Contemporary Chinese Studies (UBC Press)
Series · 22
books · 1999-2014
Books in series
#2
The Chinese in Vancouver, 1945-80
The Pursuit of Identity and Power
1999
In The Chinese in Vancouver, Wing Chung Ng captures the fascinating story of the city's Chinese in their search for identity. He juxtaposes the cultural positions of different generations of Chinese immigrants and their Canadian-born descendants and unveils the ongoing struggle over the definition of being Chinese. It is an engrossing story about cultural identity in the context of migration and settlement, where the influence of the native land and the appeal of the host city continued to impinge on the consciousness of the ethnic Chinese.
#3
Chinese Democracy after Tiananmen
2001
In 1989, most observers believed that China’s political reform process had been violently short-circuited, but few would now dispute that China is in a very important transition. Central to this transition has been an extraordinary change in the formal intellectual conception of ‘democracy.’ In this book, Yijiang Ding presents a multi-dimensional picture of China at the political crossroads. Chinese Democracy looks at the significant change in the state-society relationship in contemporary China in three interrelated areas: intellectual, social, and cultural. Drawing heavily on recent Chinese scholarship, Ding shows that the emergent theory on the dualism of state and society is contemporaneous with a new cognitive and cultural appreciation of the people’s independence from state authority. Is China moving toward liberal democracy? Does Western engagement with China contribute economically and politically to this shift? These are the questions at the heart of the book. Which are especially timely, given the recent reconstruction of political regimes worldwide.
#4
Scars of War
The Impact of Warfare on Modern China
2001
Throughout its modern history China has suffered from immense destruction and loss of life from warfare. In its worst periods of warfare, the eight years of the Anti-Japanese War (1937-45), millions of civilians lost their lives. But in China, the story of modern war-related death and suffering has remained hidden. The Rape of Nanking is beginning to be known, but hundreds of other massacres are still unrecognized by the outside world and even by China itself. The focus of Scars of War is the social and psychological, not the economic, costs of war on the country. The book is illustrated with contemporary photographs and woodblock prints. Each chapter is introduced by a traditional Chinese saying (cheng-yu) on warfare.
#5
Gender and Change in Hong Kong
Globalization, Postcolonialism, and Chinese Patriarchy
2003
The 1980s and 1990s represent a critical historical juncture for Hong Kong, as it underwent important social, political, and economic transformations. This period of transition, during which the state worked to redefine itself, significantly altered the role and status of Hong Kong women. Colonial modernity, which arose through the integration of the colonial state, the capitalist economy, and the Hong Kong Chinese society, proved favourable for some women but also had adverse consequences for others. It constructed women of different class interests and shaped the gendered citizenship of its colonial subjects.
Gender and Change in Hong Kong analyzes women's changing identities and agencies amidst the complex interaction of three important forces, namely, globalization, postcolonialism, and Chinese patriarchy. The chapters examine the issues from a number of perspectives to consider legal changes, political participation, the situation of working-class and professional women, sexuality, religion, and international migration.
This incisive volume offers sophisticated theoretical discussions and original empirical findings, and will appeal to a wide range of scholars and students in gender and women's studies, postcolonialism, globalization, and Asian studies.
#6
Obedient Autonomy
Chinese Intellectuals and the Achievement of Orderly Life
2004
In the West, the idea of autonomy is often associated with a sense of freedom―a self-interested state of being unfettered by rules or obligations to others. This original anthropological study explores a type of “obedient” autonomy that thrives on setbacks, blossoms as more rules are imposed, and flourishes in adversity. Obedient Autonomy analyzes this model, and explains its precepts through examining the specialized and highly organized discipline of archaeology in China.
The book follows Chinese students on their journey to becoming full-fledged archaeologists in a bureaucracy-saturated environment. Often required to travel in teams to the countryside, archaeologists are uniquely obliged to overcome divisions among themselves, between themselves and their peasant-workers, and between themselves and bureaucratic officials. This analysis reveals how these interactions provide teachers of archaeology with stories used to foster obedient autonomy in their students. Moreover, it demonstrates how this form of autonomy enables a person to order and control their future careers in what appears to be a disorderly and uncertain world.
#9
Tibet and Nationalist China's Frontier
Intrigues and Ethnopolitics, 1928-49
2006
In this ground-breaking study, Hsiao Ting Lin demonstrates that the Chinese frontier was the subject neither of concerted aggression on the part of a centralized and indoctrinated Chinese government nor of an ideologically driven nationalist ethnopolitics. Instead, Nationalist sovereignty over Tibet and other border regions was the result of rhetorical grandstanding by Chiang Kai-shek and his regime. Tibet and Nationalist China’s Frontier makes a crucial contribution to the understanding of past and present China-Tibet relations. A counterpoint to erroneous historical assumptions, this book will change the way Tibetologists and modern Chinese historians frame future studies of the region.
