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Afterlives of Chinese Communism comprises essays from over fifty world- renowned scholars in the China field, from various disciplines and continents. It provides an indispensable guide for understanding how the Mao era continues to shape Chinese politics today. Each chapter discusses a concept or practice from the Mao period, what it attempted to do, and what has become of it since. The authors respond to the legacy of Maoism from numerous perspectives to consider what lessons Chinese communism can offer today, and whether there is a future for the egalitarian politics that it once promised.
In 2021, the Chinese Communist Party celebrated a century of existence. Since the Party's humble beginnings in the Marxist groups of the Republican era to its current global ambitions, one thing has not changed for China's leaders: their claim to represent the vanguard of the Chinese working class. Spanning from the night classes for workers organised by student activists in Beijing in the 1910s to the labour struggles during the 1920s and 1930s; from the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution to the social convulsions of the reform era to China's global push today, this book reconstructs the contentious history of labour in China from the early twentieth century to this day (and beyond). This w...
This book analyzes the 'intellectual political culture' of post-Tiananmen China in comparison to and in conflict with liberalism inside and outside the P.R.C. How do mainland politics and discourses challenge ‘our’ own, chiefly liberal and anti-‘statist’ political frameworks? To what extent is China paradoxically intertwined with a liberal economism? How can one understand its general refusal of liberalism, as well as its frequent, direct responses to electoral democracy, universalism, Western media, and other normative forces? Vukovich argues that the Party-state poses a challenge to our understandings of politics, globalization, and even progress. To be illiberal is not necessarily to be reactionary and vulgar but, more interestingly, to be anti-liberal and to seek alternatives to a degraded liberalism. In this way Chinese politics illuminate the global conjuncture, and may have lessons in otherwise bleak times.
In Urban Horror Erin Y. Huang theorizes the economic, cultural, and political conditions of neoliberal post-socialist China. Drawing on Marxist phenomenology, geography, and aesthetics from Engels and Merleau-Ponty to Lefebvre and Rancière, Huang traces the emergence and mediation of what she calls urban horror—a sociopolitical public affect that exceeds comprehension and provides the grounds for possible future revolutionary dissent. She shows how documentaries, blockbuster feature films, and video art from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan made between the 1990s and the present rehearse and communicate urban horror. In these films urban horror circulates through myriad urban spaces characterized by the creation of speculative crises, shifting temporalities, and dystopic environments inhospitable to the human body. The cinematic image and the aesthetics of urban horror in neoliberal post-socialist China lay the groundwork for the future to such an extent, Huang contends, that the seeds of dissent at the heart of urban horror make it possible to imagine new forms of resistance.
According to the Chinese zodiac, 2018 was the year of the ‘earthly dog’. In the middle of the long, hot, and feverish dog days of the summer of 2018, some workers at Shenzhen Jasic Technology took their chances and attempted to form an independent union. While this action was met by the harshest repression, it also led to extraordinary demonstrations of solidarity from small groups of radical students from all over the country, which in turn were immediately and severely suppressed. China’s year of the dog was also imbued with the spirit of another canine, Cerberus—the three-headed hound of Hades—with the ravenous advance of the surveillance state and the increasing securitisation of Chinese society, starting from the northwestern region of Xinjiang. This Yearbook traces these latest developments in Chinese society through a collection of 50 original essays on labour, civil society, and human rights in China and beyond, penned by leading scholars and practitioners from around the world.
In 1994, workers broke ground on China’s Three Gorges Dam. By its completion in 2012, the dam had transformed the ecology of the Yangzi River, displaced over a million people, and forever altered a landscape immortalized in centuries of literature and art. The controversial history of the dam is well known; what this book uncovers are its unexpected connections to the cultural traditions it seems to sever. By reconsidering the dam in relation to the aesthetic history of the Three Gorges region over more than two millennia, Fixing Landscape offers radically new ways of thinking about cultural and spatial production in contemporary China. Corey Byrnes argues that this monumental feat of engi...
Revisiting fragmented authoritarianism in China's central energy administration / Nis Grünberg -- "Fragmented authoritarianism" or "integrated fragmentation"? / Kjeld Erik Brødsgaard -- Tobacco control in China : institutions, bureaucratic noncompliance and policy ineffectiveness / Jiwei Qian -- Unorthodox approaches to public participation in authoritarian regimes : the making of China's recent healthcare reforms / Yoel Kornreich -- Private interests in Chinese politics : a case study on health care sector reforms / Daniele Brombal -- Bargaining science : negotiating earthquakes / Louise Lyngfeldt Gorm Hansen -- "When one place is in trouble, help comes from all sides" : fragmented authoritarianism in post-disaster reconstruction / Christian Sorace -- Urban climate change politics in China : fragmented authoritarianism and governance innovations in Hangzhou / Jørgen Delman -- The domestic politics of China's financial reform / Yang Jiang -- Catalysts to the fragmented party control of the gun : is it hollowed from inside-out? / You Ji
This book is a collection of essays in honour of Professor Wang Gungwu. Professor Wang is not only a great historian on Chinese history in general and the Chinese overseas in particular, but has much wider influence through remarkable domain crossing, namely spatial crossing characterised by geographical straddling between inside and outside of China, temporal crossing from the ancient past to the contemporary, inter-disciplinary crossing from history to the social sciences, and intellectual crossing from the academia to public activism. He has been a long-lasting source of inspiration for understanding some of the most pressing and complex issues in our times, including the nature of China'...
Thaxton argues that the memory of the great famine under Mao shaped villagers' resistance to the socialist state.