China Information最新文献

{"title":"Heteronomous rationality and rural protests: Peasants’ perceived egalitarianism in post-taxation China","authors":"Fumiki Tahara","doi":"10.1177/0920203X221108994","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0920203X221108994","url":null,"abstract":"This study focuses on Chinese peasants’ behavioural logic after the abolition of agricultural taxes in 2006. The everyday words and deeds of the residents of an ordinary village in Gansu Province were observed and interpreted. Their behavioural logic can be conceptualized as ‘heteronomous rationality’, according to which one’s behavioural choice is based on whether one is treated equally and fairly in comparison with others. When deviations from this standard are observed, rural peasants are motivated to protest. This study further examines when and how this Chinese-style peasant egalitarianism was shaped.","PeriodicalId":45809,"journal":{"name":"China Information","volume":"37 1","pages":"3 - 23"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65551873","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: Museum Representations of Chinese Diasporas: Migration Histories and the Cultural Heritage of the Homeland by Cangbai Wang","authors":"Sofia Bollo","doi":"10.1177/0920203X221105559c","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0920203X221105559c","url":null,"abstract":"theory of totalitarianism. Feldman deserves huge appreciation for his efforts to comprehend the first-hand traumatic experiences of the interviewed businessmen and professionals in Mao’s China. A lack of theorization and dialogue with the relevant literature has limited the potential of his findings to generalize the idea of pre-totalitarianism, which could enhance our understanding of the global resurgence of autocratization today. This book appeals to political scientists, journalists, as well as scholars and novices specializing in contemporary China studies. Political sociologists, social psychologists, and anthropologists will appreciate the book for its thick description of the everyday life of the business and professional classes in today’s China, despite its limited theorization of collective memory and trauma under Felman’s conceptualization of pretotalitarianism.","PeriodicalId":45809,"journal":{"name":"China Information","volume":"36 1","pages":"288 - 289"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44814540","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: Dictatorship by Degrees: Xi Jinping in China by Steven P. Feldman","authors":"Y. Lai","doi":"10.1177/0920203X221105559b","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0920203X221105559b","url":null,"abstract":"at the bottom. Today, these disparate groups of zhiqing, now retired, often organize outings and activities to commemorate their once collective life at the locale where they had been settled. On such occasions these various elderly individuals have a chance to recall the past and to interact with each other. This is when the ‘fault lines along class and ideology’ (p. 209) among them become visible. The high social and/or political groups with pleasant memories of the sent-down days, armed with their social and political capital, do not hide their supercilious contempt for the ordinary zhiqing. These hierarchical social interactions are vividly documented in entertaining detail in Chapter 6, in which a large contingent of former zhiqing who had been settled in the Heilongjiang countryside take a token ‘“New Long March” along the One Belt and One Road’ (p. 212), attempting to relive their Red Guard linking-up movement. These disparate groups of zhiqing do share one commonality – one aspect of their memories aligns with the official portrayal of the zhiqing’s experience, highlighting their youth, contributions, and positive personal qualities of perseverance and determination in the countryside. They have adopted what Xu repeatedly emphasizes is the official pattern of focusing on ‘people but not the event’, similar to museum displays, zhiqing literature, and their autobiographies. However, Xu has not probed for a deeper explanation. My own observations when I interviewed former Red Guards in the 1970s who had been sent down is that introspection would have led them to confront periods and episodes in which they had personally contravened ethical behaviour. Consciously or subconsciously zhiqing writings therefore lack self-reflection. Former good-class Red Guards prefer to remember their heroic self-reliance in the countryside, while some of the middling-class Red Guards and those who were not allowed to join the Red Guards remember themselves as victims for the entire course of their life history.","PeriodicalId":45809,"journal":{"name":"China Information","volume":"36 1","pages":"286 - 288"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43316087","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: Chairman Mao’s Children: Generation and the Politics of Memory in China by Bin Xu","authors":"A. Chan","doi":"10.1177/0920203X221105559a","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0920203X221105559a","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45809,"journal":{"name":"China Information","volume":"36 1","pages":"285 - 286"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47119331","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: Silencing Shanghai: Language and Identity in Urban China by Fang Xu","authors":"E. Vickers","doi":"10.1177/0920203X221105559e","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0920203X221105559e","url":null,"abstract":"central pillar of the state–community interface, attempting – with some success (p. 149) – to provide a space for relatively non-political leisure activity. Another departure from the Russian education model during the first years was in the emphasis on nationalism. In the case of the Chinese elementary schools, the evidence also suggests that adoption of systematic party directives, unlike in publishing, was deferred for a few years. A tentative conclusion to take away from the study is that analysts should pay closer attention to cultural policy, contrary to strong ‘materialist’ approaches that may present the macroeconomic factors as overly determinative. For example, the market reforms of the Deng Xiaoping years, apart from Tiananmen 1989, did correlate with a limited degree of opening. But as the author points out, top–down control over all cultural domains, re-enforced with the inauguration in 2012 of the current regime, leads us to question aspects of the correlation. There is simply little evidence of a parallel democratization accompanying economic liberalization. For a centralist party, governing a oneparty state, first leaning on the Soviet model, and today on its own admittedly unique and highly productive model, based on special national ‘characteristics’, culture is too important. Art and literature are ‘fronts’ (p. 183). Parenthetically, and consistent with the economy–culture mismatch, the recent growing concentration of control within the cultural sphere has been identified as a concern in a number of full democracies. Considering this complicated and controversial