China Understandings Today – serie

Following the end of World War II in 1945, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) spent the next three decades carrying out agrarian reform among nearly one-third of the world’s peasants. This book presents a new perspective on the first step of this reform, when the CCP helped redistribute over 40 million hectares of land to over three hundred million impoverished peasants in the nationwide land reform movement. This land reform, the founding myth of the People’s Republic of China (1949–present) and one of the largest redistributions of wealth and power in history, embodies the idea that an equal distribution of property will lead to social and political equality.Power Over Property argues that in practice, however, the opposite occurred: the redistribution of political power led to a more equal distribution of property. China’s land reform was accomplished not only through the state’s power to define the distribution of resources, but also through village communities prioritizing political entitlements above property rights. Through the systematic analysis of never-before studied micro-level data on practices of land reform in over five hundred villages, Power Over Property demonstrates how land reform primarily involved the removal of former power holders, the mobilization of mass political participation, and the creation of a new social-political hierarchy. Only after accomplishing all of this was it possible to redistribute land. This redistribution, moreover, was determined by political relations to a new structure of power, not just economic relations to the means of production.The experience of China’s land reform complicates our understanding of the relations between economic, social, and political equality. On the one hand, social equality in China was achieved through political, not economic means. On the other hand, the fundamental solution was a more effective hierarchy of fair entitlements, not equal rights. This book ultimately suggests that focusing on economic equality alone may obscure more important social and political dynamics in the development of the modern world.

The Global White Snake examines the Chinese White Snake legends and their extensive, multidirectional travels within Asia and across the globe. Such travels across linguistic and cultural boundaries have generated distinctive traditions as the White Snake has been reinvented in the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and English-speaking worlds, among others. Moreover, the inter-Asian voyages and global circulations of the White Snake legends have enabled them to become repositories of diverse and complex meanings for a great number of people, serving as reservoirs for polyphonic expressions ranging from the attempts to consolidate authoritarian power to the celebrations of minority rights and activism.The Global White Snake uncovers how the White Snake legend often acts as an unsettling narrative of radical tolerance for hybrid sexualities, loving across traditional boundaries, subverting authority, and valuing the strange and the uncanny. A timely mediation and reflection on our contemporary moment of continued struggle for minority rights and social justice, The Global White Snake revives the radical anti-authoritarian spirit slithering under the tales of monsters and demons, love and lust, and reminds us of the power of the fantastic and the fabulous in inspiring and empowering personal and social transformations. "This splendid book is the most thorough and enthusiastic study of the White Snake legend in its diverse forms across a global media landscape: from Chinese operas, Japanese anime, Asian films, to stage adaptations in the U.S. The more widely the legend about this seductive deity travels and is transformed in different cultural transformations, the more subversive and transgressive its message becomes. Reading this well researched account is as spellbinding.”—Leo Ou-fan Lee, author of Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945“In the Chinese legend of the White Snake, woman is not seduced by the snake but is herself the snake. Originating as a very local legend on the deadly dangers of seduction and infatuation, the story grew into one of China’s most popular love stories that allowed its adapters past and present to explore all possibilities of the relations between the sexes. The story also spread widely throughout East Asia and beyond. In this richly illustrated monograph Liang Luo studies the continuous developments of the legend in print, on stage, in cinema, and in digital media in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, and Japan as well as Southeast Asia and Northern America from the late nineteenth century to the 2010s, offering an engrossing and highly original window onto the imagination of the Other in East and West.”—Wilt L. Idema, author of The White Snake and Her Son: A Translation of the Precious Scroll of Thunder Peak with Related Texts“This rigorous and exciting study presents a folk narrative and its transmutations that will provoke new theoretical directions for examining the relations between traditional and tradition-inspired narrative. The Global White Snake brings together the relevant sources, versions, and theory that will show readers a clear idea of the White Snake narrative tradition and its meanings in various literary, performative, and social contexts. The compelling, stimulating, fascinating scholarship will deepen and expand readers’ understanding of the Chinese vernacular literary/live-performance traditions, as well as the emerging means of transmission and creativity in virtual, online, digital formats.”—Mark Bender, author of The Nuosu Book of Origins: A Creation Epic from Southwest China“In Liang Luo, the beloved White Snake has found her bard for her numerous retellings and variants across the centuries from folk legend to the Shanghai screen, television, internet animation, feminist novel, and riotous musicals and opera; from forbidden love, struggle against Buddhist norms, and spiritual awakening to women's rights and homosexual love; and from Eastern China's cultural cities (Zhenjiang, Hangzhou, and Suzhou) to transformations in Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and the U.S. Lucidly and engagingly written, Liang Luo has not only made accessible a wealth of cultural riches to the Anglophone world, but charted their deployments across Republican, Cold War, and global cultural politics.”—Michael M.J. Fischer, author of Anthropology in the Meantime: Experimental Ethnography, Theory, and Method for the Twenty-First Century“The Global White Snake is an astonishing achievement, filled with dynamic examinations of the ancient legend and its many recent global adaptations. Blending insights from media theory, transnational literature, queer studies, folklore, and animal studies, this learned and accessible book shows how cultural objects move around the world and, just as important, how the world makes new meaning out of borrowed cultural objects. The capaciousness and fluidity of the white snake legend itself are matched only by the brilliance and generosity of the account Liang Luo offers in this book.”—Peter J. Kalliney, author of Modernism in a Global Context

