Rethinking Socialism and Reform in China – serie

Over the past seven decades—since the 1949 Revolution—every aspect of Chinese society has been profoundly transformed multiple times. No sector has experienced more tumultuous twists and turns than industry. The eight articles contained in this volume examine these twists and turns, focusing on those aspects of industrial relations that involve contention and power, that is, factory politics. They were selected among articles that have appeared in the Chinese journal Open Times (开放时代) over the past decade. Because Open Times has a well-earned reputation for publishing diverse viewpoints, it has been able to attract some of the very best scholarship in China.

Ethnic Minorities in Socialist China: Development, Migration, Culture, and Identity, edited by Dr. Han Xiaorong and translated into English by Zeng Qiang, presents nine articles written by Chinese scholars about the transformation of China’s ethnic minority groups in the socialist era. Focusing on seven of the 55 ethnic minorities in China, the nine articles cover four major themes: development, migration, culture and identity. These case studies are based on both fieldwork and written sources, and most authors make connections between their case studies and relevant social scientific theories. Peoples and places studied include the autonomous regions of Tibet and Inner Mongolia; the Hanni, Dai, and Bai peoples of Yunnan Province; Miao farmers of Yangjiang in Guangdong; and the Yi people of the Pearl River Delta region. These studies, which originally appeared in Open Times (开放时代), broadly reflect the concerns, interests and perspectives of the Chinese scholars involved in the study of China’s ethnic minorities.

The rapid marketization of rural labor, agricultural products, and land has dramatically reshaped village life and its structures of governance. This volume, edited by Alexander F. Day, collects twelve key essays translated from Chinese on this transformation of rural society and governance over the past 20 years. These essays, originally published in the leading Chinese-language journal Open Times (开放时代), cover class differentiation, the atomization of rural society, the hollowing out of rural governance, land transfer, rural activism against marketization, lineage politics, the role of agricultural cooperatives, the transformation of small peasant farmers into wage labor, and the disintegration and expansion of peasant petitioning, all exploring the transformation in rural China during the post-socialist era.