PEKING UNIVERSITY SERIES ON SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY – serie

This book closely examines one relatively small but significant political phenomenon — Suku in Revolutionary China through a matrix of western social theory: Freud, Marcuse, Arendt, and Ricoeur. Suku is the practice of confessing individual suffering in a political context and in a collective public forum. By interpreting Suku from the joint perspectives of political identity and subjective psychological identity, the aim of the book is to postulate a new paradigm for discussing social suffering and collective confession in a political context that represents the radical transformation in China's modern history. This book presents an analysis of the transformation of identity from the traditional to the modern, both for the individual peasant and for the state of China.

De-politicizing issues of ethnicity is a new theoretical approach to study ethnic questions actively propounded and elaborated by Professor Ma Rong of Sociology Department of Peking University in the past ten years. In the recent years, this theoretical approach has aroused biggish responses from the academic community in Mainland China, the relevant government departments, and the general public. It is likely to elicit vigorous discussions in the years ahead. The book contains eight selected chapters which represent the main contributions to the debate. The first chapter by Ma Rong is the key paper where in he lays out his main ideas and arguments. The remaining chapters deal with both positive and negative responses to the first chapter, and his replies to them.

Contemporary Chinese rural life is placed in sharp theoretical and practical focus in this book. State-of-the-art techniques and perspectives are combined to take the reader into Xiaocun, a small village on the east bank of the Dianchi Lake in Kunming City.In 2003, the author published the book Crime and Punishment: The Story of Xiaocun (1931–1997), which dealt with disputes, mediation and punishment in the village following the legal anthropology tradition. At that time, neither the villagers nor the author foresaw the vast changes that were to appear a few years later. Their main economic activity then was growing vegetables and flowers; urbanisation was tsunami-like in its speed and impact. Land requisition for urban development was so swift that five years later, in 2008, there was no farmland left. Instead, there were many landmark real estate and development projects. Xiaocun has become the centre of an enlarged Kunming City. Observers, including the Xiaocun residents, are unavoidably shocked at the changes to the physical landscape in the wake of its rapid urbanisation.This book, Topography of Politics in Rural China: The Story of Xiaocun, reports the author's revisits to the village starting in early 2007. In the past few years of research on this village, the author deeply felt that the problems that make people passionate are fully exposed through issues surrounding land and housing. Well written in narrative, this book tells the story of Xiaocun in this new century from the perspective of topography, exploring the peasantry and its relations to the state in more fundamental terms.

This book explores the development of the putting-out system in hand-woven textile industries in late Qing Dynasty and China's Republican Period. In classic sociology theory, the putting-out system in handcraft production was regarded as traditional and inefficient. In the context of Republican China, it was believed that this kind of household-based production system would have totally failed in competition with the factory system of machinery production. However, this book exhibits the historical fact that the putting-out system was booming in handcraft textile production and subsequently provides an explanation to this phenomenon from the perspectives of institutional analysis and quantitative modeling. With rich county-level data and comprehensive analysis, this book is valuable for both researchers, academics and students in economics and social history studies.