Rune Svarverud – författare

The Great Smog of China traces Chinese air pollution events dating back to more than 2,000 years ago. Based on the authors’ fieldwork, interviews and text studies, the book offers a short and concise history of selected air pollution incidents that for varying reasons prompted different kinds of responses and forms of engagement in Chinese society. The three authors, from the disciplines of anthropology, China studies and political science, identify traceable incidents of smog and air pollution that have been communicated in different media and came to impact society in various ways. This also informs a discussion of what it takes to transform people’s experiences of health and environmentally related risks of pollution into broader forms of socio-political agency.

In spite of the intense preoccupation with individual and self in modern Western thought, the social sciences have tended to focus on groups and collectives and downplay the individual. This implicit view has also coloured the study of social life in China where both Confucian ethics and Communist policies have shaped collective structures with little room for individual agency and choice.What is actually happening, however, is a growing individualization of China - not only changing perceptions of the individual but also rising expectations for individual freedom, choice and individuality. The individual has also become a basic social category in China, and a development has begun that permeates all areas of social, economic and political life. How this process evolves in a state and society lacking two of the defining characteristics of European individualization - a culturally embedded democracy and a welfare system - is one of the questions that the volume explores.A strength of this volume is that its authors succeed in depicting the individualization process in conceptually acute and empirically sensitive terms, and as something with its own distinctively Chinese profile. That makes this book a 'must read' for all those wanting to understand present-day Chinese society, with all of its ambivalences, contingencies and contradictions.

In spite of the intense preoccupation with individual and self in modern Western thought, the social sciences have tended to focus on groups and collectives and downplay the individual. This implicit view has also coloured the study of social life in China where both Confucian ethics and Communist policies have shaped collective structures with little room for individual agency and choice.What is actually happening, however, is a growing individualization of China - not only changing perceptions of the individual but also rising expectations for individual freedom, choice and individuality. The individual has also become a basic social category in China, and a development has begun that permeates all areas of social, economic and political life. How this process evolves in a state and society lacking two of the defining characteristics of European individualization - a culturally embedded democracy and a welfare system - is one of the questions that the volume explores.A strength of this volume is that its authors succeed in depicting the individualization process in conceptually acute and empirically sensitive terms, and as something with its own distinctively Chinese profile. That makes this book a 'must read' for all those wanting to understand present-day Chinese society, with all of its ambivalences, contingencies and contradictions.

This is the first systematic analysis of the early introduction and reception of international law as a Western political and legal science in China. International law in late imperial China is studied both as part of the introduction of the Western sciences and as a theoretical orientation in international affairs between 1847 and 1911. The first chapters serve the purpose of analysing the political, institutional, intellectual and linguistic process of adapting the theories of international law to the Chinese context language. The second major part of the book is dedicated to the discourse on China and world order within this framework.