question, the book makes an important contribution on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the CCP.","PeriodicalId":45809,"journal":{"name":"China Information","volume":"36 1","pages":"291 - 293"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45292977","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: The Landscape of Historical Memory: The Politics of Museums and Memorial Culture in Post-Martial Law Taiwan by Kirk A. Denton","authors":"A. Heylen","doi":"10.1177/0920203X221105559g","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0920203X221105559g","url":null,"abstract":"‘villages-in-the-city’ or they become villages-in-the-city engulfed by urban development. Either way, they are developed as ‘villages-as-the-city’ and are functionally unified with the city. In the absence of democratic and moral accountability, it is market incentives, patronage politics, and corruption that prevail to assert ‘the end of the village’, where societal responsibilities for the underprivileged, the displaced, and the deceased are discarded. The analysis pertaining to the state and market impetuses for village development is convincing. Smith could however have further contextualized the production of disjuncture in China’s administrative division system – a hierarchical and nested structure that runs from the centre to the province (or municipality) to the prefecture and to the county. Though Chinese cities were historically bounded by walls and, in contemporary China, by the urban construction boundary of the city proper, their administrative territories overbound large, outlying rural and urban areas that are not functionally connected to the central core. As provincial, prefectural, and county-level administrative seats, cities and towns do not suffer from the jurisdictional fragmentation or contentious political relations of urban and rural areas because the hierarchical ordering of administrative jurisdictions intrinsically transcends the categories of urban and rural. The urban–rural divisions were unambiguously defined under the communist regime to impose new land institutions and a Soviet-style ‘household registration’ (hukou) system. In both the pre-reform and reform eras, however, the disjunctures between urban categories and transformational processes serve the developmental goals of the party-state by leveraging greater jurisdictional power to realize economic rationalization and state modernization. Since the 1990s, the disjunctures have enabled the party-state to relentlessly extract labour, land, and other resources from the rural areas to feed the voracious urban growth. They also facilitate the transfer of an area to a higher jurisdiction, which deepens the power asymmetry between the local party-state and the public, further eliminating the opportunity for the latter to contest urban development processes. In this context, urban–rural coordination, new-type urbanization, and the like, would not only ‘expose this mismatch between [urban] categories and [urban] processes as a feature of urbanization’ (p. 32) but would also be harnessed by the party-state, as an artifice of political imperative, to reconcile or rather obfuscate the tension between scientific rationality and political decisionism. I highly recommend this informative and riveting book to scholars of China studies and urban studies. The book might also be equally appealing to other academics and students who are interested in the inner workings of China’s state-led urbanization (especially how power over land development is negotiated and wielded by acto","PeriodicalId":45809,"journal":{"name":"China Information","volume":"36 1","pages":"294 - 296"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42157274","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: Politics of Control: Creating Red Culture in the Early People’s Republic of China by Chang-tai Hung","authors":"Norbert Francis","doi":"10.1177/0920203X221105559d","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0920203X221105559d","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45809,"journal":{"name":"China Information","volume":"36 1","pages":"290 - 291"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44876847","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: 《風暴歷程: 文革中的人民解放軍》 (Through the storm: The PLA in the Cultural Revolution), Vol. 1 & Vol. 2 by Yu Ruxin 余汝信","authors":"Felix Wemheuer","doi":"10.1177/0920203X221105559h","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0920203X221105559h","url":null,"abstract":"to follow. Somewhat countering the obsession with history and identity, Chapter 9 on ecomuseums sustains the criticism of ‘paying lip service to calls for policy change and [environmental] practices in the name of forging a happy relationship between the locality and the community’ (p. 205). The focus on the Museum of World Religions and the Southern Branch of the National Palace Museum in the final chapter is for the reader to reflect on Taiwan’s desire to be integrated with the world and to matter to that world, even if Taiwan’s role can only assert itself on religious and cultural levels. The only weakness of this book is the lack of a more comprehensive discussion of ‘Taiwan’s historical relationship with Japanese imperialism’ (p. 118). The absence of war-related exhibits or a monument commemorating the War of Resistance against Japan (until 1999), given the centrality of military culture to nationalist rule, denies giving Taiwan its own character as a former Japanese colony that was fundamentally different from the years of Japanese occupation on the mainland. But it is precisely in being more concerned with demonstrating the blue camp’s struggle to inject memory into a to date still ‘painfully unsettled war’ (p. 115) that the parallel with the PRC makes for a holistic reading that takes the book beyond a Taiwan-only readership. Given its manifold strengths, I recommend it highly to all readers seriously interested in contemporary issues of war memory, with Asian societies as an entry point.","PeriodicalId":45809,"journal":{"name":"China Information","volume":"36 1","pages":"296 - 297"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43651452","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: A Decade of Upheaval: The Cultural Revolution in Rural China by Dong Guoqiang and Andrew G. Walder","authors":"Cui Jinke","doi":"10.1177/0920203x221105559","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0920203x221105559","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45809,"journal":{"name":"China Information","volume":"36 1","pages":"283 - 284"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41853088","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: The End of the Village: Planning the Urbanization of Rural China by Nick R. Smith","authors":"P. Hao","doi":"10.1177/0920203X221105559f","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0920203X221105559f","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45809,"journal":{"name":"China Information","volume":"70 ","pages":"293 - 294"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41271710","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}