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Author : Peter Gue Zarrow Publisher : Peter Lang Page : 264 pages File Size : 51,6 Mb Release : 2006 Category : Foreign Language Study ISBN : 0820479454
Creating Chinese Modernity by Peter Gue Zarrow Pdf
Over the first half of the twentieth century, the lives of millions of urban Chinese were transformed by new ideas, new objects, new jobs, new leisure pursuits, new forms of transportation, new architecture: in a word, new «life-styles» and habits of mind. What did these changes mean to ordinary people? The essays in this book examine how prevailing discourses - on nationalism, feminism, democracy, individualism, socialism, and the like - emerged and were absorbed into the lived experiences and material culture of ordinary Chinese. Only from intimate personal experiences with forces ranging from war, revolution, and state-building to advertising blitzes and boycotts was Chinese modernity forged, forged out of «forces» larger than individuals but simultaneously observed, interpreted, adapted, and absorbed by those individuals.
This volume evaluates the dual roles of war and modernity in the transformation of twentieth-century Chinese identity. The contributors, all leading researchers, argue that war, no less than revolution, deserves attention as a major force in the making of twentieth-century Chinese history. Further, they show that modernity in material culture and changes in intellectual consciousness should serve as twin foci of a new wave of scholarly analysis. Examining in particular the rise of modern Chinese cities and the making of the Chinese nation-state, the contributors to this interdisciplinary volume of cultural history provide new ways of thinking about China's modern transformation up to the 1950s. Taken together, the essays demonstrate that the combined effect of a modernizing state and an industrializing economy weakened the Chinese bourgeoisie and undercut the individual's quest for autonomy. Drawing upon new archival sources, these theoretically informed, thoroughly revisionist essays focus on topics such as Western-inspired modernity, urban cosmopolitanism, consumer culture, gender relationships, interchanges between city and countryside, and the growing impact of the state on the lives of individuals. The volume makes an important contribution toward a postsocialist understanding of twentieth-century China.
Author : Sheldon H. Lu Publisher : University of Hawaii Press Page : 281 pages File Size : 50,7 Mb Release : 2007-05-31 Category : Literary Criticism ISBN : 9780824861865
Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics by Sheldon H. Lu Pdf
This ambitious work is a multimedia, interdisciplinary study of Chinese modernity in the context of globalization from the late nineteenth century to the present. Sheldon Lu draws on Chinese literature, film, art, photography, and video to broadly map the emergence of modern China in relation to the capitalist world-system in the economic, social, and political realms. Central to his study is the investigation of biopower and body politics, namely, the experience of globalization on a personal level. Lu first outlines the trajectory of the body in modern Chinese literature by focusing on the adventures, pleasures, and sufferings of the male (and female) body in the writings of selected authors. He then turns to avant-garde and performance art, tackling the physical self more directly through a consideration of work that takes the body as its very theme, material, and medium. In an exploration of mass visual culture, Lu analyzes artistic reactions to the multiple, uneven effects of globalization and modernization on both the physical landscape of China and the interior psyche of its citizens. This is followed by an inquiry into contemporary Chinese urban space in popular cinema and experimental photography and art. Examples are offered that capture the daily lives of contemporary Chinese as they struggle to make the transition from the vanishing space of the socialist lifestyle to the new capitalist economy of commodities. Lu reexamines the history and implications of China’s belated integration into the capitalist world system before closing with a postscript that traces the genealogy of the term "postsocialism" and points to the real relevance of the idea for the investigation of everyday life in China in the twenty-first century.
