Leading Schools Of Thought In Contemporary China


Book Description

The evolution of China's intellectual landscape, especially the battles among different influential social and political ideas, sheds light on its history. Leading Schools of Thought in Contemporary China offers a close-up look of eight major schools of thought that swept across China between 1978 and 2008, ranging from Deng Xiaoping's thoughts to Neo-Confucianism. Subject to unrelenting debates among both scholars and the general public, the popularity of these ideas waxed and waned throughout those turbulent decades. They have two things in common. First, they are all problem-oriented insofar as they carry their advocates' hopes of finding in them solutions to both new and old problems the country has faced. Second, while richly informed by such traditions as authoritarianism and Confucianism that have long held sway in much of Asia, including China, these ideas also reveal the deep influence of, and even affinity with, some of the most influential social and political theories in the Western tradition, including liberalism, socialism and conservatism. Readers will find in the continuing contestation among these theories in the marketplace of ideas not only much of what is exciting about the intellectual scene in China today, but also clues about China's future.




A Novel Approach to China


Book Description

This book explores Chinese novelists’ distinctive contributions to the China debate in terms of the key issues of Chinese language, power dynamics and Confucian tradition. As China is rising, Chinese scholars and policymakers are debating heatedly over China’s past, present and future. Who are the major debaters? How do they analyze China’s problems and figure out solutions? What are the main achievements and weaknesses of the Chinese intellectual debate and discourse? Chinese novelists also get involved in the China debate. However, their voices are rarely heard. This book argues that, by dramatizing the diversities of ordinary social actors’ everyday languages, active discursive practices and enchanted local traditions, Chinese novelists do not merely illustrate the dominant liberal, the New Left and the New Confucian ideologies, but enrich the China debate and provide a “novel” approach to our understanding of modern China.




Rethinking China's Rise


Book Description

A vision of contemporary China from the inside, Xu's essays offer a liberal reaction to the complexity of China's rise.




Voices from the Chinese Century


Book Description

China’s increasing prominence on the global stage has caused consternation and controversy among Western thinkers, especially since the financial crisis of 2008. But what do Chinese intellectuals themselves have to say about their country’s newfound influence and power? Voices from the Chinese Century brings together a selection of essays from representative leading thinkers that open a window into public debate in China today on fundamental questions of China and the world—past, present, and future. The voices in this volume include figures from each of China’s main intellectual clusters: liberals, the New Left, and New Confucians. In genres from scholarly analyses to social media posts, often using Party-approved language that hides indirect criticism, these essayists offer a wide range of perspectives on how to understand China’s history and its place in the twenty-first-century world. They explore questions such as the relationship of political and economic reforms; the distinctiveness of China’s history and what to take from its traditions; what can or should be learned from the West; and how China fits into today’s eruption of populist anger and challenges to the global order. The fifteen original translations in this volume not only offer insight into contemporary China but also prompt us to ask what Chinese intellectuals might have to teach Europe and North America about the world’s most pressing problems.




Disaggregating China, Inc.


Book Description

Set in the aftermath of China's entry into the World Trade Organization, Disaggregating China, Inc. questions the extent to which the liberal internationalist promise of membership has been fulfilled in China. Yeling Tan unpacks the policies that various Chinese government actors adopted in response to WTO rules and shows that rather than disciplining the state, WTO entry provoked a divergence of policy responses across different parts of the complex party-state. Tan argues that these responses draw from three competing strategies of economic governance: market-substituting (directive), market-shaping (developmental), and market-enhancing (regulatory). She uses innovative web-scraping techniques to assemble an original dataset of over 43,000 Chinese industry regulations, identifying policies associated with each strategy. Combining textual analysis with industry data, in-depth case studies, and field interviews with industry representatives and government officials, Tan demonstrates that different Chinese state actors adopted different logics of adjustment to respond to the common shock of WTO accession. This policy divergence originated from a combination of international and domestic forces. Disaggregating China, Inc. breaks open the black box of the Chinese state, explaining why WTO rules, usually thought to commit states to international norms, instead provoked responses that the architects of those rules neither expected nor wanted.




Frantz Fanon and Emancipatory Social Theory


Book Description

In Frantz Fanon and Emancipatory Social Theory: A View from the Wretched, Dustin J. Byrd and Seyed Javad Miri bring together a collection of essays by a variety of scholars who explore the lasting influence of Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist, revolutionary, and social theorist. Fanon’s work not only gave voice to the “wretched” in the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962), but also shaped the radical resistance to colonialism, empire, and racism throughout much of the world. His seminal works, such as Black Skin, White Masks, and The Wretched of the Earth, were read by The Black Panther Party in the United States, anti-imperialists in Africa and Asia, and anti-monarchist revolutionaries in the Middle East. Today, many revolutionaries and scholars have returned to Fanon’s work, as it continues to shed light on the nature of colonial domination, racism, and class oppression. Contributors include: Syed Farid Alatas, Rose Brewer, Dustin J. Byrd, Sean Chabot, Richard Curtis, Nigel C. Gibson, Ali Harfouch, Timothy Kerswell, Seyed Javad Miri, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Pramod K. Nayar, Elena Flores Ruíz, Majid Sharifi, Mohamed Imran Mohamed Taib and Esmaeil Zeiny.




