Opera Society And Politics In Modern China

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Opera, Society, and Politics in Modern China

Author : Hsiao-t'i Li
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 380 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2020-10-26
Category : History
ISBN : 9781684171019

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Opera, Society, and Politics in Modern China by Hsiao-t'i Li Pdf

"Popular operas in late imperial China were a major part of daily entertainment, and were also important for transmitting knowledge of Chinese culture and values. In the twentieth century, however, Chinese operas went through significant changes. During the first four decades of the 1900s, led by Xin Wutai (New Stage) of Shanghai and Yisushe of Xi’an, theaters all over China experimented with both stage and scripts to present bold new plays centering on social reform. Operas became closely intertwined with social and political issues. This trend toward “politicization” was to become the most dominant theme of Chinese opera from the 1930s to the 1970s, when ideology-laden political plays reflected a radical revolutionary agenda.Drawing upon a rich array of primary sources, this book focuses on the reformed operas staged in Shanghai and Xi’an. By presenting extensive information on both traditional/imperial China and revolutionary/Communist China, it reveals the implications of these “modern” operatic experiences and the changing features of Chinese operas throughout the past five centuries. Although the different genres of opera were watched by audiences from all walks of life, the foundations for opera’s omnipresence completely changed over time."

Urban Politics and Cultural Capital

Author : Ma Haili
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 180 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2016-02-11
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781317003526

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Urban Politics and Cultural Capital by Ma Haili Pdf

This book tells the story of how a regional Chinese theatrical form, Shanghai Yue Opera, evolved from the all-male ’beggar’s song’ of the early twentieth century to become the largest all-female opera form in the nation, only to face increasing pressure to survive under Chinese political and economic reforms in the new millennium. Previous publications have focused mainly on the historical development of Chinese theatre, with emphasis placed on Beijing opera. This is the first book to take an interdisciplinary approach to the story of the Shanghai Yue Opera, bringing history, arts management, central and regional government policy, urbanisation, gender, media, and theatre artistic development in one. Through the story of the Shanghai Yue Opera House market reform this book facilitates an understanding of the complex Chinese political economic situation in post-socialist China. This book suggests that as state art institutions are key organs of the Communist party gaining legitimacy, the vigorous evolution and struggle of the Shanghai Yue Opera house in fact directly mirrors the Communist Party internal turmoil in the new millennium to gain its own legitimacy and survival.

Peking Opera and Politics in Taiwan

Author : Nancy Guy
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Page : 254 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2005
Category : Operas, Chinese
ISBN : 9780252029738

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Peking Opera and Politics in Taiwan by Nancy Guy Pdf

Peking Opera and Politics in Taiwan tells the peculiar story of an art caught in a sea of ideological ebbs and flows. Nancy Guy demonstrates the potential significance of the political environment for an art form's development, ranging from determining the smallest performative details (such as how a melody can or cannot be composed) to whether a tradition ultimately thrives or withers away.When Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government and military retreated to Taiwan in 1949, they brought along numerous Peking opera performers. Expecting that this symbolically important art would strengthen regime legitimacy and authority, they generously supported Peking opera's perpetuation in exile. Valuing mainland Chinese culture above Taiwanese culture, the Nationalists generously supported Peking opera to the virtual exclusion of local performing traditions, despite their wider popularity. Later, as Taiwan turned toward democracy, the island's own "indigenous" products became more highly valued and Peking opera found itself on a tenuous footing. Finally, in 1995, all of its opera troupes and schools (formerly supported by the Ministry of Defense) were dismantled.Nancy Guy investigates the mechanisms through which Peking Opera was perpetuated, controlled, and ultimately disempowered, and explores the artistic and political consequences of the state's involvement as its primary patron. Her study provides a unique perspective on the interplay between ideology and power within Taiwan's dynamic society.Nancy Guy is an associate professor of music at the University of California, San Diego.

Urban Politics and Cultural Capital in China the Case of Chinese Opera

Author : Ma Haili
Publisher : Lund Humphries Publishers
Page : 160 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2015-01
Category : Music
ISBN : 1472432290

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Urban Politics and Cultural Capital in China the Case of Chinese Opera by Ma Haili Pdf

This is the first book to take an interdisciplinary approach to the story of the Shanghai Yue Opera, bringing history, arts management, central and regional government policy, urbanisation, gender, media, and theatre artistic development in one. Through the story of the Shanghai Yue Opera House market reform this book facilitates an understanding of the complex Chinese political economic situation in post-socialist China. This book suggests that as state art institutions are key organs of the Communist party gaining legitimacy, the vigorous evolution and struggle of the Shanghai Yue Opera house in fact directly mirrors the Communist Party internal turmoil in the new millennium to gain its own legitimacy and survival.