Few social issues have received more public attention and scholarly debate than the death penalty. While the abolitionist movement has made a successful stride in recent decades, a small number of countries remain committed to the death penalty and impose it with a relatively high frequency. In this regard, the People’s Republic of China no doubt leads the world in both numbers of death sentences and executions. Despite being the largest user of the death penalty, China has never conducted a national poll on citizens’ opinions toward capital punishment, while claiming “overwhelming public support” as a major justification for its retention and use.Based on a content analysis of 38,512 comments collected from 63 cases in 2015, this study examines the diversity and rationales of netizens’ opinions of and interactions with China’s criminal justice system. In addition, the book discusses China’s social, systemic, and structural problems and critically examines the rationality of netizens’ opinions based on Habermas’s communicative rationality framework. Readers will be able to contextualize Chinese netizens’ discussions and draw conclusions about commonalities and uniqueness of China’s death penalty practice.

Resisting Spirits is a reconsideration of the significance and periodization of literary production in the high socialist era, roughly 1953 through 1966, specifically focused on Mao-era culture workers’ experiments with ghosts and ghost plays. Maggie Greene combines rare manuscript materials—such as theatre troupes’ annotated practice scripts—with archival documents, memoirs, newspapers, and films to track key debates over the direction of socialist aesthetics. Through arguments over the role of ghosts in literature, Greene illuminates the ways in which culture workers were able to make space for aesthetic innovation and contestation both despite and because of the constantly shifting political demands of the Mao era. Ghosts were caught up in the broader discourse of superstition, modernization, and China’s social and cultural future. Yet, as Greene demonstrates, the ramifications of those concerns as manifested in the actual craft of writing and performing plays led to further debates in the realm of literature itself: If we remove the ghost from a ghost play, does it remain a ghost play? Does it lose its artistic value, its didactic value, or both? At the heart of Greene’s intervention is “just reading”: the book regards literature first as literature, rather than searching immediately for its political subtext, and the voices of dramatists themselves finally upstage those of Mao’s inner circle. Ironically, this surface reading reveals layers of history that scholars of the Mao era have often ignored, including the ways in which social relations and artistic commitments continued to inform the world of art. Focusing on these concerns points to continuities and ruptures in the cultural history of modern China beyond the bounds of “campaign time.” Resisting Spirits thus illuminates the origins of more famous literary inquisitions, including that surrounding Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, by exploring ghost plays such as Li Huiniang that at first appear more innocent. To the contrary, Greene shows how the arguments surrounding ghost plays and the fates of their authors place the origins of the Cultural Revolution several years earlier, with a radical new shift in the discourse of theatre.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, modern Chinese intellectuals, reformers, revolutionaries, leftist journalists, and idealistic youth had often crossed the increasing gap between the city and the countryside, which made the act of “going to the countryside” a distinctively modern experience and a continuous practice in China. Such a spatial crossing eventually culminated in the socialist state program of “down to the villages” movements during the 1960s and 1970s. What, then, was the special significance of “going to the countryside” before that era? Going to the Countryside deals with the cultural representations and practices of this practice between 1915 and 1965, focusing on individual homecoming, rural reconstruction, revolutionary journeys to Yan’an, the revolutionary “going down to the people” as well as going to the frontiers and rural hometowns for socialist construction. As part of the larger discourses of enlightenment, revolution, and socialist industrialization, “going to the countryside” entailed new ways of looking at the world and ordinary people, brought about new experiences of space and time, initiated new means of human communication and interaction, generated new forms of cultural production, revealed a fundamental epistemic shift in modern China, and ultimately created a new aesthetic, social, and political landscape.As a critical response to the “urban turn” in the past few decades, this book brings the rural back to the central concern of Chinese cultural studies and aims to bridge the city and the countryside as two types of important geographical entities, which have often remained as disparate scholarly subjects of inquiry in the current state of China studies. Chinese modernity has been characterized by a dual process that created problems from the vast gap between the city and the countryside but simultaneously initiated constant efforts to cope with the gap personally, collectively, and institutionally. The process of “crossing” two distinct geographical spaces was often presented as continuous explorations of various ways of establishing the connectivity, interaction, and relationship of these two imagined geographical entities. Going to the Countryside argues that this new body of cultural productions did not merely turn the rural into a constantly changing representational space; most importantly, the rural has been constructed as a distinct modern experiential and aesthetic realm characterized by revolutionary changes in human conceptions and sentiments.

