Download or read book South China Village Culture written by James Hayes and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true essence of China is rooted in its villages. The traditional village culture of South China, as elsewhere in the country, is a microcosm of the greater society and philosophy of China, both ancient and modern. This book focuses particularly on Hong Kong and Shenzhen, originally part of the same county in Guangdong province, which share a rich heritage of diverse influences - a mix of doctrines and varied beliefs, interwoven with regional social and economic practices operating through a well-ordered local organisation - that have helped make this region the success it is today.
Download or read book Villages in the City written by Stefan Al and published by . This book was released on 2014-09-30 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues for the value of urban villages as places. To reveal their qualities, a series of drawings and photographs uncovers the immerse concentration of social life in their dense structures and provides a peek into residents homes and daily lives.
Download or read book A Century of Change in a Chinese Village written by Lin Juren and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-05-04 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This compelling book analyzes the dramatic changes in rural Chinese society as a result of rapid urbanization. Building on eight decades of studies of the village of Lengshuigou, Chinese sociologists examine the fundamental changes over the last century that have radically transformed centuries-old systems of patriarchy and generational order.
Download or read book Moral Politics in a South Chinese Village written by Hok Bun Ku and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2003-08-25 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring sensitive issues often hidden to outsiders, this engaging study traces the transformation and economic development of a south China village during the first tumultuous decade of reform. Drawing on a wealth of intimate detail, Ku explores the new sense of risk and mood of insecurity experienced in the post-reform era in Ku Village, a typical hamlet beyond the margins of richer suburban areas or fertile farmland. Villagers' dissatisfaction revolves around three key issues: the rising cost of living, mounting agricultural expenses, and the forcible implementation of birth-control quotas. Faced with these daunting problems, villagers have developed an array of strategies. Their weapons include resisting policies they consider unreasonable by disregarding fees, evading taxes, and ignoring strict family planning regulations; challenging the rationale of official policies and the legitimacy of the local government and its officials; and reestablishing clan associations to supercede local Party authority. Using lively everyday narratives and compelling personal stories, Ku argues that rural people are not in fact powerless and passive; instead they have their own moral system that informs their everyday family lives, work, and political activities. Their code embodies concepts of fairness and justice, a concrete definition of the relationship between the state and its citizens, an understanding of the boundaries and responsibilities of each party, and a clear notion of what constitutes good and bad government and officials. On the basis of these principles, they may challenge existing policies and deny the authority of officials and the government, thereby legitimizing their acts of self-defense. Through his richly realized ethnography, Ku shows the reader a world of memorable, fully realized individuals striving to control their fate in an often arbitrary world.
Download or read book Custom Land and Livelihood in Rural South China written by Patrick H. Hase and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-01 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Land was always at the centre of life in Hong Kong’s rural New Territories: it sustained livelihoods and lineages and, for some, was a route to power. Villagers managed their land according to customs that were often at odds with formal Chinese law. British rule, 1898—1997, added complications by assimilating traditional practices into a Western legal system. Custom, Land and Livelihood in Rural South China explores land ownership in the New Territories, analysing over a hundred surviving land deeds from the late Ch’ing Dynasty to recent times, which are transcribed in full and translated into English. Together with other sources collected by the author during 30 years of research, these deeds yield information on all aspects of traditional village life—from raising families and making a living to coping with intruders—and evoke a view of the world which, despite decades of urbanisation, still has resonance today.
Download or read book Village Life in China A Study in Sociology written by Arthur H. Smith and published by Good Press. This book was released on 2021-04-25 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author had spent more than 20 years working and living in China developing a great respect for the Chinese, their customs, lifestyle, and philosophy. He thought that Chinese villages were a microcosm of the whole of the empire and he was certain that China would be a big player in the 20th century and later, but also realized that some things about their lifestyle would have to change, stating this as a prime reason for writing the book. In the foreward, he uses the phrase 'the Chinese problem' recognizing the fact that a better understanding of the Chinese was needed in the Western world.
Download or read book Gao Village written by Mobo C. F. Gao and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about Gao Village, in Jiangxi province, where the author was born and brought up, leaving when he was twenty-one to study English at Xiamen University. Since emigrating to Australia in 1990, he has returned every year to Gao Village, where his brother still lives. Several accounts of village life in China have been published, but all have been by Western or urban Chinese scholars. Mobo Gao's account is in every sense one from the inside. Though written as an academic work, it does not eschew personal stories and experiences relevant to the themes addressed. These cover a forty-year period and fall into four distinct themes; the village before and after land reform; the commune system; the dismantling of the communes; and the unfolding impact of the market economy, including increased migration to urban areas, from the late 1980s onwards.
