Download or read book The Teahouse Under Socialism written by Di Wang and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-15 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text explores urban public life through the microcosm of the Chengdu teahouse. Like most public spaces, the teahouse was and still is an enduring symbol of Chinese popular culture, stemming back centuries and prevailing through political transformations, modernization, and globalization. The time period covered begins basically with the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949-50, goes through the end of the Cultural Revolution and into the post-Mao reform era.
Download or read book The Teahouse Under Socialism written by Di Wang and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To understand a city fully, writes Di Wang, we must observe its most basic units of social life. In The Teahouse under Socialism, Wang does just that, arguing that the teahouses of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, are some of the most important public spaces?perfect sites for examining the social and economic activities of everyday Chinese. Wang looks at the transformation of these teahouses from private businesses to collective ownership and how state policy and the proprietors? response to it changed the overall economic and social structure of the city. He uses this transformation to illuminate broader trends in China?s urban public life from 1950 through the end of the Cultural Revolution and into the post-Mao reform era. In doing so, The Teahouse under Socialism charts the fluctuations in fortune of this ancient cultural institution and analyzes how it survived, and even thrived, under bleak conditions. Throughout, Wang asks such questions as: Why and how did state power intervene in the operation of small businesses? How was "socialist entertainment" established in a local society? How did the well-known waves of political contestation and struggle in China change Chengdu?s teahouses and public life? In the end, Wang argues, the answers to such questions enhance our understanding of public life and political culture in the Communist state.
Download or read book The Teahouse under Socialism written by Di Wang and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-15 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To understand a city fully, writes Di Wang, we must observe its most basic units of social life. In The Teahouse under Socialism, Wang does just that, arguing that the teahouses of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, are some of the most important public spaces—perfect sites for examining the social and economic activities of everyday Chinese. Wang looks at the transformation of these teahouses from private businesses to collective ownership and how state policy and the proprietors’ response to it changed the overall economic and social structure of the city. He uses this transformation to illuminate broader trends in China’s urban public life from 1950 through the end of the Cultural Revolution and into the post-Mao reform era. In doing so, The Teahouse under Socialism charts the fluctuations in fortune of this ancient cultural institution and analyzes how it survived, and even thrived, under bleak conditions. Throughout, Wang asks such questions as: Why and how did state power intervene in the operation of small businesses? How was "socialist entertainment" established in a local society? How did the well-known waves of political contestation and struggle in China change Chengdu’s teahouses and public life? In the end, Wang argues, the answers to such questions enhance our understanding of public life and political culture in the Communist state.
Download or read book The Teahouse written by Di Wang and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines economic, social, political, and cultural changes as funneled through the teahouses of Chengdu during the first half of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Village China Under Socialism and Reform written by Huaiyin Li and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2009-03-12 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Village China Under Socialism and Reform offers a comprehensive account of rural life after the communist revolution, detailing villager involvement in political campaigns since the 1950s, agricultural production under the collective system, family farming and non-agricultural economy in the reform, and everyday life in the family and community. Li's rich examination draws on original documents from local agricultural collectives, newly accessible government archives, and his own fieldwork in Qin village of Jiangsu province to highlight the continuities in rural transformation. Firmly disagreeing with those who claim that recent developments in rural China represent a radical break with pre-reform sociopolitical practices and patterns of production, Li instead draws a clear history connecting the current situation to ecological, social, and institutional changes that have persisted from the collective era.
Download or read book Violence and Order on the Chengdu Plain written by Di Wang and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-27 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1939, residents of a rural village near Chengdu watched as Lei Mingyuan, a member of a violent secret society known as the Gowned Brothers, executed his teenage daughter. Six years later, Shen Baoyuan, a sociology student at Yenching University, arrived in the town to conduct fieldwork on the society that once held sway over local matters. She got to know Lei Mingyuan and his family, recording many rare insights about the murder and the Gowned Brothers' inner workings. Using the filicide as a starting point to examine the history, culture, and organization of the Gowned Brothers, Di Wang offers nuanced insights into the structures of local power in 1940s rural Sichuan. Moreover, he examines the influence of Western sociology and anthropology on the way intellectuals in the Republic of China perceived rural communities. By studying the complex relationship between the Gowned Brothers and the Chinese Communist Party, he offers a unique perspective on China's transition to socialism. In so doing, Wang persuasively connects a family in a rural community, with little overt influence on national destiny, to the movements and ideologies that helped shape contemporary China.