Rapid social economic changes, the transition from a planned economy to a market economy, or even economic liberalization can lead to political instability and the collapse of authoritarian regimes. Despite experiencing all of these unprecedented changes in the past forty years, China under the Chinese Communist Party’s leadership has so far successfully transformed and improved both its governance capacity and its ruling capacity. Governing and Ruling addresses this regime resilience puzzle by examining the political logic of its taxation system, especially the ways in which taxation helps China handle three governance problems: maneuvering social control, improving agent discipline, and eliciting cooperation. Changdong Zhang argues that a taxation system plays an important role in sustaining authoritarian rule, in China and elsewhere, by combining co-optation and repression functions. The book collects valuable firsthand and secondhand data; studies China’s taxation system, intergovernmental fiscal relationships, composition of fiscal revenue sources, and tax administration; and discusses how each dimension influences the three governance problems.

Dr. Hu Shih (1891–1962) was one of China’s top scholars and diplomats and served as the Republic of China’s ambassador to the United States during World War II. As early as 1941, Hu Shih warned of the fundamental ideological conflict between dictatorial totalitarianism and democratic systems, a view that later became the foundation of the Cold War narrative. In the 1950s, after Mao’s authoritarian regime was established, Hu Shih started to analyze the development and nature of Communism, delivering a series of lectures and addresses to reveal what he called Stalin’s “grand strategy” for facilitating the International Communist Movement.For decades—and today to a certain extent—Hu Shih’s political writings were considered sensitive and even dangerous. As a strident critic of the Chinese Communist Party’s oligarchical practices, he was targeted by the CCP in a concerted national campaign to smear his reputation, cast aspersions on his writings, and generally destroy any possible influence he might have in China. This volume brings together a collection of Hu Shih’s most important, mostly unpublished, English-language speeches, interviews, and commentaries on international politics, China-U.S. relations, and the International Communist Movement. Taken together, these works provide an insider’s perspective on Sino-American relations and the development of the International Communist Movement over the course of the 20th century.

The serial narrative is one of the most robust and popular forms of storytelling in contemporary China. With a domestic audience of one billion-plus and growing transnational influence and accessibility, this form of storytelling is becoming the centerpiece of a fast-growing digital entertainment industry and a new symbol and carrier of China’s soft power. Televising Chineseness: Gender, Nation, and Subjectivity explores how television and online dramas imagine the Chinese nation and form postsocialist Chinese gendered subjects. The book addresses a conspicuous paradox in Chinese popular culture today: the coexistence of increasingly diverse gender presentations and conservative gender policing by the government, viewers, and society. Using first-hand data collected through interviews and focus group discussions with audiences comprising viewers of different ages, genders, and educational backgrounds, Televising Chineseness sheds light on how television culture relates to the power mechanisms and truth regimes that shape the understanding of gender and the construction of gendered subjects in postsocialist China.

Righteous Revolutionaries illustrates how states appeal to popular morality—shared understandings of right and wrong—to forge new group identities and mobilize violence against perceived threats to their authority. Jeffrey A. Javed examines the Chinese Communist Party’s mass mobilization of violence during its land reform campaign in the early 1950s, one of the most violent and successful state-building efforts in history. Using an array of novel archival, documentary, and quantitative historical data, this book illustrates that China’s land reform campaign was not just about economic redistribution but rather part of a larger, brutally violent state-building effort to delegitimize the new party-state’s internal rivals and establish its moral authority.Righteous Revolutionaries argues that the Chinese Party-state simultaneously removed perceived threats to its authority at the grassroots and bolstered its legitimacy through a process called moral mobilization. This mobilization process created a moral boundary that designated a virtuous ingroup of “the masses” and a demonized outgroup of “class enemies,” mobilized the masses to participate in violence against this broadly defined outgroup, and strengthened this symbolic boundary by making the masses complicit in state violence. Righteous Revolutionaries shows how we can find traces of moral mobilization in China today under Xi Jinping’s rule. In an era where states and politicians regularly weaponize moral emotions to foment intergroup conflict and violence, understanding the dynamics of violent mobilization and state authority are more relevant than ever before.