Kunqu

Author : Joseph S. C. Lam
Publisher : Hong Kong University Press
Page : 299 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2022-11-07
Category : Music
ISBN : 9789888754328

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Kunqu by Joseph S. C. Lam Pdf

In Kunqu: A Classical Opera of Twenty-First-Century China, Joseph S. C. Lam offers a holistic and interdisciplinary view on kunqu, a 600-year-old genre of Chinese opera that is being fashionably performed inside and outside of China. He explains how and why the genre charms and signifies Chinese culture, history, and personhood. As the first comprehensive and scholarly book on kunqu written in English, the book not only discusses the genre in cultural and historical terms but also analyzes its shows as performative, cultural, social, and political communications. It approaches the genre from several perspectives, ranging from those of performers and producers to those of casual audience, dedicated connoisseurs, and scholarly critics. Lam also employs a judicious blend of Chinese and international theories and methods. Through this comprehensive study of kunqu, Lam has established the significance of the genre not only in the sphere of Chinese music, but also among the cultural heritage and performing arts at a global level. “This work would be of terrific interest to amateur kunqu performers and to kunqu supporters. It will also be an essential reference work for scholars conducting research not only on kunqu, but on all forms of Chinese opera, particularly as they are being performed contemporarily.” —Nancy Guy, UC San Diego; author of Peking Opera and Politics in Taiwan “It is the first book-length work devoted to studying kunqu opera from historical and ethnomusicological perspectives. At the same time, the study engages various sociocultural theories and methods of humanities studies. It will be a significant addition to the scholarships of ethnomusicology, Chinese cultural history, Chinese drama, and theater/performance studies.” —Yung Sai-shing, National University of Singapore

Listening to China’s Cultural Revolution

Author : Laikwan Pang,Paul Clark,Tsan-Huang Tsai
Publisher : Springer
Page : 280 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2016-01-26
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781137463579

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Listening to China’s Cultural Revolution by Laikwan Pang,Paul Clark,Tsan-Huang Tsai Pdf

Bringing together the most recent research on the Cultural Revolution in China, musicologists, historians, literary scholars, and others discuss the music and its political implications. Combined, these chapters, paint a vibrant picture of the long-lasting impact that the musical revolution had on ordinary citizens, as well as political leaders.

The Party and the Arty in China

Author : Richard Curt Kraus
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Page : 261 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2004-04-02
Category : History
ISBN : 9781417503568

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The Party and the Arty in China by Richard Curt Kraus Pdf

In this original exploration of the dynamic and potent interface between Chinese culture and politics, Richard Kraus examines the impact of the market on the once-comprehensive system of state patronage of the arts in the PRC. The author uses all genres of art to explore the changing nature of politics, seen through such phenomena as ideology, propaganda, censorship, and the relationship of artists to the state. Kraus makes three provocative arguments: First, the commercialization of China's cultural life has been intellectually liberating, but also poses serious economic challenges that artists are sometimes slow to master. Second, despite conventional wisdom in the West that China's economic reforms have not been followed by serious political reform, he shows that the shift from state patronage to a mixed system of private and public sponsorship is in fact a fundamental political change. Third, Western recognition of the reformation in China's cultural life has been obscured by a combination of ignorance, ideological barriers, and foreign policy rivalry. Cogent, witty, and deeply informed, this comprehensive overview of the Chinese arts scene will be an essential text for all observers of contemporary China.

Women Playing Men

Author : Jin Jiang
Publisher : University of Washington Press
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 2011-07-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9780295800134

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Women Playing Men by Jin Jiang Pdf

This ground-breaking volume documents women's influence on popular culture in twentieth-century China by examining Yue opera. A subgenre of Chinese opera, it migrated from the countryside to urban Shanghai and morphed from its traditional all-male form into an all-female one, with women cross-dressing as male characters for a largely female audience. Yue opera originated in the Zhejiang countryside as a form of story-singing, which rural immigrants brought with them to the metropolis of Shanghai. There, in the 1930s, its content and style transformed from rural to urban, and its cast changed gender. By evolving in response to sociopolitical and commercial conditions and actress-initiated reforms, Yue opera emerged as Shanghai's most popular opera from the 1930s through the 1980s and illustrates the historical rise of women in Chinese public culture. Jiang examines the origins of the genre in the context of the local operas that preceded it and situates its development amid the political, cultural, and social movements that swept both Shanghai and China in the twentieth century. She details the contributions of opera stars and related professionals and examines the relationships among actresses, patrons, and fans. As Yue opera actresses initiated reforms to purge their theater of bawdy eroticism in favor of the modern love drama, they elevated their social image, captured the public imagination, and sought independence from the patriarchal opera system by establishing their own companies. Throughout the story of Yue opera, Jiang looks at Chinese women's struggle to control their lives, careers, and public images and to claim ownership of their history and artistic representations.