Download or read book Enduring Socialism written by Harry G. West and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Against the historical backdrop of successive socialist and post-socialist claims to have completely remade society, the contributors to this volume explore the complex and often paradoxical continuities between diverse post-socialist presents and their corresponding socialist and pre-socialist pasts. The chapters focus on ways in which: pre-socialist economic, political, and cultural forms in fact endured an era of socialism and have found new life in the post-socialist present, notwithstanding revolutionary socialist claims; continuities with a pre-socialist past have been produced within the historical imaginary of post-socialism; and socialist economic, political, and cultural forms have in fact endured in a purportedly post-socialist era, despite the claims of neo-liberal reformers. Harry West is a lecturer in Social Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). His has conducted research in the northern district of Mueda in Mozambique, where nationalist guerrillas based themselves during the anti-colonial war (1964-1974). As part of his project, he has studied how various social groups experienced, and coped with, violence during and after the war for independence. He has also taken interest in how colonialism and revolutionary socialism reconfigured the institutions of local authority, and, more recently, how post-socialist reforms have fostered a "revival of tradition" in rural Mozambique. Parvathi Raman is a lecturer in Social Anthropology in the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). She has conducted research in South Africa on the role of Indians in the South African Communist Party and has written about the changing character of the socialist imagination in the twentieth century. She also works on the politics of diaspora, and multiculturalism and the neo-liberal state.
Download or read book Routledge Handbook of Revolutionary China written by Alan Baumler and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-08-12 with total page 487 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Revolutionary China covers the evolution of Chinese society from the roots of the Republic of China in the early 1900s until the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. The chapters in this volume explain aspects of the process of revolution and how people adapted to the demands of the revolutionary situation. Exploring changes in political leadership, as well as transformation in culture, it compares the differences in experiences in urban and rural areas and contrasts rapid changes, such as the war with Japan and Communist ‘liberation’ with evolutionary developments, such as the gradual redefinition of public space. Taking a comprehensive approach, the themes covered include: • War, occupation and liberation • Religion and gender • Education, cities and travel. This is an essential resource for students and scholars of Modern China, Republican China, Revolutionary China and Chinese Politics.
Download or read book Ruling the Stage Social and Cultural History of Opera in Sichuan from the Qing to the People s Republic of China written by Igor Iwo Chabrowski and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-06-08 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Igor Chabrowski analyses the history of the development of opera in Sichuan, arguing that opera serves as a microcosm of the profoundtransformation of modern Chinese culture between the 18th century and 1950s.
Download or read book The Master in Bondage written by Huaiyin Li and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2023-03-28 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a rich set of original oral histories conducted with retired factory workers from industrial centers across the country, this book provides a bottom-up examination of working class participation in factory life during socialist and reform-era China. Huaiyin Li offers a series of new interpretations that challenge, revise, and enrich the existing scholarship on factory politics and worker performance during the Maoist years, including the nature of the Maoist state as seen in the operation of power relations on the shop floor, as well as the origins and dynamics of industrial enterprise reforms in the post-Mao era. In sharp contrast with the ideologically driven goal of promoting grassroots democracy or manifesting workers' status as the masters of the workplace, Li argues that Maoist era state-owned enterprises operated effectively to turn factory workers into a well-disciplined labor force through a complex set of formal and informal institutions that functioned to generate an equilibrium in power relations and work norms. The enterprise reforms of the 1980s and 1990s undermined this preexisting equilibrium, catalyzing the transformation of the industrial workforce from predominantly privileged workers in state-owned enterprises to precarious migrant workers of rural origins hired by private firms. Ultimately, this comprehensive and textured history provides an analytically astute new picture of everyday factory life in the world's largest manufacturing powerhouse.
Download or read book Dancing for Their Lives written by Claudia Huang and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2025-02-11 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dancing for Their Lives explores the vibrant world of retired Chinese women known as "dancing grannies” who seek fulfillment and companionship amidst societal upheaval. These women, part of China’s “lost generation,” gather in parks and public squares to reclaim their lives through dance in the wake of Chinese economic and cultural transformations. The book challenges prevailing narratives of aging societies, portraying old age as a site of social innovation rather than decline. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Chengdu, China, Dancing for Their Lives reveals how retirees learn to navigate shifting social norms and values while actively creating new models for growing older. The book’s insights resonate beyond Chinese society, offering lessons on resilience and the pursuit of meaning in any aging population. Dancing for Their Lives underscores the human capacity to craft purposeful lives amid uncertainty, transcending geographical boundaries to illuminate the universal quest for fulfillment in later years.
Download or read book Tiger Tyrant Bandit Businessman written by Brian DeMare and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-16 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rural county of Poyang, lying in northern Jiangxi Province, goes largely unmentioned in the annals of modern Chinese history. Yet records from the Public Security Bureau archive hold a treasure trove of data on the every day interactions between locals and the law. Drawing on these largely overlooked resources, Tiger, Tyrant, Bandit, Businessman follows four criminal cases that together uniquely illuminate the dawning years of the People's Republic. Using a unique casefile approach, Brian DeMare recounts stories of a Confucian scholar who found himself allied with bandits and secret society members; a farmer who murdered a cadre; an evil tyrant who exploited religious traditions to avoid prosecution; and a merchant accused of a crime he did not commit. Each case is a tremendous tale, complete with memorable characters, plot twists, and drama. And while all depict the enemies of New China, each also reveals details of village life during this most pivotal moment of recent Chinese history. Together, the narratives bring rural regime change to life, illustrating how the Chinese Communist Party cemented its authority through mass political campaigns, careful legal investigations, and sheer patience. Balancing storytelling with historical inquiry, this book is at once a grassroots view of rural China's legal system and its application to apparent counterrevolutionaries, and a lesson in archival research itself.