Download or read book Rediscovery of Cultural Landscapes in Southern China written by Wallace P.H. Chang and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-04-28 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the concept of human landscape in rural settlements in Southern China, where communities and their cultural landscapes are facing contemporary challenges following a period of rapid urbanization in the last 50 years. While metropolitan cities, such as Hong Kong, are experiencing accelerated urban development, underpopulated rural villages are struggling to maintain the cultural heritage of their regions. Rediscovery of Cultural Landscapes in Southern China provides a detailed account into indigenous living cultures in traditional, rural settlements upon natural landscapes. Beginning with an overview of the theoretical framework, the book presents six unique cases, including: Tai O, Yim Tin Tsai, Lai Chi Wo, Nga Tsin Wai, Cangdong, and Meinong, while illustrating a relevant comparison between Hakka and Satoyama landscape systems. The spectrum of theoretical and case analyses allows for a rethinking of the evolving cultural landscape’s positioning with valuable heritages in the context of a post-industrial society. The book is written towards reinterpreting the cultural landscape by conceptualizing the human landscape for scholars, practitioners, and students interested in rural-cultural conservation and revitalization, heritage management, traditional architecture and landscape planning, and urban-rural development.
Download or read book Chinese Village Life Today written by Gonçalo Santos and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2021-08-22 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China has undergone a remarkable process of urbanization, but a significant portion of its citizens still live in rural villages. To gain better access to jobs, health care, and consumer goods, villagers often travel or migrate to cities, and that cyclical transit and engagement with new technoscientific and medical practices is transforming village life. In this thoughtful ethnography, Gonçalo Santos paints a richly detailed portrait of one rural township in Guangdong Province, north of the industrialized Pearl River Delta region. Unlike previous studies of rural-urban relations and migration in China, Chinese Village Life Today—based on Santos’s more than twenty years of field research—starts from a rural community’s point of view rather than the perspective of major urban centers. Santos considers the intimate choices of village families in the face of larger forces of modernization, showing how these negotiations shape the configuration of daily village life, from marriage, childbirth, and childcare to personal hygiene and public sanitation. Santos also outlines the advantages of a rural existence, including a degree of autonomy over family planning and community life that is rare in urban China. Filled with vivid anecdotes and keen observations, this book presents a fresh perspective on China’s urban-rural divide and a grounded theoretical approach to rural transformation.
Download or read book China in One Village written by Liang Hong and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2021-06-22 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A global future in the history of a single village After a decade away from her ancestral family village, during which she became a writer and literary scholar in Beijing, Liang Hong started visiting her rural hometown in landlocked Henan Province. What she found was an extended family riven by the seismic changes in Chinese society and a village turned inside out by emigration, neglect, and environmental despoliation. Combining family memoir, literary observation, and social commentary, Liang’s by turns lyrically poetic and movingly raw investigation into the fate of her village became a bestselling book in China and brought her fame. For many months, Liang walked the roads and fields of her village, recording the stories of her relatives—especially her irascible, unforgettable father—and talking to everyone from high government officials to the lowest of village outcasts. Across China, many saw in Liang’s riveting interviews with family members and childhood acquaintances a mirror of their own lives, and her observations about the way the greatest rural-to-urban migration of modern times has twisted the country resonated deeply. China in One Village tells the story of contemporary China through one clear-eyed, literary observer, one family, and one village.
Download or read book The Unknown Cultural Revolution written by Dongping Han and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2008-12 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published: New York: Garland Pub., 2000.
Download or read book Chinese Village Socialist State written by Edward Friedman and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1991-01-01 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This portrait of social change in the North China plain depicts how the world of the Chinese peasant evolved during an era of war and how it in turn shaped the revolutionary process. The book is based on evidence gathered from archives and interviews with villagers and rural officials.