Lineages Embedded in Temple Networks

Author : Richard G. Wang
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 400 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2023-11-20
Category : History
ISBN : 9781684176540

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Lineages Embedded in Temple Networks by Richard G. Wang Pdf

Lineages Embedded in Temple Networks explores the key role played by elite Daoists in social and cultural life in Ming China, notably by mediating between local networks—biological lineages, territorial communities, temples, and festivals—and the state. They did this through their organization in clerical lineages—their own empire-wide networks for channeling knowledge, patronage, and resources—and by controlling central temples that were nodes of local social structures. In this book, the only comprehensive social history of local Daoism during the Ming largely based on literary sources and fieldwork, Richard G. Wang delineates the interface between local organizations (such as lineages and temple networks) and central state institutions. The first part provides the framework for viewing Daoism as a social institution in regard to both its religious lineages and its service to the state in the bureaucratic apparatus to implement state orthodoxy. The second part follows four cases to reveal the connections between clerical lineages and local networks. Wang illustrates how Daoism claimed a universal ideology and civilizing force that mediated between local organizations and central state institutions, which in turn brought meaning and legitimacy to both local society and the state.

Intercultural Aesthetics in Traditional Chinese Theatre

Author : Wei Feng
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 287 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2020-06-11
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9783030406356

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Intercultural Aesthetics in Traditional Chinese Theatre by Wei Feng Pdf

This book traces the transformation of traditional Chinese theatre’s (xiqu) aesthetics during its encounters with Western drama and theatrical forms in both mainland China and Taiwan since 1978. Through analyzing both the text and performances of eight adapted plays from William Shakespeare, Bertolt Brecht, and Samuel Beckett, this book elaborates on significant changes taking place in playwriting, acting, scenography, and stage-audience relations stemming from intercultural appropriation. As exemplified by each chapter, during the intercultural dialogue of Chinese and foreign elements there exists one-sided dominance by either culture, fusion, and hybridity, which corresponds to the various facets of China’s pursuit of modernity between its traditional and Western influences.

Working the System

Author : Qiliang He
Publisher : Hong Kong University Press
Page : 181 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 2023-01-03
Category : History
ISBN : 9789888805600

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Working the System by Qiliang He Pdf

In Working the System: Motion Picture, Filmmakers, and Subjectivities in Mao-Era China, 1949–1966, Qiliang He inquired into the making of the new citizenry in Mao-era China (1949–1976) by studying five preeminent Shanghai-based filmmakers. These case studies shed light on how individuals’ subjectivities took shape in the cinematic arena under a new sociopolitical system after 1949. He suggests that a filmmaker’s subjectivity was not fixed or stable but constantly in flux, requiring a host of “subjectivizing practices” to (re)shape and consolidate it. These filmmakers endeavored to reap maximal benefits from Mao’s sociopolitical system and minimize the disadvantages that would make them victims under the system. In short, Qiliang He argues that the filmmakers not only worked under the socialist system imposed upon them but also worked the system in their best interests. “Through five chosen filmmakers’ creative control and their negotiation of their professional status within China’s newly adopted socialist system, the author presents a compelling case that illustrates how individual filmmakers constantly adjusted themselves professionally and ideologically to survive in a fast-changing industry and a highly politicized society.” —Lin Feng, University of Leicester “This book is a strong example of how much more we can learn about Mao-era Chinese culture if we approach it less as alien due to Cold War prejudices and instead think of artists as creating under professional constraints in China just as they do everywhere.” —Jason McGrath, University of Minnesota

Rival Partners

Author : Jieh-min Wu
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 532 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2023-11-20
Category : History
ISBN : 9781684176557

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Rival Partners by Jieh-min Wu Pdf

Taiwan has been depicted as an island facing the incessant threat of forcible unification with the People’s Republic of China. Why, then, has Taiwan spent more than three decades pouring capital and talent into China? In award-winning Rival Partners, Wu Jieh-min follows the development of Taiwanese enterprises in China over twenty-five years and provides fresh insights. The geopolitical shift in Asia beginning in the 1970s and the global restructuring of value chains since the 1980s created strong incentives for Taiwanese entrepreneurs to rush into China despite high political risks and insecure property rights. Taiwanese investment, in conjunction with Hong Kong capital, laid the foundation for the world’s factory to flourish in the southern province of Guangdong, but official Chinese narratives play down Taiwan’s vital contribution. It is hard to imagine the Guangdong model without Taiwanese investment, and, without the Guangdong model, China’s rise could not have occurred. Going beyond the received wisdom of the “China miracle” and “Taiwan factor,” Wu delineates how Taiwanese business people, with the cooperation of local officials, ushered global capitalism into China. By partnering with its political archrival, Taiwan has benefited enormously, while helping to cultivate an economic superpower that increasingly exerts its influence around the world.