Download or read book Urban Infrastructuring written by Deljana Iossifova and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-04-18 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about urban infrastructuring as the processes linking infrastructural configurations and their components with other social, ecological, political, or otherwise defined systems as part of urbanisation and globalisation in the Global South. It suggests that infrastructuring is essential to urbanisation and that it is entangled with socio-spatio-ecological transformations that often have negative outcomes over time. Furthermore, it argues that infrastructuring requires an ethical positioning in research and practice in order to enhance infrastructural sustainability in the face of intersecting environmental, social and economic crises. “Urban Infrastructuring” is developed in three parts. First, it identifies infrastructural entanglements across various urban and urbanising settings in the Global South. Second, it highlights some of the damaging processes and outcomes of urban infrastructuring and argues that the absence, presence and transformation of infrastructure in the Global South (re-)produces socioecological injustice in the short- and long term. Third, the book argues for a shift of infrastructuring agendas towards more just and sustainable interventions. It suggests that an ethico-politics of care should be embedded in systems approaches to infrastructuring in both research and practice. The edited volume contains contributions from authors with backgrounds in a variety of academic disciplines from the natural and social sciences, engineering and the humanities. It provides valuable insights for anyone concerned with the study, design, planning, implementation and maintenance of urban infrastructures to enhance human well-being and sustainability. It will be of interest to researchers and urban decision-makers alike.
Download or read book Chinese Theatre Troupes in Southeast Asia written by Beiyu Zhang and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-27 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A detailed account of the cultural history of the Chinese diaspora, with a focus on the performers and audiences who were involved in the making of Chinese performing cultures in Southeast Asia. Focusing on five different kinds of theatre troupes from China and their respective travels in Singapore, Bangkok, Malaya and Hong Kong, Zhang examines their different travelling experiences and divergent cultural practices. She thus sheds light on how transnational mobility was embodied, practised and circumscribed in the course of troupes’ travelling, sojourning and interacting with diasporic communities. These troupes communicated diverse discourses and ideologies influenced by different social political movements in China, and these meanings were further altered by transmission. By unpacking multiple ways of performing Chineseness that was determined by changing time-space constructions, this volume provides valuable insight for scholars of the Chinese Diaspora, Transnational History and Performing Arts in Asia.
Download or read book The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama written by Xiaomei Chen and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-25 with total page 655 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This condensed anthology reproduces close to a dozen plays from Xiaomei Chen's well-received original collection, The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama, along with her critical introduction to the historical, cultural, and aesthetic evolution of twentieth-century Chinese spoken drama. Comprising representative works from the Republican era to postsocialist China, the book encapsulates the revolutionary rethinking of Chinese theater and performance that began in the late Qing dynasty and vividly portrays the uncertainty and anxiety brought on by modernism, socialism, political conflict, and war. Chosen works from 1919 to 1990 also highlight the formation of national and gender identities during a period of tremendous social, cultural, and political change in China and the genesis of contemporary attitudes toward the West. PRC theater tracks the rise of communism, juxtaposing ideals of Chinese socialism against the sacrifices made for a new society. Post-Mao drama addresses the nation's socialist legacy, its attempt to reexamine its cultural roots, and postsocialist reflections on critical issues such as nation, class, gender, and collective memories. An essential, portable guide for easy reference and classroom use, this abridgment provides a concise yet well-rounded survey of China's theatricality and representation of political life. The original work not only established a canon of modern Chinese drama in the West but also made it available for the first time in English in a single volume.
Download or read book Street Culture in Chengdu written by Di Wang and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the lively street culture in Chengdu from 1870 to 1930, this book explores the relationship between urban commoners and public space, the role of community and neighborhood in public life, and how the reform movement and Republican revolution transformed everyday life in this inland city.
Download or read book Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution written by Arif Dirlik and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arif Dirlik's latest offering is a revisionist perspective on Chinese radicalism in the twentieth century. He argues that the history of anarchism is indispensable to understanding crucial themes in Chinese radicalism. And anarchism is particularly significant now as a source of democratic ideals within the history of the socialist movement in China. Dirlik draws on the most recent scholarship and on materials available only in the last decade to compile the first comprehensive history of his subject available in a Western language. He emphasizes the anarchist contribution to revolutionary discourse and elucidates this theme through detailed analysis of both anarchist polemics and social practice. The changing circumstances of the Chinese revolution provide the immediate context, but throughout his writing the author views Chinese anarchism in relation to anarchism worldwide.
