Download or read book The Middle Class in Neoliberal China written by Hai Ren and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the late 1970s, China's move towards neoliberalism has made it not only one of the world's fastest growing economies, but also one of the most polarised states. This economic, social and political transformation has led to the emergence of a new Chinese middle class, and understanding the development and the role of this new social group is crucial to understanding contemporary Chinese society. Investigating the new politics of the middle class in China, this book addresses three major questions. First, how does the Chinese state deal with problems of national sovereignty and political representation to create the middle class both as a legitimate category of the people and as an ideal norm of citizenship? Second, how does the recognition of the middle class norm take place in the practice of everyday life? Finally, what kind of risks does the politics of the middle class generate not only for middle class subjects but also for the disenfranchised? In answering these questions, this book examines a set of practices, bodies of knowledge, measures, and institutions that aim to manage, govern, control, and orient the behaviours, gestures, and thoughts of Chinese citizens. This investigation contributes not only to the understanding of the Chinese middle class society but also to the scholarly debate over the relationship between governmental apparatuses, subjectification, and life-building. Drawing on ethnographic information, historical archives, and the media, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars working in the fields of Chinese studies, Chinese politics, ethnic studies and urban studies, as well as those interested in culture, society, class and welfare.
Download or read book Embodying Middle Class Gender Aspirations written by Kailing Xie and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-04-25 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book takes a feminist approach to analyse the lives of well-educated urban Chinese women, who were raised to embody the ideals of a modern Chinese nation and are largely the beneficiaries of the policy changes of the post-Mao era. It explores young women’s gendered attitudes to and experiences of marriage, reproductive choices, careers and aspirations for a good life. It sheds light on what keeps mainstream Chinese middle-class women conforming to the current gender regime. It illuminates the contradictory effects of neoliberal techniques deployed by a familial authoritarian regime on these women’s striving for success in urban China, and argues that, paradoxically, women’s individualistic determination to succeed has often led them onto the path of conformity by pursuing exemplary norms which fit into the party-state’s agenda.
Download or read book Class And Class Conflict In Post socialist China written by Alvin Y So and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2013-08-07 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Class and Class Conflict in Post-Socialist China traces the origins and the profound changes of the patterns of class conflict in post-socialist China since 1978.The first of its kind in the field of China Studies that offers comprehensive overviews and traces the historical evolutions of different patterns of class conflict (among workers, peasants, capitalists, and the middle class) in post-socialist China, the book provides comprehensive overviews of different patterns of class conflict. It uses a state-centered approach to study class conflict, i.e., study how the communist party-state restructures the patterns of class conflict in Chinese society, and brings in a historical dimension by tracing the origins and developments of class conflict in socialist and post-socialist China.
Download or read book Driving toward Modernity written by Jun Zhang and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Driving toward Modernity, Jun Zhang ethnographically explores the entanglement between the rise of the automotive regime and emergence of the middle class in South China. Focusing on the Pearl River Delta, one of the nation's wealthiest regions, Zhang shows how private cars have shaped everyday middle-class sociality, solidarity, and subjectivity, and how the automotive regime has helped make the new middle classes of the PRC. By carefully analyzing how physical and social mobility intertwines, Driving toward Modernity paints a nuanced picture of modern Chinese life, comprising the continuity and rupture as well as the structure and agency of China's great transformation.
Download or read book Desiring China written by Lisa Rofel and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2007-05-10 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through window displays, newspapers, soap operas, gay bars, and other public culture venues, Chinese citizens are negotiating what it means to be cosmopolitan citizens of the world, with appropriate needs, aspirations, and longings. Lisa Rofel argues that the creation of such “desiring subjects” is at the core of China’s contingent, piece-by-piece reconfiguration of its relationship to a post-socialist world. In a study at once ethnographic, historical, and theoretical, she contends that neoliberal subjectivities are created through the production of various desires—material, sexual, and affective—and that it is largely through their engagements with public culture that people in China are imagining and practicing appropriate desires for the post-Mao era. Drawing on her research over the past two decades among urban residents and rural migrants in Hangzhou and Beijing, Rofel analyzes the meanings that individuals attach to various public cultural phenomena and what their interpretations say about their understandings of post-socialist China and their roles within it. She locates the first broad-based public debate about post-Mao social changes in the passionate dialogues about the popular 1991 television soap opera Yearnings. She describes how the emergence of gay identities and practices in China reveals connections to a transnational network of lesbians and gay men at the same time that it brings urban/rural and class divisions to the fore. The 1999–2001 negotiations over China’s entry into the World Trade Organization; a controversial women’s museum; the ways that young single women portray their longings in relation to the privations they imagine their mothers experienced; adjudications of the limits of self-interest in court cases related to homoerotic desire, intellectual property, and consumer fraud—Rofel reveals all of these as sites where desiring subjects come into being.
