A Contemporary History of the Chinese Zheng


Book Description

A Contemporary History of the Chinese Zheng traces the twentieth- and twenty-first-century development of an important Chinese musical instrument in greater China.The zheng was transformed over the course of the twentieth century, becoming a solo instrument with virtuosic capacity. In the past, the zheng had appeared in small instrumental ensembles and supplied improvised accompaniments to song. Zheng music became a means of nation-building and was eventually promoted as a marker of Chinese identity in Hong Kong. Ann L. Silverberg uses evidence from the greater China area to show how the narrative history of the zheng created on the mainland did not represent zheng music as it had been in the past. Silverberg ultimately argues that the zheng’s older repertory was poorly represented by efforts to collect and promote zheng music in the twentieth century. This book contends that the restored “traditional Chinese music” created and promulgated from the 1920s forward—and solo zheng music in particular—is a hybrid of “Chinese essence, Western means” that essentially obscures rather than reveals tradition. “Ann Silverberg’s book provides a history of the Chinese zheng zither, with a focus on the rise of solo music since the mid-twentieth century across the three sites of mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Existing English-language studies mostly omit consideration of Hong Kong and Taiwan, so this account enriches current perspectives on the multiplicities of Chinese musical history and identity.” —Jonathan Stock, University College Cork, Ireland “Professor Ann Silverberg’s insights and approach are long awaited in the studies of Chinese music. I am particularly impressed by her coverage of the situation in Hong Kong and Taiwan. This book is a wonderful contribution to zheng music. It also inspires and enhances the studies of other Chinese musical instruments and Chinese traditional music.” —Yu Siu Wah, independent scholar




Never Forget National Humiliation


Book Description

Wang follows the Chinese Communist Party's ideological re-education of the public through the exploitation of China's humiliating modern history, tracking the CCP's use of history education to glorify the party, re-establish its legitimacy, consolidate national identity, and justify one-party rule in the post-Tiananmen and post-Cold War era.




Art in Turmoil


Book Description

Chapters by scholars of Chinese history and art and by artists whose careers were shaped by the Cultural Revolution decode the rhetoric of China's turbulent decade. The many illustrations in the book, some familiar and some never seen before, also offer new insights into works that have transcended their times."--BOOK JACKET.




1368


Book Description

"With the goal of understanding China's future in a changing international landscape, this book offers a new picture of China's rise since the Age of Exploration and its historical impact on the modern world. The establishment of the Great Ming dynasty in 1368 was a monumental event in world history. A century before Columbus, Beijing sent a series of diplomatic missions across the South China Sea and Indian Ocean that paved the way for China's first modern global era. In 1368, Ali Humayun Akhtar maps China's ascendance from the embassies of Admiral Zheng He to the arrival of European mariners and the shock of the Opium Wars. In Akhtar's new picture of world history, China's current rise evokes an earlier epoch, one that sheds light on where Beijing is heading today. Spectacular accounts in Persian and Ottoman Turkish describe palaces of silk and jade in Beijing's Forbidden City. Malay legends recount stories of Chinese princesses in Melaka with gifts of porcelain and gold. During Europe's Age of Exploration, Iberian mariners charted new passages to China that the Dutch and British East India Companies transformed into lucrative tea routes. Among the ships' passengers were Italian Jesuits, whose linguistic skills facilitated book projects with local mapmakers and botanists published in Amsterdam. But there was a shift during the British Industrial Revolution, one that pointed to Europe's high-tech future. Across the British Empire, the rise of steam engines and factories allowed the export of the very commodities once imported from China. By the end of the Opium Wars and the arrival of Commodore Perry in Japan, Chinese and Japanese reformers called for their own industrial revolutions, one that would accelerate in the twentieth century. What has the world learned from China since the Ming, and how did China reemerge in the 1970s as a manufacturing superpower? Akhtar's book provides much-needed context for understanding China's rise today and the future of its connections with the West and a resurgent Asia"--




The Search for Modern China


Book Description

This work chronicles the history of China for over four hundred years through the spring of 1989.




Scarlet Memorial


Book Description

This book provides a meticulously documented account of officially sanctioned cannibalism in the south-western province of Guangxi during the Cultural Revolution. Zheng Yi paints a disturbing picture of official compliance in the systematic killing and cannibalization of individuals.




