Download or read book Living in China A Modern History of Family Residence from 1949 written by Yong He and published by Royal Collins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2022-03-31 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the founding of modern China in 1949 up until the present, the national housing system has changed drastically. Originally, the PRC adopted a socialist residence system, confiscating private housing and allocating houses and properties through government bodies. This arguably peaked during the collectivisation movements of the era, before changing course in the late 1970s. Afterwards, a general trend of privatisation occurred in Chinese housing, fundamentally altering the nature of the domestic housing market. This book tracks these changes in government policy and attitudes towards residential housing, as well as the trends of modernisation, urbanization, and development that contribute to shifts in living conditions and expectations of Chinese citizens. The author also includes 25 real-life stories from his students' personal experiences--a college project in which the students interviewed their parents and grandparents on every house they had lived in since 1949. Any reader curious on the nature and change of Chinese residential housing can find answers in this book.
Download or read book Last Boat Out of Shanghai written by Helen Zia and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The dramatic, real-life stories of four young people caught up in the mass exodus of Shanghai in the wake of China's 1949 Communist Revolution--a precursor to the struggles faced by emigrants today. Shanghai has historically been China's jewel, its richest, most modern and westernized city. The bustling metropolis was home to sophisticated intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and a thriving middle class when Mao's proletarian revolution emerged victorious from the long civil war. Terrified of the horrors the Communists would wreak upon their lives, citizens of Shanghai who could afford to fled in every direction. Seventy years later, the last generation to fully recall this massive exodus have opened the story to Chinese American journalist Helen Zia, who interviewed hundreds of exiles about their journey through one of the most tumultuous events of the twentieth century. From these moving accounts, Zia weaves the story of four young Shanghai residents who wrestled with the decision to abandon everything for an uncertain life as refugees in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the U.S. Young Benny, who as a teenager became the unwilling heir to his father's dark wartime legacy, must choose between escaping Hong Kong or navigating the intricacies of a newly Communist China. The resolute Annuo, forced to flee her home with her father, a defeated Nationalist official, becomes an unwelcome young exile in Taiwan. The financially strapped Ho fights deportation in order to continue his studies in the U.S. while his family struggles at home. And Bing, given away by her poor parents, faces the prospect of a new life among strangers in America"--
Download or read book Shanghai Homes written by Jie Li and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-18 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the dazzling global metropolis of Shanghai, what has it meant to call this city home? In this account—part microhistory, part memoir—Jie Li salvages intimate recollections by successive generations of inhabitants of two vibrant, culturally mixed Shanghai alleyways from the Republican, Maoist, and post-Mao eras. Exploring three dimensions of private life—territories, artifacts, and gossip—Li re-creates the sounds, smells, look, and feel of home over a tumultuous century. First built by British and Japanese companies in 1915 and 1927, the two homes at the center of this narrative were located in an industrial part of the former "International Settlement." Before their recent demolition, they were nestled in Shanghai's labyrinthine alleyways, which housed more than half of the city's population from the Sino-Japanese War to the Cultural Revolution. Through interviews with her own family members as well as their neighbors, classmates, and co-workers, Li weaves a complex social tapestry reflecting the lived experiences of ordinary people struggling to absorb and adapt to major historical change. These voices include workers, intellectuals, Communists, Nationalists, foreigners, compradors, wives, concubines, and children who all fought for a foothold and haven in this city, witnessing spectacles so full of farce and pathos they could only be whispered as secret histories.
Download or read book Women and Property in China 960 1949 written by Kathryn Bernhardt and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on newly available archival case records, this book demonstrates that Chinese women's rights to property changed substantially from the Song through the Qing dynasties, and even more dramatically under the Republican Civil Code of 1929-30.
