From Youthful Manuscripts to River Elegy


Book Description

The narrative has two parallel lines of development, which constantly interact with each other: the political transformation of China during the critical dozen years 1977-89; and the cultural movement itself. The latter is followed from an abortive attempt in 1982 to publish the minjian journal Youthful Manuscripts, through the blossoming of many popular cultural enterprises, including the potent River Elegy television series, and finally to the Tiananmen tragedy, at which point the two lines of development finally coalesced. The book is filled with details, including the background, character, and personal connections of a large number of people who are related to the movement, which make interesting reading and can be a useful source for further studies.




Searching for Life's Meaning


Book Description

Chronicles the changing worldviews of Chinese youth in the tumultuous decade leading up to the Tiananmen demonstrations




China since Tiananmen


Book Description

In this edition of his path-breaking analysis of political and social change in China since the crackdown in Tiananmen Square in 1989, Joseph Fewsmith traces developments since 2001. These include the continuing reforms during the final years of Jiang Zemin's premiership and Hu Jintao's succession in 2002. Here the author also considers social trends and how Chinese citizens are starting to have a significant influence on government policies. As Fewsmith - a highly regarded political scientist and a seasoned China-watcher - observes, China is a very different place since Tiananmen Square. In the interim, it has emerged from isolation to become one of the most significant players on the world stage. This book explains the forces that have shaped China since Tiananmen.




Voicing Concerns


Book Description

Opening a new window into Chinese intellectual discourse, this unique book is a critical engagement with the issues, problems, and meanings of contemporary Chinese intellectual thought. As key participants in these debates who have exercised a significant influence on the development of contemporary Chinese thought, the volume's contributors explore concerns over the role of the intellectual and the outcomes of knowledge production in the humanities. Masterfully translated, these essays provide a wide range of conflicting perspectives on contemporary Chinese intellectuality, yet they share in common the belief held by many Chinese intellectuals in the power of intellectual labor to shape and change social life. By showing how Western social and cultural theory as well as the May Fourth and pre-modern Confucian traditions are being adapted for contemporary Chinese intellectual use, the book highlights how Chinese academics have affirmed an independent critical role for themselves in post-Mao China and the scope of the knowledge industry that they have created and developed since 1979.




Citizen Publications in China Before the Internet


Book Description

This book presents the first panoramic study of minkan (citizen publications) in China before the Internet. This recent history of citizen publications contributes to the reclamation of a lost past of resistance. It is an exercise in remembering a past that has been marginalized by official history and recovering ideas obliterated by state power.




Information Fantasies


Book Description

Winner of the Science Fiction Research Association Book Award​ A groundbreaking, alternate history of information technology and information discourses Although the scale of the information economy and the impact of digital media on social life in China today could pale that of any other country, the story of their emergence in the post-Mao sociopolitical environment remains untold. Information Fantasies offers a revisionist account of the emergence of the “information society,” arguing that it was not determined by the technology of digitization alone but developed out of a set of techno-cultural imaginations and practices that arrived alongside postsocialism. Anticipating discussions on information surveillance, data collection, and precarious labor conditions today, Xiao Liu goes far beyond the current scholarship on internet and digital culture in China, questioning the limits of current new-media theory and history, while also salvaging postsocialism from the persistent Cold War structure of knowledge production. Ranging over forgotten science fiction, unjustly neglected films, corporeal practices such as qigong, scientific journals, advertising, and cybernetic theories, Information Fantasies constructs an alternate genealogy of digital and information imaginaries—one that will change how we look at the development of the postsocialist world and the emergence of digital technologies.




Pacific Automobilism


Book Description

The beginning of the 21st century has seen important shifts in mobility cultures around the world, as the West’s media-driven car culture has contrasted with existing local mobilities, from rickshaws in India and minibuses in Africa to cycling in China. In this expansive volume, historian Gijs Mom explores how contemporary mobility has been impacted by social, political, and economic forces on a global scale, as in light of local mobility cultures, the car as an ‘adventure machine’ seems to lose cultural influence in favor of the car’s status character.




Television in Post-Reform China


Book Description

This book explores the political, economic, and cultural forces, locally and globally that have shaped the evolution of Chinese primetime television dramas, and the way that these dramas in turn have actively engaged in the major intellectual and policy debates concerning the path, steps, and speed of China’s economic and political modernization during the post-Deng Xiaoping era. It intertwines the evolution of Chinese television drama particularly with the ascendance of the Chinese New Left that favors a recentralization of state authority and an alternative path towards China’s modernization and China’s current administration’s call for building a "harmonious society." Two types of serial drama are highlighted in this regard, the politically provocative dynasty drama and the culturally ambiguous domestic drama. The book also provides cross-cultural comparisons that parallel the textual and institutional strategies of transnational Chinese language TV dramas with dramas from the three leading centers of transnational television production, the US, Brazil and Mexico in Latin America, and the Korean-led East Asia region. The comparison reveals creative connections while it also explores how the emergence of a Chinese cultural-linguistic market, together with other cultural-linguistic markets, complicates the power dynamics of global cultural flows.




Realistic Revolution


Book Description

This is a novel, transnational exploration of the major Chinese intellectual debates on radicalism in history, culture, and politics after 1989.




Chinese Migrant Entrepreneurship in Australia from the 1990s


Book Description

For more than two decades Australia has not only prospered without a recession but has achieved a higher growth rate than any Western country. This achievement has been credited to Australia's historic shift to Asia; the transformation of the relationship between these two countries is one of the most important changes in the Asia-Pacific region. However, the role of new Chinese migrants in transforming Sino-Australian relations through their entrepreneurial activities has not been deeply explored. Chinese Migrant Entrepreneurship in Australia from the 1990s adds new theoretical considerations and empirical evidence to a growing interest in entrepreneurship, and presents an account of a group of new Chinese migrant entrepreneurs who have succeeded in their business ventures significantly contributing to both Australia and China. The first chapter introduces the history between Australia and China, followed by chapters focusing on post-migration realities, economic opportunities, Chinese outbound tourism and the use of community media. The final chapter concludes with a summary. - Focuses on the people whose entrepreneurial activities have spread across industries and facilitated trade and cultural contacts - Analyses the experiences of the new migrants from China - Offers evidence that challenges outdated but still widely held assumptions about ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs - Presents longitudinal research on the new Chinese migrant community in Australia since the late 1980's - Demonstrates a dynamic process that challenges the overemphasis on the impact of globalisation on Chinese entrepreneurs