Going to the Countryside

Author : Yu Zhang
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
Page : 307 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2020-03-03
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780472054435

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Going to the Countryside by Yu Zhang Pdf

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, modern Chinese intellectuals, reformers, revolutionaries, leftist journalists, and idealistic youth had often crossed the increasing gap between the city and the countryside, which made the act of “going to the countryside” a distinctively modern experience and a continuous practice in China. Such a spatial crossing eventually culminated in the socialist state program of “down to the villages” movements during the 1960s and 1970s. What, then, was the special significance of “going to the countryside” before that era? Going to the Countryside deals with the cultural representations and practices of this practice between 1915 and 1965, focusing on individual homecoming, rural reconstruction, revolutionary journeys to Yan’an, the revolutionary “going down to the people” as well as going to the frontiers and rural hometowns for socialist construction. As part of the larger discourses of enlightenment, revolution, and socialist industrialization, “going to the countryside” entailed new ways of looking at the world and ordinary people, brought about new experiences of space and time, initiated new means of human communication and interaction, generated new forms of cultural production, revealed a fundamental epistemic shift in modern China, and ultimately created a new aesthetic, social, and political landscape. As a critical response to the “urban turn” in the past few decades, this book brings the rural back to the central concern of Chinese cultural studies and aims to bridge the city and the countryside as two types of important geographical entities, which have often remained as disparate scholarly subjects of inquiry in the current state of China studies. Chinese modernity has been characterized by a dual process that created problems from the vast gap between the city and the countryside but simultaneously initiated constant efforts to cope with the gap personally, collectively, and institutionally. The process of “crossing” two distinct geographical spaces was often presented as continuous explorations of various ways of establishing the connectivity, interaction, and relationship of these two imagined geographical entities. Going to the Countryside argues that this new body of cultural productions did not merely turn the rural into a constantly changing representational space; most importantly, the rural has been constructed as a distinct modern experiential and aesthetic realm characterized by revolutionary changes in human conceptions and sentiments.

Shrines to Living Men in the Ming Political Cosmos

Author : Sarah Schneewind
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 382 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2020-10-26
Category : History
ISBN : 9781684170999

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Shrines to Living Men in the Ming Political Cosmos by Sarah Schneewind Pdf

"""Shrines to Living Men in the Ming Political Cosmos"", the first book focusing on premortem shrines in any era of Chinese history, places the institution at the intersection of politics and religion. When a local official left his post, grateful subjects housed an image of him in a temple, requiting his grace: that was the ideal model. By Ming times, the “living shrine” was legal, old, and justified by readings of the classics.Sarah Schneewind argues that the institution could invite and pressure officials to serve local interests; the policies that had earned a man commemoration were carved into stone beside the shrine. Since everyone recognized that elite men might honor living officials just to further their own careers, premortem shrine rhetoric stressed the role of commoners, who embraced the opportunity by initiating many living shrines. This legitimate, institutionalized political voice for commoners expands a scholarly understanding of “public opinion” in late imperial China, aligning it with the efficacy of deities to create a nascent political conception Schneewind calls the “minor Mandate of Heaven.” Her exploration of premortem shrine theory and practice illuminates Ming thought and politics, including the Donglin Party’s battle with eunuch dictator Wei Zhongxian and Gu Yanwu’s theories."

Du Fu Transforms

Author : Lucas Rambo Bender
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 428 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2022-03-07
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781684176489

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Du Fu Transforms by Lucas Rambo Bender Pdf

Often considered China’s greatest poet, Du Fu (712–770) came of age at the height of the Tang dynasty, in an era marked by confidence that the accumulated wisdom of the precedent cultural tradition would guarantee civilization’s continued stability and prosperity. When his society collapsed into civil war in 755, however, he began to question contemporary assumptions about the role that tradition should play in making sense of experience and defining human flourishing. In this book, Lucas Bender argues that Du Fu’s reconsideration of the nature and importance of tradition has played a pivotal role in the transformation of Chinese poetic understanding over the last millennium. In reimagining his relationship to tradition, Du Fu anticipated important philosophical transitions from the late-medieval into the early-modern period and laid the template for a new and perduring paradigm of poetry’s relationship to ethics. He also looked forward to the transformations his own poetry would undergo as it was elevated to the pinnacle of the Chinese poetic pantheon.