Modern ChinaPub Date : 2022-06-23DOI: 10.1177/00977004221096067
Benjamin Kindler
{"title":"Maoist Miniatures: The Proletarian Everyday, Visual Remediation, and the Politics of Revolutionary Form","authors":"Benjamin Kindler","doi":"10.1177/00977004221096067","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00977004221096067","url":null,"abstract":"Across an extended historical arc, Chinese writers and theorists were invested in new, short literary forms that would be able to intervene in the reorganization of social relations. These forms occurred under a range of names during the twentieth century—the wall story 墙头小说, the short short story 小小说, and the microstory 微型小说—but consistently marked a series of avant-garde experiments concerned with locating an alternative to the long-form novel. This article examines this history from its emergence amid the international proletarian movement of the 1930s, through the Great Leap Forward, and on to the early reform period, and does so through the theoretical lens of the everyday 日常生活 and the relation between literary texts and visual media. It demonstrates how the deployment of these forms shifted from an attempt to remake everyday life to their assimilation to a discourse of modernization in the reform period.","PeriodicalId":47030,"journal":{"name":"Modern China","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46068593","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Modern ChinaPub Date : 2022-05-01DOI: 10.1177/00977004211003030
Ady van Den Stock
{"title":"The Minorities of Chinese Philosophy: Ideology and Identity in the Academic Discipline of “Ethnic Minority Philosophy”","authors":"Ady van Den Stock","doi":"10.1177/00977004211003030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00977004211003030","url":null,"abstract":"The academic discipline of “ethnic minority philosophy,” which emerged at the beginning of the 1980s in the People’s Republic of China, has thus far remained virtually unstudied in Western-language scholarship. The aim of this article is to place the genesis and development of this little-known discipline against the wider background of modern Chinese scholarly and political discourses on the interrelated issues of national, ethnic, cultural, philosophical, and religious identity. In doing so, this article analyzes what I call the “hierarchical inclusion” of minority traditions into the history of Chinese philosophy, the perceived proximity between ethnic minority philosophies and “primitive religion,” and the role of the problematic concept of “culture” in the reinvention of minoritarian traditions of thought as philosophy.","PeriodicalId":47030,"journal":{"name":"Modern China","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/00977004211003030","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65030313","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Modern ChinaPub Date : 2022-04-28DOI: 10.1177/00977004221087426
Elise Pizzi, Yue Hu
{"title":"Does Governmental Policy Shape Migration Decisions? The Case of China’s Hukou System","authors":"Elise Pizzi, Yue Hu","doi":"10.1177/00977004221087426","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00977004221087426","url":null,"abstract":"Does governmental policy shape potential migrants’ destination choices? Chinese cities use the household registration (hukou) system to adjust the barriers to gaining local status and access to public services and social welfare benefits. We draw on a nationally representative survey of migrants and an original survey experiment to test the effect of hukou-related barriers and benefits on the relative appeal of different destination cities. We find that strict limits on acquiring local hukou status do not deter migrants. However, local hukou status is important because it confers access to public services and social welfare benefits. Cities where migrants can gain access to such services and benefits without changing their hukou status are more appealing. These findings demonstrate that hukou policy has real impacts on migration patterns and on access to public services and social welfare benefits for millions of Chinese.","PeriodicalId":47030,"journal":{"name":"Modern China","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46699923","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Modern ChinaPub Date : 2022-04-18DOI: 10.1177/00977004221082515
Philip C. C. Huang
{"title":"From Dualistic Opposition to Dyadic Integration: Toward a New Political Economy of Chinese Practice","authors":"Philip C. C. Huang","doi":"10.1177/00977004221082515","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00977004221082515","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues for the construction of a new political economy based on Chinese practices. It begins with an explanation of the research approach of starting from practice, and from a distinctive mode of thinking that is akin to that of medicine, rather than Newtonian physics and mathematical logic. Then it discusses the present-day Chinese practices of combining socialism with market economy, state enterprises with private enterprises, the peasant economy with an industrial economy, and the party-state with the economy—all distinctive realities about the new Chinese political-economic system. The foil for the discussion is the long-standing hegemonic ideology and worldview of Anglo-American classical and neoclassical liberal economics and law. This article suggests that we employ China’s traditional dyadic integration worldview, evident in today’s practices, to arrive at a new integrative cosmological view that rises above both. To a considerable extent, this article is also a reinterpretation of classical Marxist political economy. What the article advocates may be termed a “participatory socialist market economy,” to be distinguished from a bureaucratized and controlling socialist planned economy. This is a system that is still very much in the process of formation, its particular content and characteristics yet to be clarified and specified through a sustained period of searching through practice.","PeriodicalId":47030,"journal":{"name":"Modern China","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46353735","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Modern ChinaPub Date : 2022-04-02DOI: 10.1177/00977004221079194
M. Chew
{"title":"Rethinking the Cultural Relations between Hong Kong and China: An Analysis of the Chinese Reception of Stephen Chow’s Films","authors":"M. Chew","doi":"10.1177/00977004221079194","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00977004221079194","url":null,"abstract":"This is a cultural sociological study of the mainland Chinese reception of the films of Stephen Chow, the popular Hong Kong actor and director. This study’s theoretical objective is to rethink the cultural relations between post-handover Hong Kong and China. Its empirical analysis challenges five major frameworks of studying post-handover Hong Kong culture that interpret Hong Kong–China cultural relations as hegemonic and conflictual. The study’s first substantive section establishes that the Chinese reception of Chow’s films has been very positive and well participated. The second and third sections illustrate that the Chinese scholarly reception of Chow’s films and the Chinese popular audience reception of them stress their counter-hegemonic characteristics. This study’s data include the hundreds of Chinese-language publications on Chow, online sources, and interviews with twenty-four informants.","PeriodicalId":47030,"journal":{"name":"Modern China","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49567299","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Modern ChinaPub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1177/00977004211072546