#10
Teachers' Schools and the Making of the Modern Chinese Nation-State, 1897-1937
2007
During the educational and social transformations in politically tumultuous early twentieth-century China, Chinese teacher's schools played a critical role. They were a force in the changes that swept Chinese society, bridging Chinese and Western ideals, empowering women, and contributing to rural modernization. This innovative account examines the social and political aspects and impacts of these schools, their role in a society in transistion, and their production of grassroots forces that lead to the Communist Revolution.
#11
Resisting Manchukuo
Chinese Women Writers and the Japanese Occupation
2007
The first book in English on women’s history in twentieth-century Manchuria, Resisting Manchukuo adds to a growing literature that challenges traditional understandings of Japanese colonialism. Norman Smith reveals the literary world of Japanese-occupied Manchuria (Manchukuo, 1932-45) and examines the lives, careers, and literary legacies of seven prolific Chinese women writers during the period. He shows how a complex blend of fear and freedom produced an environment in which Chinese women writers could articulate dissatisfaction with the overtly patriarchal and imperialist nature of the Japanese cultural agenda while working in close association with colonial institutions.
#12
The Chinese State at the Borders
2007
In this ground-breaking study, Hsiao Ting Lin demonstrates that the Chinese frontier was the subject neither of concerted aggression on the part of a centralized and indoctrinated Chinese government nor of an ideologically driven nationalist ethnopolitics. Instead, nationalist sovereignty over Tibet and other border regions was the result of rhetorical grandstanding by Chiang Kai-shek and his regime. Tibet and Nationalist China's Frontier makes a crucial contribution to the understanding of past and present China-Tibet relations. A counterpoint to erroneous historical assumptions, this book will change the way Tibetologists and modern Chinese historians frame future studies of the region.
#13
The New Silk Road Diplomacy
China's Central Asian Foreign Policy since the Cold War
2009
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan sprang up as independent states along China’s western frontier. Suddenly, Beijing was forced to deal with internal challenges to its authority at its border as well as international competition for energy and authority in Central Asia.
The New Silk Road Diplomacy traces how China, faced with domestic and international challenges, constructed a gradualist approach to Central Asia that prioritized multilateral diplomacy. Although China’s primary objective was to ensure stability in its own Muslimmajority domain, it also worked with Russia and the Central Asian republics to increase confidence and security in the border areas and facilitate commerce. Regional diplomacy has, however, brought China increased competition with the United States, which views Central Asia as vital to its strategic interests, particularly after the attacks of 9/11.
This multifaceted book offers a fresh perspective on the foreign policy of modern China. It will appeal to experts and students of Central Asian affairs and foreign policy and anyone interested in contemporary China and its relationship with its neighbours.
#14
Art in Turmoil
The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966-76
2010
Forty years after China’s tumultuous Cultural Revolution, this book revisits the visual and performing arts of the period – the paintings, propaganda posters, political cartoons, sculpture, folk arts, private sketchbooks, opera, and ballet – and examines what these vibrant, militant, often gaudy images meant to artists, their patrons, and their audiences at the time, and what they mean now, both in their original forms and as revolutionary icons reworked for a new market-oriented age. Chapters by scholars of Chinese history and art and by artists whose careers were shaped by the Cultural Revolution offer new insights into works that have transcended their times.
#16
Smokeless Sugar
The Death of a Provincial Bureaucrat and the Construction of China's National Economy
2010
Part history, part biography, and part mystery story, "Smokeless Sugar" traces the formation of a national economy in China through an intriguing investigation of the 1936 execution of an allegedly corrupt Cantonese official. Feng Rui, a Western-educated agricultural expert, introduced modern sugar milling to China in the 1930s as a key component in a provincial investment program. Before long, however, he was accused of colluding with smugglers to pass foreign sugar off as a domestic product. Emily Hill makes the case that Feng was, in fact, a scapegoat in a multi-sided power struggle in which political leaders vied with commercial players for access to China's markets and tax revenues.
#18
Beyond Suffering
Recounting War in Modern China
2011
China was afflicted by a brutal succession of conflicts through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet there has never been clear understanding of how wartime suffering has defined the nation and shaped its people.In Beyond Suffering, a distinguished group of historians of modern China look beyond the geopolitical aspects of war to explore its social, institutional, and cultural dimensions. The chapters in Part 1, "Society at War," reveal how militarization and war can both structure and destabilize society, while those in Part 2, "Institutional Engagement," show how institutions and the people they represent can become pawns in larger power struggles. Lastly, Part 3, "Memory and Representation," examines the various media, monuments, and social controls by which war has been memorialized.Based on fragmented accounts of poorly understood incidents, Beyond Suffering pieces together a fuller picture of the multiple fronts on which wars in modern China have been fought, experienced, and remembered.