Working for the administration remains one of the most coveted career paths for young Chinese. Rejuvenating Communism: Youth Organizations and Elite Renewal in Post-Mao China seeks to understand what motivates young and educated Chinese to commit to a long-term career in the party-state and how this question is central to the Chinese regime’s ability to maintain its cohesion and survive. Jérôme Doyon draws upon extensive fieldwork and statistical analysis in order to illuminate the undogmatic commitment recruitment techniques and other methods the state has taken to develop a diffuse allegiance to the party-state in the post-Mao era. He then analyzes recruitment and political professionalization in the Communist Party’s youth organizations and shows how experiences in the Chinese Communist Youth League transform recruits and feed their political commitment as they are gradually inducted into the world of officials. As the first in-depth study of the Communist Youth League’s role in recruitment, this book challenges the assumption that merit is the main criteria for advancement within the party-state, an argument with deep implications for understanding Chinese politics today.

Disruptions as Opportunities: Governing Chinese Society with Interactive Authoritarianism addresses the long-standing puzzle of why China outlived other one-party authoritarian regimes with particular attention to how the state manages an emerging civil society. Drawing upon over 1,200 survey responses conducted in 126 villages in the Sichuan province, as well as 70 interviews conducted with Civil Society Organization (CSO) leaders and government officials, participant observation, and online research, the book proposes a new theory of interactive authoritarianism to explain how an adaptive authoritarian state manages nascent civil society. Sun argues that when new phenomena and forces are introduced into Chinese society, the Chinese state adopts a three-stage interactive approach toward societal actors: toleration, differentiation, and legalization without institutionalization. Sun looks to three disruptions—earthquakes, internet censorship, and social-media-based guerrilla resistance to the ride-sharing industry—to test his theory about the three-stage interactive authoritarian approach and argues that the Chinese government evolves and consolidates its power in moments of crisis.

China’s news sector is a place where newsmakers, advertising executives, company bosses, and Party officials engage one another in contingent and evolving arrangements that run from cooperation and collaboration to manipulation and betrayal. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with journalists, editors, and executives at a newspaper in Guangzhou, The Currency of Truth brings its readers into the lives of the people who write, publish, and profit from news in this milieu. The book shows that far from working as mere cogs in a Party propaganda machine, these individuals are immersed in fluidly shifting networks of formal and informal relationships, which they carefully navigate to pursue diverse goals.In The Currency of Truth, Emily H. C. Chua argues that news in China works less as a medium of mass communication than as a kind of currency as industry players make and use news articles to create agreements, build connections, and protect and advance their positions against one another. Looking at the ethical and professional principles that well-intentioned and civically minded journalists strive to uphold, and the challenges and doubts that they grapple with in the process, Chua brings her findings into conversation around “post-truth” news and the “crisis” of professional journalism in the West. The book encourages readers to rethink contemporary news, arguing that rather than setting out from the assumption that news works either to inform or deceive its publics, we should explore the “post-public” social and political imaginaries emerging among today’s newsmakers and remaking the terms of their practice.

One of the most significant global events in the last forty years has been the rise of China— economically, technologically, politically, and militarily. The question on people's minds for decades has been whether China will replace the United States as a superpower in the near future. But for China, this power must be comprehensive — having strong economic and militant forces are only two pieces of the puzzle. China must also possess soft power, such as attractive ideologies, values, and culture.China as Number One? explores China’s soft powers through the eyes of Chinese citizens. Utilizing data from the World Values Survey, the contributors to this collection analyze the potential soft power of a rising China by examining its residents' social values. A comprehensive study of changes and continuities in the political and social values of Chinese citizens, the book examines findings in the context of evolutionary modernization theory and cross-national comparison.

