This book offers a sharp, critical analysis of the rise and fall of the 2019 anti-extradition bill movement in Hong Kong, including prior events like Occupy Central and the Mongkok Fishball Revolution, as well as their aftermaths in light of the re-assertion of mainland sovereignty over the SAR. Reading the conflict against the grain of those who would romanticize it or simply condemn it in nationalistic fashion, Vukovich goes beyond mediatized discourse to disentangle its roots in the Bas...

Against the dire consequences of China’s market development, a new intellectual force of the New Left has come on the scene since the mid 1990s. New Left intellectuals debate the issues of social justice, distributive equality, markets, state intervention, the socialist legacy, and sustainable development. Against the neoliberal trends of free markets, liberal democracy, and consumerism, New Left critics launched a critique in hopes of seeking an alternative to global capitalism. This volu...

China is now poised to take a key role on the world stage, but in the early twentieth century the situation could not have been more different. Rana Mitter goes back to this pivotal moment in Chinese history to uncover the origins of the painful transition from a premodern past into a modern world. Mitter takes us through the resulting social turmoil and political promise, the devastating war against Japan in the 1940s, Communism and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, and the new era of...

Centering his analysis in the dynamic forces of modern East Asian history, Kuan-Hsing Chen recasts cultural studies as a politically urgent global endeavor. He argues that the intellectual and subjective work of decolonization begun across East Asia after the Second World War was stalled by the cold war. At the same time, the work of deimperialization became impossible to imagine in imperial centers such as Japan and the United States. Chen contends that it is now necessary to resume those...

On March 9, 1996, tens of thousands of readers of a daily newspaper in China’s Anhui province saw a photograph of two young women at a local long-distance bus station. Dressed in fashionable new winter coats and carrying luggage printed with Latin letters, the women were returning home from their jobs in one of China’s large cities. As the photo caption indicated, the image represented the “transformation of migrant women”; the women’s “transformation” was signaled by their status as consu...

This classic text by Fei Xiaotong, China's finest social scientist, was first published in 1947 and is Fei's chief theoretical statement about the distinctive characteristics of Chinese society. Written in Chinese from a Chinese point of view for a Chinese audience, From the Soil describes the contrasting organizational principles of Chinese and Western societies, thereby conveying the essential features of both. Fei shows how these unique features reflect and are reflected in the...

At the start of the twenty-first century, China is poised to become a major global power. Understanding its culture is more important than ever before for western audiences, but for many, China remains a mysterious and exotic country. This Companion explains key aspects of modern Chinese culture without assuming prior knowledge of China or the Chinese language. The volume acknowledges the interconnected nature of the different cultural forms, from 'high culture' such as literature, religio...

This book argues that there is a new, Sinological form of orientalism at work in the world. It has shifted from a logic of ‘essential difference’ to one of ‘sameness’ or general equivalence. "China" is now in a halting but inevitable process of becoming-the-same as the USA and the West. Orientalism is now closer to the cultural logic of capitalism, even as it shows the afterlives of colonial discourse. This shift reflects our era of increasing globalization; the migration of orientalism to...

China’s rise and processes of Sinicization suggest that recombination of new and old elements rather than a total rupture with or return to the past is China’s likely future. In both space and time, civilizational politics offers the broadest social context. It is of particular salience in China. Reification of civilizations into simple categories such as East and West is widespread in everyday politics and common in policy and academic writings. This book’s emphasis on Sinicization as a s...

Mao Zedong envisioned a great struggle to "wreak havoc under the heaven" when he launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966. But as radicalized Chinese youth rose up against Party officials, events quickly slipped from the government's grasp, and rebellion took on a life of its own. Turmoil became a reality in a way the Great Leader had not foreseen. The Cultural Revolution at the Margins recaptures these formative moments from the perspective of the disenfranchised and dis...

In Postsocialism and Cultural Politics, Xudong Zhang offers a critical analysis of China’s “long 1990s,” the tumultuous years between the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001. The 1990s were marked by Deng Xiaoping’s market-oriented reforms, the Taiwan missile crisis, the Asian financial crisis, and the end of British colonial rule of Hong Kong. Considering developments including the state’s cultivation of a market economy, th...

Analyzing contemporary Chinese literature, film, and television, Shen shows the significance of nationalism for the mass imagination in post-socialist China. Chapters move from the intellectual idealism of the 1980s, through the post-Tiananmen transition, to the national cinema of the 1990s, and finally to the Internet literature of today.