feelings in a dynamic that intertwines China's domestic and international politics. China thus is the pessoptimist nation where national security is closely linked to nationalist insecurities. Callahan concludes that this interactive view of China's pessoptimist identity means that we need to rethink the role of the state and public opinion in Beijing's foreign policy-making.
Download or read book Dislocation written by Lynn Zheng and published by Lynn's Stories. This book was released on 2018-09-12 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since China opened its door to the world, thousands of Chinese people have come to settle in the United States every year for various reasons. With their dreams in mind, they demonstrate the resilience of life with their unusual-and-colorful experiences in this magical land of America. In the form of short stories, the author of "Dislocation" presents their experiences in a delicate and affectionate light and honestly explores the meaning of life with language that will resonate in your heart and soul.In this short story collection, you'll encounter many of the new generations of Chinese immigrants whose daily struggles are complicated by the sometimes bewildering clash between Chinese and Western cultures.A same-sex couple facing inevitable family discontentment at their wedding ("The Knot"); a middle-aged professional desperately waiting for a liver transplant ("A Blizzard"); a greedy Chinese pensioner taking advantage of government handouts ("National Welfare"); a mother reflecting on changes in Chinese society when her spoiled teenage niece goes missing ("A Little Devil"); an Airbnb hostess too busy to leave any breathing space for herself ("One-Night Stay"); and a depressed elderly man in China and his son in America for whom misunderstandings overshadow the love and affection beneath the surface ("The Absence").Learn about many facets of Chinese-American life and improve your Chinese or English effortlessly along the way.
Download or read book Southwest China in a Regional and Global Perspective c 1600 1911 written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-01-03 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book Southwest China in Regional and Global Perspectives (c. 1600-1911) is dedicated to important issues in society, trade, and local policy in the southwestern provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou and Sichuan during the late phase of the Qing period. It combines the methods of various disciplines to bring more light into the neglected history of a region that witnessed a faster population growth than any other region in China during that age. The contributions to the volume analyse conflicts and arrangements in immigrant societies, problems of environmental change, the economic significance of copper as the most important “export” product, topographical and legal obstacles in trade and transport, specific problems in inter-regional trade, and the roots of modern transnational enterprise.
Download or read book Mark Twain in China written by Selina Lai-Henderson and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-13 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835–1910) has had an intriguing relationship with China that is not as widely known as it should be. Although he never visited the country, he played a significant role in speaking for the Chinese people both at home and abroad. After his death, his Chinese adventures did not come to an end, for his body of works continued to travel through China in translation throughout the twentieth century. Were Twain alive today, he would be elated to know that he is widely studied and admired there, and that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn alone has gone through no less than ninety different Chinese translations, traversing China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Looking at Twain in various Chinese contexts—his response to events involving the American Chinese community and to the Chinese across the Pacific, his posthumous journey through translation, and China's reception of the author and his work, Mark Twain in China points to the repercussions of Twain in a global theater. It highlights the cultural specificity of concepts such as "race," "nation," and "empire," and helps us rethink their alternative legacies in countries with dramatically different racial and cultural dynamics from the United States.
Download or read book Communities of Complicity written by Hans Steinmüller and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everyday life in contemporary rural China is characterized by an increased sense of moral challenge and uncertainty. Ordinary people often find themselves caught between the moral frameworks of capitalism, Maoism and the Chinese tradition. This ethnographic study of the village of Zhongba (in Hubei Province, central China) is an attempt to grasp the ethical reflexivity of everyday life in rural China. Drawing on descriptions of village life, interspersed with targeted theoretical analyses, the author examines how ordinary people construct their own senses of their lives and their futures in everyday activities: building houses, working, celebrating marriages and funerals, gambling and dealing with local government. The villagers confront moral uncertainty; they creatively harmonize public discourse and local practice; and sometimes they resolve incoherence and unease through the use of irony. In so doing, they perform everyday ethics and re-create transient moral communities at a time of massive social dislocation.
Download or read book Secular Faith written by Vincent William Lloyd and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is faith a necessary virtue in the contemporary world? May it be, or must it be, detached from religious commitment? What do genealogies of the secular tell us about faith? Does religion need secular faith? Secular Faith brings together leading and emerging scholars to reflect on the apparent paradox of "secular faith." Ranging over anthropology, religious studies, political science, history, and literature, from Muslims in China to Pentecostals in South Africa to a prison chapel in Texas, this collection of essays is as engaging and accessible as it is penetrating and rigorous. Communism was once labeled "the god that failed." Like Christianity, Communism involves faith in a superhuman endeavor, conversion, myth, discipline, and salvation--and, from the perspective of secular liberalism, both are unjustified and false. In recent years, scholars have begun to investigate whether secularism is itself based on faith in a god that failed, or is failing. Nevertheless, many still embrace such a faith, finding in the spirit of democracy an ethos of eternal renewal. Secular Faith enters and broadens this conversation, interrogating secular faith in a global context, tapping new theoretical resources, and grappling provocatively with the tragedies and opportunities of today's profane pantheon of beliefs.