Download or read book How China Escaped Shock Therapy written by Isabella M. Weber and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-26 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China has become deeply integrated into the world economy. Yet, gradual marketization has facilitated the country’s rise without leading to its wholesale assimilation to global neoliberalism. This book uncovers the fierce contest about economic reforms that shaped China’s path. In the first post-Mao decade, China’s reformers were sharply divided. They agreed that China had to reform its economic system and move toward more marketization—but struggled over how to go about it. Should China destroy the core of the socialist system through shock therapy, or should it use the institutions of the planned economy as market creators? With hindsight, the historical record proves the high stakes behind the question: China embarked on an economic expansion commonly described as unprecedented in scope and pace, whereas Russia’s economy collapsed under shock therapy. Based on extensive research, including interviews with key Chinese and international participants and World Bank officials as well as insights gleaned from unpublished documents, the book charts the debate that ultimately enabled China to follow a path to gradual reindustrialization. Beyond shedding light on the crossroads of the 1980s, it reveals the intellectual foundations of state-market relations in reform-era China through a longue durée lens. Overall, the book delivers an original perspective on China’s economic model and its continuing contestations from within and from without.
Download or read book Middle Class China written by David S. G. Goodman and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A general expectation has developed that ChinaÕs middle class will generate not only social but also political change. This expectation often overlooks the reality that there is no single Chinese middle class with a common identity or will to action. This timely volume examines the behaviour and identity of the different elements of ChinaÕs middle class Ð entrepreneurs, managers, and professionals Ð in order to understand their centrality to the wider processes of social and political change in China. The expert contributors seek to identify the social space occupied by the Chinese middle class rather than identifying social backgrounds and attitudes. In so doing they explore socio-political issues, the development of a consumer society, relationships between gender and class in the workplace, home-ownership and the appearance of gated communities, and the political interaction between the Party-state and the entrepreneurial middle classes and their impact on the new institutional economics. Providing a more nuanced understanding of the structure of the middle class in China and identifying dynamic elements in their behaviour, this unique book will prove a fascinating and thought provoking read for academics, students and researchers with an interest in Asian studies and public policy.
Download or read book The Middle Class in Neoliberal China written by Hai Ren and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-02-11 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the late 1970s, China’s move towards neoliberalism has made it not only one of the world’s fastest growing economies, but also one of the most polarised states. This economic, social and political transformation has led to the emergence of a new Chinese middle class, and understanding the development and the role of this new social group is crucial to understanding contemporary Chinese society. Investigating the new politics of the middle class in China, this book addresses three major questions. First, how does the Chinese state deal with problems of national sovereignty and political representation to create the middle class both as a legitimate category of the people and as an ideal norm of citizenship? Second, how does the recognition of the middle class norm take place in the practice of everyday life? Finally, what kind of risks does the politics of the middle class generate not only for middle class subjects but also for the disenfranchised? In answering these questions, this book examines a set of practices, bodies of knowledge, measures, and institutions that aim to manage, govern, control, and orient the behaviours, gestures, and thoughts of Chinese citizens. This investigation contributes not only to the understanding of the Chinese middle class society but also to the scholarly debate over the relationship between governmental apparatuses, subjectification, and life-building. Drawing on ethnographic information, historical archives, and the media, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars working in the fields of Chinese studies, Chinese politics, ethnic studies and urban studies, as well as those interested in culture, society, class and welfare.
Download or read book Creating Wealth and Poverty in Postsocialist China written by Deborah Davis and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents an up-to-date look at the social processes and consequences of China's rapid economic growth.
Download or read book Commercial Nationalism written by Zala Volcic and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-02-03 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book intervenes in discussions of the fate of nationalism and national identity by exploring the relationship between state appropriation of marketing and branding strategies on the one hand, and, on the other, the commercial mobilization of nationalist discourses.
Download or read book China Surpassing the Middle Income Trap written by Shaojie Zhou and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book explores one of the most fiercely debated issues in China: if and how China will surpass the middle income trap that has plagued many developing countries for years. This book gives readers a clear picture of China today and acts as a reference for other developing countries. China is facing many setbacks and experiencing an economic slowdown in recent years due to some serious issues, and income inequality is one such issue deferring China’s development potential by creating a middle income trap. This book thoroughly investigates both the unpromising factors and favorable conditions for China to overcome the trap. It illustrates that traps may be encountered at any stage of development and argues that political stability is the prerequisite to creating a favorable environment for economic development and addressing this “middle income trap”. Written by one of China's central planners, this book offers precious insights into the industrial policies that are transforming China and the world and will be of interest to China scholars, economists and political scientists.
