China and Its National Minorities


Book Description

This title was first published in 1990: This book is a study of past and present policies of the People's Republic of China towards its numerous and varied minority groups, a subject about which there is scant information in the West. It examines the impact of Chinese culture on these diverse groups and China's attempt to bring them into the mainstream of Han life. The impact of the Cultural Revolution on the minority peoples, the future of Tibet, and the implications of Chinese minorities policies for Sino-Soviet relations are among the topics discussed in this book.




Changing Identities of the Southeast Asian Chinese Since World War II


Book Description

In June 1985, a symposium, "Changing Identities of the Southeast Asian Chinese since World War II" was held at the Australian National University in Canberra. This volume includes many of the papers from that symposium presented by ANU scholars and those from universities elsewhere in Australia, North America and Southeast Asia. Participants looked at the current thinking about the parameters of identity and shared their own research into the complex issues that overlapping categories of identity raise. Identity was chosen as the focus of the, symposium because perceptions of self - whether by others or by the individual Chinese concerned - appear to lie at the heart ' of the present-day Chinese experience in Southeast Asia, It is also evident that identity wears many guises and that we cannot talk about a single Chinese identity when identity can be determined by the different political, social, economic or religious circumstances an individual faces at any given time. One of the distinctive characteristics of all the essays in this volume is that they are written from an historical perspective. While the papers forcus on how recent developments in Southeast Asian society have shaped Chinese identity, they also discuss those changes in terms of the historical matrix from which they developed. Because many of the essays in this volume combine an historical overview with more recent statistical data, it should serve as a useful companion to the increasingly popular case studies in which much of the writing about the Chinese in Southeast Asia is now cast.




Great Reversal


Book Description

The Great Reversal is the first critical study of the widely heralded reforms currently transforming China's economy. From his long experience in Chinese agriculture, Hinton first examines the course of agricultural reform over the past decade, then looks at its consequences in different areas of the countryside and considers its implications for the country as a whole. He raises troubling questions about China's capitalist future-the growing landlessness, increasing inequality, and above all, the destruction of the nation's natural resources and the collectively built infrastructure that was the great achievement of the revolution. In so doing he sheds new light on the sources of discontent behind the demonstrations that culminated in the Tiananmen massacre of June 1989. Recognized inside and outside China as an expert on the country's agriculture, Hinton spent five or six months there every year but one since 1978, when the wave of reform was first introduced. He witnessed the events of June 1989 first hand. This experience gives authority to an analysis that digs deeper and more widely than anything else available. His essays open up a new perspective on Mao and his successors, one that has been totally obscured by the Western media.




Modern China, a History


Book Description

Readable, informative and clear, this widely used survey of twentieth-century China has been a welcome introduction to an unfamiliar world for many thousands of readers since its first appearance in 1986. Much has happened since then, with political tension going hand in hand with a spectacular economic growth under Deng Xiaoping that has caused the outside world to recognise China, with mixed emotions, as a rising superpower. This eagerly awaited and substantially expanded new edition (reset in a more generous format) brings the story up to date.







The Four Little Dragons


Book Description

Vogel brings masterly insight to the underlying question of why Japan and the little dragons--Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore--have been so extraordinarily successful in industrializing while other developing countries have not.




Making Chinese Australia


Book Description

Making Chinese Australia demonstrates how the interpretations and narratives of journalists and editors of Chinese - Australian newspapers played a powerful role in shaping the social identities and historical awareness of Chinese Australians. Mei - fen Kuo is an Australian author.




Single Sparks


Book Description

First Published in 1990. Written at a new juncture in the study of the Chinese revolution. A new generation of scholarship is emerging which promises to resolve old debates, bridge old dichotomies, and join formerly separate strands of analysis. Several of the essays in this volume are based on papers presented at a workshop on Chinese Communist base areas held at Harvard University's Fairbank Center for East Asian Research. These papers chronicle the varied approaches to China's revolution.




A Thrice-Told Tale


Book Description

A Thrice-Told Tale is one ethnographer's imaginative and powerful response to the methodological issues raised by feminist and postmodernist critics of traditional ethnography. The author, a feminist anthropologist, uses three texts developed out of her research in Taiwan--a piece of fiction, anthropological fieldnotes, and a social science article--to explore some of these criticisms. Each text takes a different perspective, is written in a different style, and has different "outcomes," yet all three involve the same fascinating set of events. A young mother began to behave in a decidedly abherrant, perhaps suicidal manner, and opinion in her village was sharply divided over the reason. Was she becoming a shaman, posessed by a god? Was she deranged, in need of physical restraint, drugs, and hospitalization? Or was she being cynically manipulated by her ne'er-do-well husband to elicit sympathy and money from her neighbors? In the end, the woman was taken away from the area to her mother's house. For some villagers, this settled the matter; for others the debate over her behavior was probably never truly resolved. The first text is a short story written shortly after the incident, which occurred almost thrity years ago; the second text is a copy of the fieldnotes collected about the events covered in the short story; the third text is an article published in 1990 in American Ethnologist that analyzes the incident from the author's current perspective. Following each text is a Commentary in which the author discusses such topics as experimental ethnography, polyvocality, authorial presence and control, reflexivity, and some of the differences between fiction and ethnography. The three texts are framed by two chapters in which the author discusses the genereal problems posed by feminist and postmodernist critics of ethnography and presents her personal exploration of these issues in an argument that is strongly self-reflexive and theoretically rigorous. She considers some feminist concerns over colonial research methods and takes issues with the insistence of some feminists tha the topics of ethnographic research be set by those who are studied. The book concludes with a plea for ethnographic responsibility based on a less academic and more practical perspective.




China


Book Description