Download or read book Dwelling in the World written by Elizabeth LaCouture and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Revolutionizing the Family written by Neil J. Diamant and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-04-28 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1950, China's new Communist government enacted a Marriage Law to allow free choice in marriage and easier access to divorce. Prohibiting arranged marriages, concubinage, and bigamy, it was one of the most dramatic efforts ever by a state to change marital and family relationships. In this comprehensive study of the effects of that law, Neil J. Diamant draws on newly opened urban and rural archival sources to offer a detailed analysis of how the law was interpreted and implemented throughout the country. In sharp contrast to previous studies of the Marriage Law, which have argued that it had little effect in rural areas, Diamant argues that the law reshaped marriage and family relationships in significant--but often unintended--ways throughout the Maoist period. His evidence reveals a confused and often conflicted state apparatus, as well as cases of Chinese men and women taking advantage of the law to justify multiple sexual encounters, to marry for beauty, to demand expensive gifts for engagement, and to divorce on multiple occasions. Moreover, he finds, those who were best placed to use the law's more liberal provisions were not well-educated urbanites but rather illiterate peasant women who had never heard of sexual equality; and it was poor men, not women, who were those most betrayed by the peasant-based revolution. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 2000. In 1950, China's new Communist government enacted a Marriage Law to allow free choice in marriage and easier access to divorce. Prohibiting arranged marriages, concubinage, and bigamy, it was one of the most dramatic efforts ever by a state to change mari
Download or read book The Last Kings of Shanghai written by Jonathan Kaufman and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In vivid detail... examines the little-known history of two extraordinary dynasties."--The Boston Globe "Not just a brilliant, well-researched, and highly readable book about China's past, it also reveals the contingencies and ironic twists of fate in China's modern history."--LA Review of Books An epic, multigenerational story of two rival dynasties who flourished in Shanghai and Hong Kong as twentieth-century China surged into the modern era, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist The Sassoons and the Kadoories stood astride Chinese business and politics for more than one hundred seventy-five years, profiting from the Opium Wars; surviving Japanese occupation; courting Chiang Kai-shek; and nearly losing everything as the Communists swept into power. Jonathan Kaufman tells the remarkable history of how these families ignited an economic boom and opened China to the world, but remained blind to the country's deep inequality and to the political turmoil on their doorsteps. In a story stretching from Baghdad to Hong Kong to Shanghai to London, Kaufman enters the lives and minds of these ambitious men and women to forge a tale of opium smuggling, family rivalry, political intrigue, and survival.
Download or read book Private Life under Socialism written by Yunxiang Yan and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2003-03-12 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For seven years in the 1970s, the author lived in a village in northeast China as an ordinary farmer. In 1989, he returned to the village as an anthropologist to begin the unparalleled span of eleven years’ fieldwork that has resulted in this book—a comprehensive, vivid, and nuanced account of family change and the transformation of private life in rural China from 1949 to 1999. The author’s focus on the personal and the emotional sets this book apart from most studies of the Chinese family. Yan explores private lives to examine areas of family life that have been largely overlooked, such as emotion, desire, intimacy, privacy, conjugality, and individuality. He concludes that the past five decades have witnessed a dual transformation of private life: the rise of the private family, within which the private lives of individual women and men are thriving.
Download or read book A Social History of Maoist China written by Felix Wemheuer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-28 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new social history of Maoist China provides an accessible view of the complex and tumultuous period when China came under Communist rule.
Download or read book American Exodus written by Charlotte Brooks and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2019-08-27 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first decades of the 20th century, almost half of the Chinese Americans born in the United States moved to China—a relocation they assumed would be permanent. At a time when people from around the world flocked to the United States, this little-noticed emigration belied America’s image as a magnet for immigrants and a land of upward mobility for all. Fleeing racism, Chinese Americans who sought greater opportunities saw China, a tottering empire and then a struggling republic, as their promised land. American Exodus is the first book to explore this extraordinary migration of Chinese Americans. Their exodus shaped Sino-American relations, the development of key economic sectors in China, the character of social life in its coastal cities, debates about the meaning of culture and “modernity” there, and the U.S. government’s approach to citizenship and expatriation in the interwar years. Spanning multiple fields, exploring numerous cities, and crisscrossing the Pacific Ocean, this book will appeal to anyone interested in Chinese history, international relations, immigration history, and Asian American studies.
Download or read book An Urban History of China written by Chonglan Fu and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book considers urban development in China, highlighting links between China’s history and civilization and the rapid evolution of its urban forms. It explores the early days of urban dwelling in China, progressing to an analysis of residential environments in the industrial age. It also examines China’s modern and postmodern architecture, considered as derivative or lacking spiritual meaning or personality, and showcases how China's traditional culture underpins the emergence of China’s modern cities. Focusing on the notion of “courtyard spirit” in China, it offers a study of the urban public squares central to Chinese society, and examines the disruption of the traditional Square model and the rise and growth of new architectural models.