Seeking a Future for the Past: Space, Power, and Heritage in a Chinese City examines the complexities and changing sociopolitical dynamics of urban renewal in contemporary China. Drawing on ten years of ethnographic fieldwork in the northeastern Chinese city of Qingdao, the book tells the story of the slow, fragmented, and contentious transformation of Dabaodao—an area in the city’s former colonial center—from a place of common homes occupied by the urban poor into a showcase of architectural heritage and site for tourism and consumption. The ethnography provides a nuanced account of the diverse experiences and views of a range of groups involved in shaping, and being shaped, by the urban renewal process—local residents, migrant workers, preservationists, planners, and government officials—foregrounding the voices and experiences of marginal groups, such as migrants in the city. Unpacking structural reasons for urban developmental impasses, it paints a nuanced local picture of urban governance and political practice in contemporary urban China. Seeking a Future for the Past also weighs the positives and negatives of heritage preservation and scrutinizes the meanings and effects of “preservation” on diverse social actors. By zeroing in on the seemingly contradictory yet coexisting processes of urban stagnation and urban destruction, the book reveals the multifaceted challenges that China faces in reforming its urbanization practices and, ultimately, in managing its urban future.

A brief stay in France was, for many Chinese workers and Chinese Communist Party leaders, a vital stepping stone for their careers during the cultural and political push to modernize China after World War I. For the Chinese students who went abroad specifically to study Western art and literature, these trips meant something else entirely. Set against the backdrop of interwar Paris, Paris and the Art of Transposition uncovers previously marginalized archives to reveal the artistic strategies employed by Chinese artists and writers in the early twentieth-century transnational imaginary and to explain why Paris played such a central role in the global reception of modern Chinese literature and art. While previous studies of Chinese modernism have focused on how Western modernist aesthetics were adapted or translated to the Chinese context, Angie Chau does the opposite by turning to Paris in the Chinese imaginary and discussing the literary and visual artwork of five artists who moved between France and China: the painter Chang Yu, the poet Li Jinfa, the art critic Fu Lei, the painter Pan Yuliang, and the writer Xu Xu. Chau draws the idea of transposition from music theory where it refers to shifting music from one key or clef to another, or to adapting a song originally composed for one instrument to be played by another. Transposing transposition to the study of art and literature, Chau uses the term to describe a fluid and strategic art practice that depends on the tension between foreign and familiar, new and old, celebrating both novelty and recognition—a process that occurs when a text gets placed into a fresh context.

In Search of Admiration and Respect examines the institutionalization of Chinese cultural diplomacy in the period between high imperialism and the international ascendance of the People’s Republic of China. During these years, Chinese intellectuals and officials tried to promote the idea of China’s cultural refinement in an effort to combat negative perceptions of the nation. Yanqiu Zheng argues that, unlike similar projects by more established powers, Chinese cultural diplomacy in this era was not carried out solely by a functional government agency; rather, limited resources forced an uneasy collaboration between the New York-based China Institute and the Chinese Nationalist government. In Search of Admiration and Respect uses the Chinese case to underscore what Zheng calls “infrastructure of persuasion,” in which American philanthropy, museums, exhibitions, and show business had disproportionate power in setting the agenda of unequal intercultural encounters. This volume also provides historical insights into China’s ongoing quest for international recognition. Drawing upon diverse archival sources, Zheng expands the contours of cultural diplomacy beyond established powers and sheds light on the limited agency of peripheral nations in their self-representation.

While the processes of founding a new state or constructing a new political order after a transition have been well-studied, there has been much less attention to how regimes that survive major political crises purposefully reinvent a postcrisis state to respond to updated concepts, new circumstances, changed social demands, and a realigned elite consensus. In Engineering Stability, Yan Xiaojun examines the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to reassert control and restore order on university campuses in the post-Tiananmen era. Since prominent national universities serve the nation-state as training grounds for the country’s future political, economic, and cultural elites, public life on university campuses has immediate political relevance. Drawing on rich materials gathered from in-depth field research in China during the Xi Jinping era, Engineering Stability invites scholars of comparative politics, state theory, contentious politics, and political development to rethink and reimagine how what Yan calls “a compromised autocratic state” is rebuilt within and from itself after overcoming a traumatic moment of vulnerability. The book further details the four types of infrastructure — institutional, significative, regulatory, and incentivizing — that state rebuilders need to overhaul, and looks into the campaign of state rebuilding in post-Tiananmen Chinese universities and its implications for our understanding of politics in general.

