Wang – författare

A visual history of Japanese American car culture in Los Angeles, from gardeners’ trucks and family sedans to hot rods and race cars.

Cruising J-Town: Japanese American Car Culture in Los Angeles explores how generations of Japanese Americans in Southern California shaped, and were shaped by, local automobile cultures and industries: from desert lakebeds to concrete speedways, gas stations to design centers, souped-up import tuners to humble gardening trucks. Along the way, cars and trucks became literal and figurative vehicles for Japanese American self-expression, social mobility, community identity, and much more. Cruising J-Town is driven to explore how these diverse relationships between people and the world of cars have steered the Nikkei community’s American stories across the generations.

Interviews and oral histories chronicle the people and stories behind how Japanese Americans have played vital roles in countless car scenes throughout the region. Cruising J-Town is filled with vintage and contemporary photographs, drawings and ephemera that bring the story to life.

Initiated in 1978, China’s reform and opening up is regarded as the greatest economic transformation in the country’s history. By changing the property ownership system and altering the structure of resource distribution, the Communist Party was able to reform its former planned economy and open up its closed economic system.

In the decades that have followed, China has pushed forward the reform of its economic, political, cultural, social and ecological systems. It has also intensified its economic interaction with other nations by relaxing, and even abolishing, many kinds of restrictive policies, in the process stimulating foreign trade and attracting huge amounts of overseas investment.

China is now entering a crucial phase that requires even more thorough reform, complete opening up and constant improvement of the socialist market economic system.

This book analyses the experiences and achievements of this process. It focuses on how the country enhanced the role of market forces in its economy, advanced opening up and set up a variety of development zones across the country. Lively and packed with case studies, China’s Reform and Opening Up gives a fascinating insight into how a relatively poor and backward country achieved such rapid development, and how it rose from being the world's 10th largest economy in 1978 to the second largest today.