Download or read book A Village with My Name written by Scott Tong and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-11-17 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An “immensely readable” journey through modern Chinese history told through the experiences of the author’s extended family (Christian Science Monitor). When journalist Scott Tong moved to Shanghai, his assignment was to start the first full-time China bureau for “Marketplace,” the daily business and economics program on public radio stations across the US. But for Tong the move became much more: an opportunity to reconnect with members of his extended family who’d remained there after his parents fled the communists six decades prior. Uncovering their stories gave him a new way to understand modern China’s defining moments and its long, interrupted quest to go global. A Village with My Name offers a unique perspective on China’s transitions through the eyes of regular people who witnessed such epochal events as the toppling of the Qing monarchy, Japan’s occupation during WWII, exile of political prisoners to forced labor camps, mass death and famine during the Great Leap Forward, market reforms under Deng Xiaoping, and the dawn of the One Child Policy. Tong focuses on five members of his family, who each offer a specific window on a changing country: a rare American-educated girl born in the closing days of the Qing Dynasty, a pioneer exchange student, a toddler abandoned in wartime who later rides the wave of China’s global export boom, a young professional climbing the ladder at a multinational company, and an orphan (the author’s daughter) adopted in the middle of a baby-selling scandal fueled by foreign money. Through their stories, Tong shows us China anew, visiting former prison labor camps on the Tibetan plateau and rural outposts along the Yangtze, exploring the Shanghai of the 1930s, and touring factories across the mainland—providing a compelling and deeply personal take on how China became what it is today. “Vivid and readable . . . The book’s focus on ordinary people makes it refreshingly accessible.” —Financial Times “Tong tells his story with humor, a little snark, [and] lots of love . . . Highly recommended, especially for those interested in Chinese history and family journeys.” —Library Journal (starred review)
Download or read book The Cambridge Illustrated History of China written by Patricia Buckley Ebrey and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-25 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this sumptuously illustrated history, now in its second edition, Patricia Buckley Ebrey traces the origins of Chinese culture from prehistoric times to the present.
Download or read book Red Circle written by Stephen Songsheng Chen and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2009 with total page 557 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Red Circle: China and Me, 1949-2009 tells the fascinating story of Stephen Chen and his family. It sketches the history of the People's Republic of China, not merely as a backdrop, but as the driving force of the book's action. Red Circle chronicles the rise and fall and rise again of an extraordinary family. At the same time, it is only one of countless stories that could be told by many millions of Chinese. It tells of the hope, turmoil, and terror in the first 30 years of the PRC and of the transformation, transition, and achievement in the last 30 years. Red Circle is the first work of its kind to cover the making of modern China. The 60-year cycle encompassed by Red Circle is the basis of the traditional Chinese calendar, astrology, and cosmology. The cyclical nature of life and a return to one's roots are fundamental elements in Stephen's story. The ways in which his life reflects and completes that of his father, the stunning symmetries and recurring cycles of Red Circle make for a remarkable read. Stephen has seen China from a range of vantage points that few others have experienced. From the palace he grew up in to brutal labor camps to corporate boardrooms, from stark prisons to secret government offices, Stephen has witnessed history. Red Circle is, however, more than the tale of how a family survives or a nation emerges. At its heart, Red Circle is a thrilling testament to the indomitable will and unconquerable spirit of the individual.
Download or read book Life in Treaty Port China and Japan written by Donna Brunero and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-03-30 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume moves beyond the traditional examination of the treaty ports of China and Japan as places of cultural interaction. It moves ‘beyond the Bund’, presenting instead the history of material culture, the everyday life of the residents of the treaty ports beyond the symbology of Shanghai's waterfront. Bringing for the first time together scholars of China and Japan, museum curators, legal, economic and architectural historians, it studies the treaty ports not only as sites of cultural exchange, but also as sites of social contestation, accommodation and mobility, covering topics as varied as day to day life itself, such as family, property and law, health and welfare, travel, visual culture and memory. The call of this volume is to peel the multiple layers of the encounter between East and West in the treaty ports of China and Japan.
Download or read book 21st Century China written by Mary Farquhar and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-10-02 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd famously said that China issues are part of 21st century Australia’s ‘very life-blood’. This brings short-term challenges to the Australia-China relationship, from Chinese investments in our resources to visits to Australia by expatriate regional political and religious leaders, labelled ‘splittists’ or ‘terrorists’ by the Chinese government. Our long-term relationship includes robust scholarship on China as an emerging superpower. In this book, leading Australian academics comment on the arts, law, politics and society in China today. The book opens with Geremie Barmé’s essay on re-orienting Beijing city for the Olympics and closes with restaurateur Kylie Kwong’s reminiscences—and recipes—from a Chinese childhood in Sydney’s suburbs. Readers will disover a rich engagement with China in the twelve chapters of this volume, ranging from Confucianism to ‘green’ Australian-Chinese cuisine.
Download or read book Ancestral Leaves written by Joseph Esherick and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2011-02-09 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Esherick looks at familiar historical events and processes anew, enriching that history with great personal depth. There is really nothing like it."—William T. Rowe, author of China's Last Empire: The Great Qing "A uniquely revealing and humanizing prism through which to view the fascinating human drama of modern Chinese history, replete with information for both longtime students of China and newcomers alike. An absolutely splendid book."—Elizabeth Perry, author of Patrolling the Revolution: Worker Militias, Citizenship and the Modern Chinese State