Gendered Memories: An Imaginary Museum for Ding Ling and Chinese Female Revolutionary Martyrs takes readers on a journey through the lives and legacies of Chinese female revolutionary martyrs, revealing how their sacrifices have been remembered, commemorated, and manipulated throughout history. This innovative book blends historical narratives with personal narratives, creating an “imaginary museum” where the stories of these women are brought to life. Author Xian Wang employs this imaginary museum to create a conceptual space mirroring an actual museum that juxtaposes historical narratives with countermemories of Chinese female revolutionaries, such as the prominent writer Ding Ling. Exploring Ding’s experiences with martyrdom and the commemoration of female revolutionary martyrs associated with her, the book provides a compelling argument that female revolutionary martyrdom reinforces, rather than rejects, the traditional concept of female chastity martyrdom. Narratives that challenge established gender norms, particularly those surrounding female chastity, have often been silenced or overlooked in the collective memory of these female revolutionary martyrs. By delving into these countermemories, Wang provides fresh insights into gendered violence, memories, and politics in modern Chinese literature and culture.

Ethnic Minority Cinema in China’s Nation-State Building investigates the relationship between cinematic productions about non-Han ethnic minorities and China’s nation-state building project from the early Republican era of the 1920s to the current authoritarian regime in the twenty-first century. Kwai-Cheung Lo argues that the glossy, but superficial, cinematic depictions of non-Han ethnic minorities manufactured and manipulated by state authorities have deeply penetrated the Chinese public’s conception of what an ideal multiethnic nation should be like as well as what it means to be Chinese under political unification. Lo understands these representations of ethnic minorities as part of a larger ecosystem and the cultures, values, and life practices of non-Han ethnic minorities as closely entwined with environmental issues and politics. This intertwining, Lo argues, suggests a crisis in “objectification and identification” of both people and the environment, that plays out in cinema featuring ethnic minorities. Lo traces these depictions of Chinese ethnic minority groups in films created by both Han-majority and non-Han filmmakers, examining how these representations became a site in which state authorities, Han and non-Han communities, and foreign agencies compete and interact under the larger context of building and imagining the Chinese nation-state.

China is a multicultural country home to fifty-five ethnic minority groups, yet due to linguistic and cultural barriers many of these groups remain understudied or unknown in the West. The Qiang, one of modern China’s officially recognized ethnic minorities, is also China’s longest-standing ethnoracial identity marker that has existed since the earliest recorded history of China. Creative Belonging investigates the formation and evolution of the Qiang as a people, a concept, and a cultural history in China. It further examines how the contemporary Qiang ethnic group interacts strategically with mainstream Chinese society, challenging the historically entrenched hierarchies between the sociocultural “centers” of China and its ethnic “peripheries.” This book is based on years of ethnographic and textual-archival research in the Himalayan regions of southwest China, where the contemporary Qiang group resides. Drawing on a diverse range of official and local political discourses and previously unstudied literary, historiographical, and cinematic works, Yanshuo Zhang illuminates how the Qiang have carved out spaces of “creative belonging” within the parameters of multiculturalism in contemporary China. Rooted in ethnographic and textual-archival research, the book presents original materials produced by Qiang indigenous writers, scholars, artists, grassroots village cultural activists, and entrepreneurs at both the local and the global levels. Creative Belonging invites readers to rethink ethnicity and national belonging in China by centering minority groups’ efforts to expand the meanings and implications of “Chinese culture.”

The Death and Life of Chinese Civil Society examines how a group of Chinese intellectual elites referred to as the liberals or ziyou pai edified the civil society project beginning in the 1990s to build an independent space to constrain state power, increase political participation, and promote China’s democratization. In the early 2000s, activists in movements such as the environmental and the AIDS movements identified with the liberals and regarded their activism as part of the project of building civil society. However, since the late 2000s the liberals’ influence has gradually declined. In prominent social movements in the 2010s such as the labor and feminist movements, activists have openly criticized the liberal interpretation of civil society and regarded liberals’ civil society agenda as irrelevant. Mujun Zhou employs the concept of interstitial space, or the space where the exercise of power has not been fully institutionalized, to examine the history of the civil society project over the past three decades and its changing relationship with other social movements. Zhou suggests that by advocating for civil society the liberals gained allies and thematized many social problems rising during China’s economic reform; however, liberals’ activism also produced new forms of power inequalities.