Author : Joseph W. Esherick Publisher : University of Hawaii Press Page : 294 pages File Size : 55,7 Mb Release : 2001-10-31 Category : History ISBN : 0824825187
Remaking the Chinese City by Joseph W. Esherick Pdf
In China today skyscrapers tower over ancient temples, freeways deliver lines of cars and tour buses to imperial palaces, cinema houses compete with old theaters featuring Peking Opera. The disparity evidenced in the contemporary Chinese cityscape can be traced to the early decades of the twentieth century, when government elites sought to transform cities into a new world that would be at once modern and distinctly Chinese. Remaking the Chinese City aims to capture the full diversity of recent Chinese urbanism by examining the modernist transformations of China's cities in the first half of the twentieth century. Collecting in one place some of the most interesting and exciting new work on Chinese urban history, this volume presents thirteen essays discussing ten Chinese cities: the commercial and industrial center of Shanghai; the old capital, Beijing; the southern coastal city of Canton; the interior's Chengdu; the tourist city of Hangzhou; the utopian "New Capital" built in Manchuria during the Japanese occupation; the treaty port of Tianjin; the Nationalists' capital in Nanjing; and temporary wartime capitals of Wuhan and Chongqing. Unlike past treatments of early twentieth-century China, which characterize the period as one of failure and decay, the contributors to this volume describe an exciting world in constant and fundamental change. During this time, the Chinese city was remade to accommodate parks and police, paved roads and public spaces. Rickshaws, trolleys, and buses allowed the growth of new downtowns. Department stores, theaters, newspapers, and modern advertising nourished a new urban identity. Sanitary regulations and traffic laws were enforced, and modern media and transport permitted unprecedented freedoms. Yet despite their fondness for things Western and modern, early urban planners envisioned cities that would lead the Chinese nation and preserve Chinese tradition. The very desire for modernity led to the construction of a visible and accessible national past and the imagining of a distinctive national future. In their investigation of the national capitals of the period, the essays show how cities were reshaped to represent and serve the nation. To promote tourism, traditions were invented and recycled for the pleasure and edification of new middle-class and foreign consumers of culture. Abundantly illustrated with maps and photographs, Remaking the Chinese City presents the best and most current scholarship on modern Chinese cities. Its thoroughness and detailed scholarship will appeal to the specialist, while its clarity and scope will engage the general reader. Contributors: Michael Tsin on Canton, Ruth Rogaski and Brett Sheehan on Tianjin, David Buck on Changchun, Kristin Stapleton on Chengdu, Liping Wang on Hangzhou, Madeleine Dong on Beijing, Charles Musgrove on Nanjing, Stephen MacKinnon on Wuhan, Lee MacIsaac on Chongqing, and Jeffrey Wasserstrom and David Strand with concluding essays.
Everyday Modernity in China (Studies in Modernity and National Identity; A China Program Book) by Madeleine Yue Dong,Joshua L Goldstein Pdf
Essays address expressions of modernity in relation to non-Western politics and national cultures. Topics range from the installation of gas streetlights in Shanghai to urban planning efforts aimed at improving daily routines of work and leisure.
Globalization and the Making of Religious Modernity in China by Thomas Jansen,Thoralf Klein,Christian Meyer Pdf
Globalization and the Making of Religious Modernity in China, co-edited by Thomas Jansen, Thoralf Klein and Christian Meyer, investigates the transformation of China’s religious landscape under the impact of global influences since 1800. The interdisciplinary case studies analyze the ways in which processes of globalization are interlinked with localizing tendencies, thereby forging transnational relationships between individuals, the state and religious as well as non-religious groups at the same time that the global concept ‘religion’ embeds itself in the emerging Chinese ‘religious field’ and within the new academic disciplines of Religious Studies and Theology. The contributions unravel the intellectual, social, political and economic forces that shaped and were themselves shaped by the emergence of what has remained a highly contested category. The contributors are: Hildegard Diemberger, Vincent Goossaert, Esther-Maria Guggenmos, Thomas Jansen, Thoralf Klein, Dirk Kuhlmann, LAI Pan-chiu, Joseph Tse-Hei Lee, Christian Meyer, Lauren Pfister, Chloë Starr, Xiaobing Wang-Riese, and Robert P. Weller.
Author : Charles A. Laughlin Publisher : University of Hawaii Press Page : 258 pages File Size : 43,5 Mb Release : 2008-03-06 Category : Literary Criticism ISBN : 9780824831257
The Literature of Leisure and Chinese Modernity by Charles A. Laughlin Pdf
The Chinese essay is arguably China’s most distinctive contribution to modern world literature, and the period of its greatest influence and popularity—the mid-1930s—is the central concern of this book. What Charles Laughlin terms "the literature of leisure" is a modern literary response to the cultural past that manifests itself most conspicuously in the form of short, informal essay writing (xiaopin wen). Laughlin examines the essay both as a widely practiced and influential genre of literary expression and as an important counter-discourse to the revolutionary tradition of New Literature (especially realistic fiction), often viewed as the dominant mode of literature at the time. After articulating the relationship between the premodern traditions of leisure literature and the modern essay, Laughlin treats the various essay styles representing different groups of writers. Each is characterized according to a single defining activity: "wandering" in the case of the Yu si (Threads of Conversation) group surrounding Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren; "learning" with the White Horse Lake group of Zhejiang schoolteachers like Feng Zikai and Xia Mianzun; "enjoying" in the case of Lin Yutang’s Analects group; "dreaming" with the Beijing school. The concluding chapter outlines the impact of leisure literature on Chinese culture up to the present day. The Literature of Leisure and Chinese Modernity dramatizes the vast importance and unique nature of creative nonfiction prose writing in modern China. It will be eagerly read by those with an interest in twentieth-century Chinese literature, modern China, and East Asian or world literatures.