A History of China in the 20th Century


Book Description

This book provides readers with rich context and detailed description leading to new perspectives on major historical events in China. Positioned as a thought leader and highly acclaimed arts professional in China, the author is able to give a historical account of China’s twentieth century that is richly informed by its valent fields of political economy and cultural studies. Western readers' knowledge of China’s twentieth century remains based on pioneering research of modern scholars such as Fairbank and Jonathan Spence. In recent years, however, it is rare to see a complete history of China spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which also includes the first two decades of the twenty-first century. This book contributes new narrative and perspective to this span of history. Now, as the Sino-US trade conflict makes dramatic impact on a post-COVID global economy, readers have the need for a fresh understanding of how China came to be what it is today. The author’s groundbreaking work provides new insight provided by newly uncovered sources explaining how China came to be what it is today from a cultural and sociological perspective, in a historical mode.




Globalization and State Transformation in China


Book Description

As China develops its economy, the author argues it will be held back by its refusal to import democratic values.




Writing Beijing


Book Description

One of the oldest cities in the world, Beijing was an imperial capital for centuries. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Beijing became not only the political center of the new communist country, but also the signifier of socialist ideol-ogy and revolutionary culture. Now, in the 21st century, Beijing embodies global conflicts and global connections. Over the course of the last century, then, Beijing moved from the quintessential “traditional” capital to the symbol of communist urban form and finally to a cosmopolitan metropolis. These three stages in the history of Beijing and its shifting representations are the topic of this study. Like other capitals, Beijing is much more than its physical entity. It also functions as a concept, a representation. As city planners have (and continue to) present Beijing to the world as a model, the fluctuating images of Beijing have become solidified in urban space. Today, the urban form of Beijing juxtaposes diverse spaces that span centuries, embodying the various representations of the city by its planners in different eras. These representations of space also provide possibilities for writers to rethink and rebuild the city in their literary works. Chinese writers and filmmakers often essentialize those urban spaces by making them symbols of different urban cultures, the old houses representing “traditional,” “patriarchal” Chinese culture while soviet-style buildings reflect revolu-tionary culture. Finally, the more recent sprouting of apartments, condos, and townhouses stands for the invasion of western modernity and provides evidence of global capitalism in contemporary China. Inspired by Henri Lefebvre, this study establishes a framework that connects urban spaces (representations of space) to writers and literary productions (representational space). I analyze the three major urban spatial forms of traditional, communist, and glob-alized Beijing and examine what these urban spaces mean to Chinese writers and filmmakers as well as how they use them to configure particular images of Beijing. I argue that these different configurations are actually the projections of those writers and filmmakers’ own cultural imaginations; they provoke a form of emotional catharsis and also produce alternative visions of the cityscape.




The Chinese Zheng Zither


Book Description

The zheng zither is one of the most popular instruments in contemporary China. It is commonly regarded as a solo instrument with a continuous tradition dating back to ancient times. But in fact, much of its contemporary solo repertory is derived from several different regional folk ensemble repertories of the mid-twentieth century. Since the setting up of China’s modern conservatories, the zheng has been transformed within these new contexts of professional music-making. Over the course of the twentieth century, these regional folk repertories were brought into the performance traditions of modern regional zheng schools. From this basis, a large new zheng repertory was created by conservatory musicians, combining aspects of Western classical music with folk music materials. With the ’opening up’ of China’s economy since the 1980s, the zheng has been brought into the wider stage of international music-making which includes contemporary art music compositions by overseas based Chinese composers and commercial world music works by Western composers. Through a series of case studies, this book explores how the transformation of the Chinese zheng has constantly responded to its changing social context, critiquing the long-standing arguments concerning ’authenticity’ in the development of tradition. This work arises out of, and reflects on, the research methodologies known as performance as research. As an insider to the tradition, brought up within China’s zheng society, a trained and practising zheng performer, this study is largely drawn from the author's own experiences of practising and performing the music in question; her study also draws on fieldwork, as well as primary and secondary written sources in Chinese and English. This book is accompanied by downloadable resources which contain audio visual materials relating to the author's fieldwork and zheng performances by different zheng musicians.




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