#19
A School in Every Village
Educational Reform in a Northeast China County, 1904-31
2011
In the early 1900s, the Qing dynasty implemented a nationwide school system to buttress its power. Although the Communists, contemporary observers, and more recent scholarship have all depicted rural society as feudal and these educational reforms a failure, Elizabeth VanderVen draws on untapped archival materials to show that villagers and local officials capably integrated foreign ideas and models into a system that was at once traditional and modern, Chinese and Western. Her portrait of education reform both challenges received notions about the modernity-tradition binary in Chinese history, and addresses topics central to debates on modern China, including state making and the impact of global ideas on local society.
#20
Merry Laughter and Angry Curses
The Shanghai Tabloid Press, 1897-1911
2012
Merry Laughter and Angry Curses reveals how the late-Qing-era tabloid press became the voice of the people. As periodical publishing reached a fever pitch, tabloids had free rein to criticize officials, mock the elite, and scandalize readers. Tabloid writers produced a massive amount of anti-establishment literature, whose distinctive humour and satirical style were both potent and popular. This book shows the tabloid community to be both a producer of meanings and a participant in the social and cultural dialogue that would shake the foundations of imperial China and lead to the 1911 Republican Revolution.
#21
Intoxicating Manchuria
Alcohol, Opium, and Culture in China's Northeast
2012
Examines how alcohol, opium, and addiction were portrayed in the culture of China's Northeast during the first half of the twentieth century.
#23
Chieftains into Ancestors
Imperial Expansion and Indigenous Society in Southwest China
2013
Official Chinese history has always been written from a centrist viewpoint. Chieftains into Ancestors describes the intersection of imperial administration and chieftain-dominated local culture in the culturally diverse southwestern region of China. Contemplating the rhetorical question of how one can begin to rewrite the story of a conquered people whose past was never transcribed in the first place, the authors combine anthropological fieldwork with historical textual analysis to build a new regional history – one that recognizes the ethnic, religious, and gendered transformations that took place in China’s nation-building process.
#26
Diasporic Chineseness After the Rise of China
Communities and Cultural Production
2013
As China rose to its position of global superpower, Chinese groups in the West watched with anticipation and trepidation. In this volume, international scholars examine how artists, writers, filmmakers, and intellectuals from the Chinese diaspora represented this new China to global audiences. The chapters, often personal in nature, focus on the nexus between the political and economic rise of China and the cultural products this period produced, where new ideas of nation, identity, and diaspora were forged.
#28
The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, 1850-1960
2014
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.
#30
Cultivating Connections
The Making of Chinese Prairie Canada
2014
In the late 1870s, thousands of Chinese men left coastal British Columbia and the western United States and headed east. For them, the Prairies were a land of opportunity; there, they could open shops and potentially earn enough money to become merchants. The result of almost a decade's research and more than three hundred interviews, Cultivating Connections tells the stories of some of Prairie Canada's Chinese settlers – men and women from various generations who navigated cultural difference. These stories reveal the critical importance of networks in coping with experiences of racism and establishing a successful life on the Prairies.
#31
Staging Corruption
Chinese Television and Politics
2014
In late 1995, the drama Heaven Above (Cangtian zaishang) debuted on Chinese TV. Featuring a villainous high-ranking government official, it was the first in a series of wildly popular corruption dramas that riveted the nation. Staging Corruption looks at the rise, fall, and reincarnation of corruption dramas and the ways in which they express the collective dreams and nightmares of China in the market-reform era. It also considers how these dramas – as products of the interplay between television stations, production companies, media regulation, and political censorship – unveil complicated relationships between power, media, and society. This book is essential reading for those following China's ongoing struggles with the highly volatile socio-political issue of corruption.
#32
The Business of Culture
Cultural Entrepreneurs in China and Southeast Asia, 1900-65
2014
The Business of Culture examines the rise of Chinese "cultural entrepreneurs," businesspeople who risked financial well-being and reputation by investing in multiple cultural enterprises in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rich in biographical detail, the interlinked case studies featured in this volume introduce three distinct the cultural personality, the tycoon, and the collective enterprise. These portraits reveal how rapidly evolving technologies and growing transregional ties created fertile conditions for business success in the cultural sphere. They also highlight strategies used by cultural entrepreneurs around the world today.
Authors
Xiaoping Cong
Author · 1 books
Xiaoping Cong is a scholar of late imperial and twentieth-century China who teaches at the University of Houston.