Reportage in the Chinese-Speaking World examines reportage as an important aesthetic form of cultural production in the Sinophone world. Originating as a proletarian nonfiction form in interwar Europe, reportage spread around the world, coming into its own in the Sinophone world from the 1930s to today. Going beyond fact-based journalism, reportage is pursued through a variety of artistic forms and media, from nonfiction writing to photography to documentary film. Reportage’s plurimedial representations facilitate and amplify intersectional struggles against multiple forms of social and political oppression. Engaging its audiences in affective ethico-political exchanges with (human or nonhuman) subjects, reportage promotes audiences’ empathetic responses to the democratic appeals of marginalized groups whose status, identity, or situation manifest emergent ethical challenges in the society of their time.This work offers new understandings of reportage’s dialectical relationship with its readership by evoking sympathetic identifications with personal contemplations of place, hearth, and senses of belonging. Covering a breadth of media across mainland China, Taiwan, and the Sinophone diaspora in the United States and Japan, this book examines how intermediality cultivates distinctive expressions in reportage, cross-cultural empathy, and ethico-political relationships between the reporter, photographer, filmmaker, and their surroundings.

China’s Date Debate is an in-depth investigation of the Chinese Communist Party’s remapping of China’s World War II timeline from eight years (1937–1945) to fourteen years (1931–1945). Instead of the previously accepted starting date of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident on July 7, 1937, the Chinese Communist Party defined the war’s starting date as the Mukden Incident on September 18, 1931, which triggered the Japanese Kwantung Army’s invasion of Manchuria. Since the 1980s, scholars from Manchuria have demanded a fourteen-year war timeline to encompass the invasion of their homeland. By the 1990s, other scholars took notice and started to counter with claims that the eight-year timeline was the more accurate. Subsequently, a fierce “date debate” emerged between the two sides that was only resolved by the 2017 proclamation from the Ministry of Education. Emily Matson demonstrates that the decision to set China’s World War II timeline at fourteen years was not merely a top-down decision, but was influenced by decades of Manchurian scholarship on the war. China’s Date Debate recenters Manchuria as a region of critical importance for China’s national identity today and the implications of this “date debate” on the Chinese Communist Party’s domestic legitimacy and international image.

Home Team Away calls for a rethinking of sport fandom that is divorced from an attachment to location. As the first comprehensive account of the European football fandom in China, this book explores how the Chinese middle class subjectivity is formed through the cross-cultural, digital consumption of the Big Five leagues. Yuan Gong captures the embodied experiences of fans and fan clubs, fan discourses and activities unfolding on digital platforms on Weibo, Weixin, and Hupu, combining fieldwork in Shanghai and virtual ethnography. Gong argues that Chinese fans’ decisions to follow and engage with European football result from their material conditions, ideological contestation, and technology appropriation as a new demographic bloc arising during China’s transition to authoritarian digital capitalism. By engaging with their home teams away, the Chinese middle class fans perform as citizens with a global vision despite the resurgence of the nationalist and anti-Western sentiments.

With a keen attention to how culture and elite conflict shape politics, The Great Separation upends deterministic understandings of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the market reforms that followed. This ambitious posthumous volume by sociologist Xiaohong Xu turns the existing scholarship on China’s “neoliberalism” on its head by demonstrating that the effort to separate mass politics from economic policy had its origins well before the Reform and Opening-up era. Over the course of the Cultural Revolution, unfolding factional dynamics and interpretive struggles enabled Chairman Mao and his radical colleagues to mobilize workers to advance their own political goals while neutralizing the masses’ economic demands, symbolically separating the political from the economic. This set the stage for a more thoroughgoing depoliticization of the economy after 1989, when China faced challenges from students and workers whose economic grievances had rapidly morphed into political demands for democracy. The result was what Xu calls ordoeconomism: an ideology that valorizes economic development, rejects mass politics, and views the state as the apolitical guardian of the economy. As Xu demonstrates, while ordoeconomism may share some affinities with neoliberalism, it is a distinctively Chinese approach that must be understood on its own terms.

Cold War and Sinophone Culture at the Borders examines Sinophone literary and cultural production in relation to the politics of the global Cold War and decolonization in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia. As we reckon with the historical and contemporary geopolitical standoffs in the Cold War–divided territories, Shuang Shen draws attention to the diasporic communities outside Chinese sovereign territories and shows that these supposedly peripheral locations were in fact significant cultural and political hot spots. Shen demonstrates how Cold War borders exerted geo-power over strategic hot spots, organized global flows of populations and cultures, hardened the boundaries of aesthetic debates, and managed interracial relationships and plurilingual exchange. The multifold bordering effect in turn complicates the common perception of the border as a mechanism of territorial division. Cold War and Sinophone Culture at the Borders proposes that a critical examination of borders—not just territorial divisions, but also social, political, and aesthetic boundaries––can tap into different structures of power without needing to incorporate them into a single binary framework of the metropole versus colony.