State of the Field and Disciplinary Approaches


Book Description

The three-volume project 'Concepts and Methods for the Study of Chinese Religions' presents a history of the study of Chinese religions. It evaluates the current state of scholarship, discusses a variety of analytical approaches and theories about methodology, epistemology, and the ontology of the field. The three books display an interdisciplinary approach and offer debates that transcend national traditions. It engages with a variety of methodologies for the study of East Asian religions and promotes dialogues with Western and Chinese voices. This volume covers successive historical stages in the study of religion in modern China, draws out the genealogy of major figures and intellectual achievements in a variety of research traditions, and highlights as well the challenges and evolutions experienced by the main disciplines in the last 30 years. This volume serves as a reference for graduate students and scholars interested by religions in modern Chinese societies (i.e., mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Chinese communities oversea). Using a wide range of methods, from textual analysis to fieldwork, it presents case studies via the disciplines of religious studies, anthropology, sociology, history, and political science.




Minjian


Book Description

Who are the new Chinese intellectuals? In the wake of the crackdown on the 1989 democracy movement and the rapid marketization of the 1990s, a novel type of grassroots intellectual emerged. Instead of harking back to the traditional role of the literati or pronouncing on democracy and modernity like 1980s public intellectuals, they derive legitimacy from their work with the vulnerable and the marginalized, often proclaiming their independence with a heavy dose of anti-elitist rhetoric. They are proudly minjian—unofficial, unaffiliated, and among the people. In this book, Sebastian Veg explores the rise of minjian intellectuals and how they have profoundly transformed China’s public culture. An intellectual history of contemporary China, Minjian documents how, amid deep structural shifts, grassroots thinker-activists began to work outside academia or policy institutions in an embryonic public sphere. Veg explores the work of amateur historians who question official accounts, independent documentarians who let ordinary people speak for themselves, and grassroots lawyers and NGO workers who spread practical knowledge. Their interventions are specific rather than universal, with a focus on concrete problems among disenfranchised populations such as victims of Maoism, migrant workers and others without residence permits, and petitioners. Drawing on careful analysis of public texts by grassroots intellectuals and the networks and publics among which they circulate, Minjian is a groundbreaking transdisciplinary exploration of crucial trends developing under the surface of contemporary Chinese society.




Governance Innovation and Policy Change


Book Description

This edited volume assesses governance innovation and institutional change under the fifth generation of China’s political leaders headed by Xi Jinping. The configuration of long-term policy innovation without regime change requires skilled political actors who secure strategic majorities and set up coalitions to design and launch new policies. Recalibrations or reconfigurations of the governance model respond to domestic reform pressures or external shocks in order to secure regime survival. Given that most structural constraints and reform pressures do not arise out of a sudden, the thrilling question is why the political elites sometimes decide not to engage in institutional reforms despite of widespread societal support for major restructuring and why they suddenly launch institutional changes in times of relative stability. The authors address these issues by focusing on basic patterns and paradigms of governance and institutional change in China, the actors and drivers of governance innovation, as well as the impact of norms, values, and socio-cognitive orientations. This is added by some reflections on the interplay between abstract ideas, reform debates, and the making of concrete decisions as outlined by the Third Plenum on (socio-)economic reforms in 2013 and the Fourth Plenum on rule-based governance (fazhi) in 2014.




The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Studies


Book Description

This Handbook approaches Chinese Studies from an interdisciplinary perspective while attempting to establish a fundamental set of core values and tenets for the subject, in relation to the further development of Chinese Studies as an academic discipline. It aims to consolidate the current findings in Chinese Studies, extract the essence from each affiliated discipline, formulate a concrete set of ideas to represent the ‘Chineseness’ of the subject, establish a clear identity for the discipline and provide clear guidelines for further research and practice. Topics included in this Handbook cover a wide spectrum of traditional and newly added concerns in Chinese Studies, ranging from the Chinese political system and domestic governance to international relations, Chinese culture, literature and history, Chinese sociology (gender, middle class, nationalism, home ownership, dating) and Chinese opposition and activism. The Handbook also looks at widening the scope of Chinese Studies (Chinese psychology, postcolonialism and China, Chinese science and climate change), and some illustrations of innovative Chinese Studies research methods. The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Studies is an essential reference for researchers and scholars in Chinese Studies, as well as students in the discipline.