Download or read book Invisible China written by Scott Rozelle and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of how China’s changing economy may leave its rural communities in the dust and launch a political and economic disaster. As the glittering skyline in Shanghai seemingly attests, China has quickly transformed itself from a place of stark poverty into a modern, urban, technologically savvy economic powerhouse. But as Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell show in Invisible China, the truth is much more complicated and might be a serious cause for concern. China’s growth has relied heavily on unskilled labor. Most of the workers who have fueled the country’s rise come from rural villages and have never been to high school. While this national growth strategy has been effective for three decades, the unskilled wage rate is finally rising, inducing companies inside China to automate at an unprecedented rate and triggering an exodus of companies seeking cheaper labor in other countries. Ten years ago, almost every product for sale in an American Walmart was made in China. Today, that is no longer the case. With the changing demand for labor, China seems to have no good back-up plan. For all of its investment in physical infrastructure, for decades China failed to invest enough in its people. Recent progress may come too late. Drawing on extensive surveys on the ground in China, Rozelle and Hell reveal that while China may be the second-largest economy in the world, its labor force has one of the lowest levels of education of any comparable country. Over half of China’s population—as well as a vast majority of its children—are from rural areas. Their low levels of basic education may leave many unable to find work in the formal workplace as China’s economy changes and manufacturing jobs move elsewhere. In Invisible China, Rozelle and Hell speak not only to an urgent humanitarian concern but also a potential economic crisis that could upend economies and foreign relations around the globe. If too many are left structurally unemployable, the implications both inside and outside of China could be serious. Understanding the situation in China today is essential if we are to avoid a potential crisis of international proportions. This book is an urgent and timely call to action that should be read by economists, policymakers, the business community, and general readers alike. Praise for Invisible China “Stunningly researched.” —TheEconomist, Best Books of the Year (UK) “Invisible China sounds a wake-up call.” —The Strategist “Not to be missed.” —Times Literary Supplement (UK) “[Invisible China] provides an extensive coverage of problems for China in the sphere of human capital development . . . the book is rich in content and is not constrained only to China, but provides important parallels with past and present developments in other countries.” —Journal of Chinese Political Science
Download or read book Collective Killings in Rural China during the Cultural Revolution written by Yang Su and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-21 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The violence of Mao's China is well known, but its extreme form is not. In 1967 and 1968, during the Cultural Revolution, collective killings were widespread in rural China in the form of public execution. Victims included women, children, and the elderly. This book is the first to systematically document and analyze these atrocities, drawing data from local archives, government documents, and interviews with survivors in two southern provinces. This book extracts from the Chinese case lessons that challenge the prevailing models of genocide and mass killings and contributes to the historiography of the Cultural Revolution, in which scholarship has mainly focused on events in urban areas.
Download or read book The Missionary s Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village written by Henrietta Harrison and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2013-06 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Missionary’s Curse tells the story of a Chinese village that has been Catholic since the seventeenth century, drawing direct connections between its history, the globalizing church, and the nation. Harrison recounts the popular folk tales of merchants and peasants who once adopted Catholic rituals and teachings for their own purposes, only to find themselves in conflict with the orthodoxy of Franciscan missionaries arriving from Italy. The village’s long religious history, combined with the similarities between Chinese folk religion and Italian Catholicism, forces us to rethink the extreme violence committed in the area during the Boxer Uprising. The author also follows nineteenth century Chinese priests who campaigned against missionary control, up through the founding of the official church by the Communist Party in the 1950s. Harrison’s in-depth study provides a rare insight into villager experiences during the Socialist Education Movement and Cultural Revolution, as well as the growth of Christianity in China in recent years. She makes the compelling argument that Catholic practice in the village, rather than adopting Chinese forms in a gradual process of acculturation, has in fact become increasingly similar to those of Catholics in other parts of the world.
Download or read book Bitter and Sweet written by Ellen Oxfeld and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2017-05-23 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Less than a half century ago, China experienced a cataclysmic famine, which was particularly devastating in the countryside. As a result, older people in rural areas have experienced in their lifetimes both extreme deprivation and relative abundance of food. Young people, on the other hand, have a different relationship to food. Many young rural Chinese are migrating to rapidly industrializing cities for work, leaving behind backbreaking labor but also a connection to food through agriculture. Bitter and Sweet examines the role of food in one rural Chinese community as it has shaped everyday lives over the course of several tumultuous decades. In her superb ethnographic accounts, Ellen Oxfeld compels us to reexamine some of the dominant frameworks that have permeated recent scholarship on contemporary China and that describe increasing dislocation and individualism and a lack of moral centeredness. By using food as a lens, she shows a more complex picture, where connectedness and sense of place continue to play an important role, even in the context of rapid change.
Download or read book Power and Justice written by Xudong Zhao and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-04-10 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses the relationship, interaction and conflict between everyday life and various institutions in a specific village in North China, with a focus on the formal and informal legal systems. It vividly describes the village’s “legal construction problems” as well as the customs and laws, and such it can be seen as a historical and innovative comment on China’s problems. The book is based on the author’s field investigations assessing vast amounts of material concerning local organizations, formal and informal authorities, economic exchange, religious rituals, as well as interviews with villagers and numerous court files. It presents an in-depth exploration of “pluralism of authority” in China’s rural society, and examines how various authorities were formed. It also summarizes how various local disputes are resolved and discusses the villagers’ understanding of the concept of “justice.” Lastly, it suggests ways in which national law and local customs could communicate and collaborate.