How do you build a hopeful future when your present is designed to be temporary? Brutal Ephemerality reveals that the sprawling urban villages on the edge of megacities such as Beijing aren’t slums that grew by accident. Instead, urban villages are intentionally kept in a state of uncertainty, allowing the city to have a ready supply of cheap land and flexible labor to fuel its rapid growth. Yang Zhan proposes the concept of “migrant venturers” (chuǎngdàngzhě) and argues that “venturing” (chuǎngdàng) represents a distinct survival strategy of mobility, risk-taking, and opportunity seeking, rather than rooting oneself in a specific place or profession. This strategy is an active practice of “future-making”—an effort to project a meaningful future from an uncertain present. Brutal Ephemerality demonstrates how time is not a neutral backdrop, but the central arena for political struggle, ethical practice, and imaginative creation among marginalized groups. Zhan shows how hope and suffering are paradoxically intertwined, and how the very struggle for a better life can, itself, become a source of harm.

Resisting Spirits is a reconsideration of the significance and periodization of literary production in the high socialist era, roughly 1953 through 1966, specifically focused on Mao-era culture workers’ experiments with ghosts and ghost plays. Maggie Greene combines rare manuscript materials—such as theatre troupes’ annotated practice scripts—with archival documents, memoirs, newspapers, and films to track key debates over the direction of socialist aesthetics. Through arguments over the role of ghosts in literature, Greene illuminates the ways in which culture workers were able to make space for aesthetic innovation and contestation both despite and because of the constantly shifting political demands of the Mao era. Ghosts were caught up in the broader discourse of superstition, modernization, and China’s social and cultural future. Yet, as Greene demonstrates, the ramifications of those concerns as manifested in the actual craft of writing and performing plays led to further debates in the realm of literature itself: If we remove the ghost from a ghost play, does it remain a ghost play? Does it lose its artistic value, its didactic value, or both? At the heart of Greene’s intervention is “just reading”: the book regards literature first as literature, rather than searching immediately for its political subtext, and the voices of dramatists themselves finally upstage those of Mao’s inner circle. Ironically, this surface reading reveals layers of history that scholars of the Mao era have often ignored, including the ways in which social relations and artistic commitments continued to inform the world of art. Focusing on these concerns points to continuities and ruptures in the cultural history of modern China beyond the bounds of “campaign time.” Resisting Spirits thus illuminates the origins of more famous literary inquisitions, including that surrounding Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, by exploring ghost plays such as Li Huiniang that at first appear more innocent. To the contrary, Greene shows how the arguments surrounding ghost plays and the fates of their authors place the origins of the Cultural Revolution several years earlier, with a radical new shift in the discourse of theatre.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, modern Chinese intellectuals, reformers, revolutionaries, leftist journalists, and idealistic youth had often crossed the increasing gap between the city and the countryside, which made the act of “going to the countryside” a distinctively modern experience and a continuous practice in China. Such a spatial crossing eventually culminated in the socialist state program of “down to the villages” movements during the 1960s and 1970s. What, then, was the special significance of “going to the countryside” before that era? Going to the Countryside deals with the cultural representations and practices of this practice between 1915 and 1965, focusing on individual homecoming, rural reconstruction, revolutionary journeys to Yan’an, the revolutionary “going down to the people” as well as going to the frontiers and rural hometowns for socialist construction. As part of the larger discourses of enlightenment, revolution, and socialist industrialization, “going to the countryside” entailed new ways of looking at the world and ordinary people, brought about new experiences of space and time, initiated new means of human communication and interaction, generated new forms of cultural production, revealed a fundamental epistemic shift in modern China, and ultimately created a new aesthetic, social, and political landscape.As a critical response to the “urban turn” in the past few decades, this book brings the rural back to the central concern of Chinese cultural studies and aims to bridge the city and the countryside as two types of important geographical entities, which have often remained as disparate scholarly subjects of inquiry in the current state of China studies. Chinese modernity has been characterized by a dual process that created problems from the vast gap between the city and the countryside but simultaneously initiated constant efforts to cope with the gap personally, collectively, and institutionally. The process of “crossing” two distinct geographical spaces was often presented as continuous explorations of various ways of establishing the connectivity, interaction, and relationship of these two imagined geographical entities. Going to the Countryside argues that this new body of cultural productions did not merely turn the rural into a constantly changing representational space; most importantly, the rural has been constructed as a distinct modern experiential and aesthetic realm characterized by revolutionary changes in human conceptions and sentiments.