The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, 1850-1960 by Bridie Andrews Pdf
Medical care in nineteenth-century China was spectacularly pluralistic: herbalists, shamans, bone-setters, midwives, priests, and a few medical missionaries from the West all competed for patients. This book examines the dichotomy between "Western" and "Chinese" medicine, showing how it has been greatly exaggerated. As missionaries went to lengths to make their medicine more acceptable to Chinese patients, modernizers of Chinese medicine worked to become more "scientific" by eradicating superstition and creating modern institutions. Andrews challenges the supposed superiority of Western medicine in China while showing how "traditional" Chinese medicine was deliberately created in the image of a modern scientific practice.
Klaus Mühlhahn situates modern China in the nation's long, dynamic tradition of overcoming adversity and weakness through creative adaptation--a legacy of crisis and recovery that is apparent today in China's triumphs but also in its most worrisome trends. Mühlhahn's panoramic survey rewrites the history of modern China for a new generation.
Beyond the May Fourth Paradigm by Kai-wing Chow,Tze-ki Hon,Hung-yok Ip,Don C. Price Pdf
When did China make the decisive turn from tradition to modernity? For decades, the received wisdom would have pointed to the May Fourth movement, with its titanic battles between the champions of iconoclasm and the traditionalists, and its shift to more populist forms of politics. A growing body of recent research has, however, called into question how decisive the turn was, when it happened, and what relation the resulting modernity bore to the agendas of people who might have considered themselves representatives of such an iconoclastic movement. Having thus explicitly or implicitly 'decentered' the May Fourth, such research (augmented by contributions in the present volume) leaves us with the task of accounting for the shape Chinese modernity took, as the product of dialogues and debates between, and the interplay of, a variety of actors and trends, both within and (certainly no less importantly) without the May Fourth camp.
In the midst of China's wild rush to modernize, a surprising note of reality arises: Shanghai, it seems, was once modern indeed, a pulsing center of commerce and art in the heart of the twentieth century. This book immerses us in the golden age of Shanghai urban culture, a modernity at once intrinsically Chinese and profoundly anomalous, blending new and indigenous ideas with those flooding into this "treaty port" from the Western world. A preeminent specialist in Chinese studies, Leo Ou-fan Lee gives us a rare wide-angle view of Shanghai culture in the making. He shows us the architecture and urban spaces in which the new commercial culture flourished, then guides us through the publishing and filmmaking industries that nurtured a whole generation of artists and established a bold new style in urban life known as modeng. In the work of six writers of the time, particularly Shi Zhecun, Mu Shiying, and Eileen Chang, Lee discloses the reflection of Shanghai's urban landscape--foreign and familiar, oppressive and seductive, traditional and innovative. This work acquires a broader historical and cosmopolitan context with a look at the cultural links between Shanghai and Hong Kong, a virtual genealogy of Chinese modernity from the 1930s to the present day.
"We live in an era in which the critique of the West has become not only possible but mandatory. Where does this critique leave those peoples whose entry into culture is, precisely because of the history of Western imperialism, already Westernized? This is the primary question Rey Chow addresses in Woman and Chinese Modernity." -- Book cover.
In this era, analysis of the West has become not only possible but mandatory. Where does this analysis leave those ethnic peoples whose entry into culture is, precisely because of the history of Western imperialism, already "Westernized"? This is the primary question Rey Chow addresses in "Woman and Chinese Modernity". The author brings together a variety of texts about modern China - from Bertolucci's "Last Emperor" and the "Mandarin Duck and Butterfly" stories, to writings by male and female authors of the May Fourth period - and organizes them along four critical paths all of which involve "woman". Those include the visual image, literary history, narrative structure and emotional reception. These, in turn, allow four mutually implicated aspects of "Chinese" modernity to come to the fore - the ethnic spectator, the fragmentation of tradition in popular literature, the problematic construction of a new "inner" reality through narration, and the relations between sexuality, sentimentalism and reading.
Missionary Primitivism and Chinese Modernity by David Woodbridge Pdf
In Missionary Primitivism and Chinese Modernity, David Woodbridge examines the activities of Brethren missionaries in twentieth-century China. Ranging from the coastal treaty ports to the inland frontiers, the book presents a fascinating encounter between primitivist missionaries and a modernising China.