Chunying Wang, Y. Y. Wang
{"title":"Gray Markets in the Great Leap: Prosecuting “Profiteering” in Liangshan County, Shandong, 1958–1960","authors":"Chunying Wang, Y. Y. Wang","doi":"10.1177/00977004211072546","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00977004211072546","url":null,"abstract":"This article uses legal archives from Liangshan 梁山 county, Shandong, to explore the ambiguous position of rural markets in China during the Great Leap Forward campaign (1958–1962). These testimonies, though sparse, show that negotiations at a local, indeed personal, level underpinned the symbiosis between the “second economy” of illicit trade and the party-state’s putatively socialist political economy. Liangshan’s gray market bridged the gap between the party-state’s Sputnik promises and catastrophic realities, contributing twofold to the party-state’s political survival. First, illicit commerce helped famine survivors, including local cadres, obtain desperately needed sustenance; these cadres’ support of trading villagers despite top-down restrictions on such transactions likely helped them retain local moral authority after the Leap. Second, the intermittent formal prosecution of “profiteers” in the ritualized space of the county courtroom projected justice, stability, and coercive power, which also contributed to the party’s continuing hold on authority.","PeriodicalId":47030,"journal":{"name":"Modern China","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65030373","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Modern ChinaPub Date : 2022-02-24DOI: 10.1177/00977004221074297
Yuming Sheng
{"title":"Performance-Based Authoritarianism Revisited: GDP Growth and the Political Fortunes of China’s Provincial Leaders","authors":"Yuming Sheng","doi":"10.1177/00977004221074297","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00977004221074297","url":null,"abstract":"An influential performance-based authoritarianism thesis attributes China’s reform-era economic success to merit-based political selection whereby the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has persistently rewarded with career advancement local leaders overseeing fast GDP growth. Yet voluminous empirical research on whether boosting local economic growth has bestowed career advantages on provincial leaders remains inconclusive due to the assumption of static preferences of the national leadership for unbridled GDP growth and inconsistency in data measurement in studies with disparate time coverage. Employing annual individual-level data consistently coded with a general measure of career mobility and a rigorous measure of relative economic performance, I reexamine how provincial GDP growth affected the career outcomes of the governors and provincial party secretaries under different CCP national chiefs spanning the entire reform era. My findings challenge the sweeping, one-sided conventional wisdom and call for greater attention to shifting political and economic contexts in theoretical and empirical research on contemporary China.","PeriodicalId":47030,"journal":{"name":"Modern China","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42185134","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Modern ChinaPub Date : 2022-02-14DOI: 10.1177/00977004211073513
G. Elazar
{"title":"Searching for Shangrila: Existential Authenticity, Buddhist Revival, and Ethnic Empowerment on the Sino-Tibetan Frontier","authors":"G. Elazar","doi":"10.1177/00977004211073513","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00977004211073513","url":null,"abstract":"In 2001, the county of Zhongdian in Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan province, was renamed Shangrila, after the monastery described in James Hilton’s 1933 novel, Lost Horizon, and in allusion to the mythical Tibetan kingdom of Shambhala. Thereafter, work began on constructing the region as an easily accessible showcase for Tibetan culture. Based on fieldwork conducted in the Shangrila Thangka Academy, this article deals with the production and commodification of Tibetan Thangka scrolls. The multiple narratives presented in this article, in parallel and sometimes contradictory ways, center around authenticity—ranging from the preservation of Tibetan culture to the propagation of Tibetan Buddhism—and function as a cultural critique of Chinese society in the reform era.","PeriodicalId":47030,"journal":{"name":"Modern China","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43301731","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Modern ChinaPub Date : 2022-02-11DOI: 10.1177/00977004211072182
S. Li
{"title":"Yan Fu, John Seeley, and the Idea of Liberty","authors":"S. Li","doi":"10.1177/00977004211072182","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00977004211072182","url":null,"abstract":"This article advances a more precise appreciation of Yan Fu’s idea of liberty based on a close and contextualized reading of his Lectures on Politics (1906), which he adapted from John Seeley’s Introduction to Political Science (1896). Yan’s creative interpretation of Seeley’s account of liberty exposes his own persistent views and tendencies. Specifically, Yan’s text adopts Seeley’s literal, neutral concept of liberty while extending its use as security against political tyranny. Yan shows consistent recognition of liberty in the latter sense, while his statist discourses expose potential tolerance of oppression for the sake of the collective good. Yan’s lectures also reveal his more limited libertarian spirit that underpinned his statism, brought out and conceptually strengthened by Seeley. This statism was, nevertheless, mitigated by the liberal dimensions he maintained. Overall, Yan’s idea of liberty is a highly complex one, meaning that a one-sided assessment as either liberal or nationalistic is untenable.","PeriodicalId":47030,"journal":{"name":"Modern China","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41305876","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Modern ChinaPub Date : 2022-01-11DOI: 10.1177/00977004211068055
Vivienne Shue
{"title":"Regimes of Resonance: Cosmos, Empire, and Changing Technologies of CCP Rule","authors":"Vivienne Shue","doi":"10.1177/00977004211068055","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00977004211068055","url":null,"abstract":"This analysis aims to place certain key elements of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule observed under Xi Jinping today into longer and fuller historical perspective. It highlights trademark CCP practices of ordering space, marking time, potent political messaging, and vigorous propaganda diffusion as these have evolved over many years up to the present, reconsidering these in light of early Chinese cosmological thought and later symbolic practices of empire.","PeriodicalId":47030,"journal":{"name":"Modern China","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44161799","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}