Download or read book China s Borderlands written by Steven Parham and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-02-27 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Ethnicity and Urban Life in China written by Xiaowei Zang and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-04-13 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This much-needed work on ethnicity in Asia offers a major sociological analysis of Hui Muslims in contemporary China. Using both qualitative and quantitative data derived from fieldwork in Lanzhou between March 2001 and July 2004, it looks at the contrast between the urban life of the Han people, the ethnic majority in the city of Lanzhou, and the Hui people, the largest ethnic minority in the city, and assesses the link between minority ethnicity and traditional behaviour in urban sociology and research on ethnic groups of China. In-depth interviews and survey data provides a fresh perspective to the study of ethnic behaviour in China, and offers a rich account of Hui behaviour in seven aspects of urban life: neighbouring interaction, friendship formation, network behaviour, mate selection methods, spouse choice, marital homogamy, and household structure. Contributing to the global discourse on Islam, religious fundamentalism and modernity, this book will be invaluable to anyone interested in Chinese society, Islam, religion, development, urban studies, anthropology and ethnicity.
Download or read book Situating the Uyghurs Between China and Central Asia written by Ildikó Bellér-Hann and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2007 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing together distinguished international scholars, this volume offers a unique insight into the social and cultural hybridity of the Uyghurs. The work is comparative and interdisciplinary in focus and bridges a gap in our understanding of this group.
Download or read book China s Social Development and Policy written by Litao Zhao and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In China, social development has fallen far behind economic development. This book looks at why this is the case, and poses the question of whether the conditions, structures and institutions that have locked China into unbalanced development are changing to pave the way for the next stage of development. Based on an empirical examination of ideological, structural and institutional transformations that have shaped China’s development experiences, the book analyses China’s reform and development in the social domain, including pension, healthcare, public housing, ethnic policy, and public expenditure on social programs. The book moves beyond descriptive analyses to understand the role of broader changes in shaping and redefining the pattern of development in China.
Download or read book Contextualization of Sufi Spirituality in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century China written by David Lee and published by James Clarke & Company. This book was released on 2016-07-28 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Liu Zhi (c1662-c1730), a well-known Muslim scholar writing in Chinese, published outstanding theological works, short treatises, and short poems on Islam. While traditional Arabic and Persian Islamic texts used unfamiliar concepts to explain Islam, Liu Zhi translated both text and concepts into Chinese culture. In this erudite volume, David Lee examines how Liu Zhi integrated the basic religious living of the monotheistic Hui Muslims into their pluralistic Chinese culture. Liu Zhi discussed the Prophet Muhammad in Confucian terms, and his work served as a bridge between peoples. This book is an in-depth study of Liu Zhi's contextualization of Islam within Chinese scholarship that argues his merging of the two never deviated from the basic principles of Islamic belief.
Download or read book Violence Discourse and Politics in China s Uyghur Region written by Pablo A. Rodríguez-Merino and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-12-30 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates how Uyghur-related violent conflict and Uyghur ethnic minority identity, religion, and the Xinjiang region, more broadly, became constituted as a ‘terrorism’ problem for the Chinese state. Building on securitization theory, Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS), and the scholarly definitional debate on terrorism, it develops the concept of terroristization as a critical analytical framework for the study of historical processes of threat construction. Investigating the violent events reported in Xinjiang since the early 1980s, the evolving discursive patterns used by the Chinese state to make sense of violent incidents, and the crackdown policies that the official terrorism discourse has legitimized, the book demonstrates how the securitization, and later terroristization, of Xinjiang and the Uyghurs, is the result of a discursive and political choice of the Chinese state. The author reveals the contingent and unstable nature of such construction, and how it problematizes the inevitability of the rationale behind China’s ‘war on terror’, that has prescribed a brutal crackdown as the most viable approach to governing the tensions that have historically characterized China’s rule over the Turkic Muslim ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of the politics of contemporary China, security and ethnic minority issues, International Relations and Security, as well as those adopting discursive approaches to the study of security, notably those within the critical security and terrorism studies fields.
Download or read book China in the 21st Century written by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-31 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The need to understand this global giant has never been more pressing: China is constantly in the news, yet conflicting impressions abound. Within one generation, China has transformed from an impoverished, repressive state into an economic and political powerhouse. In the fully revised and updated second edition of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, China expert Jeffrey Wasserstrom provides cogent answers to the most urgent questions regarding the newest superpower, and offers a framework for understanding its meteoric rise. Focusing his answers through the historical legacies--Western and Japanese imperialism, the Mao era, and the massacre near Tiananmen Square--that largely define China's present-day trajectory, Wasserstrom introduces readers to the Chinese Communist Party, the building boom in Shanghai, and the environmental fall-out of rapid Chinese industrialization. He also explains unique aspects of Chinese culture such as the one-child policy, and provides insight into how Chinese view Americans. Wasserstrom reveals that China today shares many traits with other industrialized nations during their periods of development, in particular the United States during its rapid industrialization in the 19th century. He provides guidance on the ways we can expect China to act in the future vis-à-vis the United States, Russia, India, and its East Asian neighbors. The second edition has also been updated to take into account changes China has seen in just the past two years, from the global economic shifts to the recent removal of Chongqing Party Secretary Bo Xilai from power. Concise and insightful, China in the 21st Century provides an excellent introduction to this significant global power.
Download or read book Claiming Homes written by Charlotte Bruckermann and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2019-10-03 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chinese citizens make themselves at home despite economic transformation, political rupture, and domestic dislocation in the contemporary countryside. By mobilizing labor and kinship to make claims over homes, people, and things, rural residents withstand devaluation and confront dispossession. As a particular configuration of red capitalism and socialist sovereignty takes root, this process challenges the relationship between the politics of place and the location of class in China and beyond.