Download or read book The Global Middle Classes written by Rachel Heiman and published by School for Advanced Research Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surging middle-class aspirations and anxieties throughout the world have recently compelled anthropologists to pay serious attention to middle classes and middle-class spaces, sentiments, lifestyles, labors, and civic engagements. Middle classness has become a powerful category for self-identification, as political and corporate leaders increasingly hail "the middle classes" as the ideal subject-citizenry. Ethnographically rich and culturally particular, the essays in this volume elucidate middle-class experience and discourse and in so doing add critical nuance to theories of class itself.
Download or read book Governing China s Population written by Susan Greenhalgh and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Governing China's Population' tells the story of political and cultural shifts, from the perspectives of both regime and society.
Download or read book In Search of Paradise written by Li Zhang and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-15 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new revolution in homeownership and living has been sweeping the booming cities of China. This time the main actors on the social stage are not peasants, migrants, or working-class proletariats but middle-class professionals and entrepreneurs in search of a private paradise in a society now dominated by consumerism. No longer seeking happiness and fulfillment through collective sacrifice and socialist ideals, they hope to find material comfort and social distinction in newly constructed gated communities. This quest for the good life is profoundly transforming the physical and social landscapes of urban China. Li Zhang, who is from Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, turns a keen ethnographic eye on her hometown. She combines her analysis of larger political and social issues with fine-grained details about the profound spatial, cultural, and political effects of the shift in the way Chinese urban residents live their lives and think about themselves. In Search of Paradise is a deeply informed account of how the rise of private homeownership is reconfiguring urban space, class subjects, gender selfhood, and ways of life in the reform era. New, seemingly individualistic lifestyles mark a dramatic move away from yearning for a social utopia under Maoist socialism. Yet the privatization of property and urban living have engendered a simultaneous movement of public engagement among homeowners as they confront the encroaching power of the developers. This double movement of privatized living and public sphere activism, Zhang finds, is a distinctive feature of the cultural politics of the middle classes in contemporary China. Theoretically sophisticated and highly accessible, Zhang's account will appeal not only to those interested in China but also to anyone interested in spatial politics, middle-class culture, and postsocialist governing in a globalizing world.
Download or read book The Politics of Chinese Media written by Bingchun Meng and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-01-09 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an analytical account of the consensus and contestations of the politics of Chinese media at both institutional and discursive levels. It considers the formal politics of how the Chinese state manages political communication internally and externally in the post-socialist era, and examines the politics of news media, focusing particularly on how journalists navigate the competing demands of the state, the capital and the urban middle class readership. The book also addresses the politics of entertainment media, in terms of how power operates upon and within media culture, and the politics of digital networks, highlighting how the Internet has become the battlefield of ideological contestation while also shaping how political negotiations are conducted. Bearing in mind the contemporary relevance of China’s socialist revolution, this text challenges both the liberal universalist view that presupposes ‘the end of history’ and various versions of China exceptionalism, which downplay the impact of China’s integration into global capitalism.
Download or read book Liberalism 2 0 and the Rise of China written by David Tyfield and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What can we do in this period of historic, global turbulence? Mainstream narratives have no plausible account of how to stop exacerbating the multiple, overlapping challenges; much less begin to address them meaningfully. The only thing everyone agrees is innovation will be needed. But what is innovation? Usually, it is understood as new technologies that will ‘solve’ specific ‘problems’ – and, it is hoped, return life to a ‘business as usual’ of progress in individual freedom and wealth. But innovation is a thoroughly social process with profound implications for the arrangement of power in a society, hence shaping the emergence of new social systems. Exploring evidence from the key arenas of low-carbon innovation, including in the pivotal location of a rising China, this book describes the global systemic crisis of a neoliberal world order and the embryonic emergence of an alternative global power regime of a ‘liberalism 2.0’. This augurs both a web 2.0-based revitalization of the classical liberalism of the nineteenth century and new Dickensian inequalities and injustices. Against hopes that the present is a ‘revolutionary’ moment, therefore, political engagement with this emerging power regime is thus presented as the most productive strategy for a progressive twenty-first century politics.
Download or read book Gated Communities in China written by Choon-Piew Pow and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-09-11 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the nature and dynamics of gated communities within the specificities of reform Shanghai, a city that arguably has been at the forefront of China’s new urban/consumer revolution.
