Communications in contemporary China: orchestrating thinking

Reviewed by: Ghost Protocol: Development and Displacement in Global China eds. by Carlos Rojas and Ralph A. Litzinger Andrea Pia (bio) Carlos Rojas and Ralph A. Litzinger, editors. Ghost Protocol: Development and Displacement in Global China. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. viii, 260 pp. Paperback $25.95, isbn 978-0-8223-6193-0. Recent scholarship on contemporary China has been somewhat haunted by the image of the ghost, of the specter, and the phantasmal. There are very good reasons for this to be the case. One could see ghosts as the narratological device through which people make sense of their own as well as of others' [End Page 293] roundabout journeys within, between and away from communities of belonging. Ghosts can act as moral forces in the present. They make demands, take their toll on the living to whom they are forever bound by broken obligations. In this manifestation, ghosts fill with their enduring, re-signifying presence the social voids left behind by continuous change, of which contemporary China has experienced a great deal. In recent years, Chinese novels and documentaries, which the co-editors of the book under review are highly competent commentators of, have relied precisely on the register of the uncanny/phantasmal (mohuan) to thematize the struggles of communities hollowed-out by development, of families stretched thin and bereaved by oneway migration or of the modern Chinese self as it makes peace with its fractured conscience haunted by the violent memories of high socialism. By reconnecting them to the echoing legacies of their past, the narratological device of the ghost make communities, families, and individuals whole, if perhaps unresolved, once again. Ghost Protocol is an admirably crafted collection of essays that brings together leading and up-and-coming scholars of China working across the humanities and the interpretative social sciences to interrogate the problematic permanence of the ghost of Socialism, and of its accompanying critiques to the capitalist order, in contemporary post-socialist China. Their permanence, the book argues, complicates, but also makes more complete, our current understanding of political transitions to global capitalism everywhere, while seriously undermining any claims in support of the empirical stability and theoretical completeness of the project of capitalist modernity. As an intervention in the study of post-socialism, the book effectively re-works some of the mainstays of the literature in ways that further their analytical purchase. In both expert and lay circles, a post-cold war expectation lingers on. This is chiefly about the unidirectional transition to liberal capitalism that should somehow befall all latecomers of modernity, and especially those countries that have entertained fantasies of socialist alternatives. The collective volume intelligently deploys the case of China—a wellspring of counter-arguments to preconceived ideas about the homogenizing forces of capitalism—to challenge precisely such lazy and unhelpful reiterations of the "capitalism-after-socialism" master trope. The book convincingly suggests the reader think of contemporary China not as pre-, post-, or neo-capitalist but as the "hyperbolic expression of both global capitalism and its putative communist antithesis"—that is as taking the convergent but unanticipated road of conjugating "capitalism-cum-socialism." This argument is successfully pursued in the effort to destabilize scholarly assumptions about the opposing relationship between the supposedly diverging political forms of the present as well as tackling the empirical question of China's capacity to successfully handle and survive its systemic contradictions. [End Page 294] The volume's point of departure is Derrida's well-known suggestion in the Spectre of Marx that the Marxian radical critique of capital will maintain its relevance in a post-communist world. Its continuous relevance would seemingly stem from its capacity to illuminate evolving spaces of structural conflict and emancipation against the liberal ideology of irreversibly pacification ushered in by the demise of the Soviet bloc. While Derrida himself made little mention of China, the volume's introduction effectively builds on Derrida to argue that China's unprecedented experiment at vernacularizing the accumulative logic of capitalism into the languages and praxes of its surviving and thriving socialist state apparatuses—a dynamic here aptly captured by the idiom of the "protocol"—truly invites a renovated engagement with the dialectical materialism of...

This chapter explores the motivations and experiences of women working for religiously inspired charitable organisations (RICOs) in contemporary urban China. It examines their narratives of arising conflicts, centred on a lack of purpose in their 'everyday', that propelled their search for meaning and ultimately led them to their chosen RICO. In the last twenty years, there has been growing scholarship on the role and work of RICOs in contemporary China. The Protestant RICO came out of a Chinese Christian–led initiative that focused on the principle of ecumenical sharing and on giving its members a theological grounding in cooperation and growth amongst all humans. Early on, the challenge of the work itself and the travel had fuelled her to work harder and make certain sacrifices such as living in a large city that often overwhelmed her.

China: An International JournalVol. 05, No. 01, pp. 97-108 (2007) Comments and NotesNo AccessChina's Cultural Rise: Visions and ChallengesLitao ZHAO and Soon Heng TANLitao ZHAOThe author is a Research Fellow at the East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore. He earned his PhD in sociology from Stanford University. His main research interests include patterns of stratification and mobility in contemporary China and China's social policies. and Soon Heng TANThe author is a Research Officer at the East Asian Institute. He obtained his Master's Degree in Applied Sociology from the National University of Singapore. His main research interests are sociological theories, the effects of globalisation, mass media and politics, and philosophy.https://doi.org/10.1142/S0219747207000064Cited by:4 PreviousNext AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsRecommend to Library ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail FiguresReferencesRelatedDetailsCited By 4The great almond debate: A subtle double movement in California waterEmily Reisman1 Aug 2019 | Geoforum, Vol. 104A comparative study of the Confucius Institute in the United Kingdom and the British Council in ChinaLiexu Cai13 May 2019 | Citizenship, Social and Economics Education, Vol. 18, No. 1Contemporary Leadership Approaches in Chinese BusinessHaina Zhang, Malcolm H. Cone, André M. Everett and Graham Elkin10 March 2015U.S. Soft Power and the “China Threat”: Multilevel AnalysesSatoshi Machida11 June 2010 | Asian Politics & Policy, Vol. 2, No. 3 Recommended Vol. 05, No. 01 Metrics History PDF download

This article examines the interface of religion, gender, and old age in contemporary China through the case of a group of rural Han elder women and their community temple in northwestern Sichuan. Without access to monastic resources and charismatic leadership, the women have made the temple a gendered ritual space of their own to obtain social company, spiritual comfort, and moral capital for themselves and their families. Neither victims of feudal superstition nor obstacles to modernisation, they are a dynamic transformative force in contemporary rural China.

Searching for happiness (xingfu) in contemporary China is noticeably mediated, in discourse and practice, by a revival of Confucian learning, especially Confucian self-cultivation. Drawing on personal observations, textual publications, and media documentation, this chapter illustrates how the Confucian notion of happiness has been formulated to articulate the diverse experience and desires among different social strata in post-reform China. The author argues that happiness engagement in contemporary China has acquired a distinctive Confucian moral-affect of self-cultivation, and in the meantime, Confucianism as an actively practiced tradition has been regenerated, transformed, and made closely relevant to the contemporary living for Chinese people.

This essay deals with Korean romance novels translated into Chinese, especially the works of Kim Ha‐in and Guiyeoni which forms a pattern of cross‐cultural communication from the marginal culture to the center. Most studies treat them as an aspect of fast‐food culture that undermines serious literature, with little attention to this literary and cultural phenomenon. Why are Korean romance novels so popular in contemporary China? There are some answers from different perspectives. However, it is obvious that Korean romance novels offered Chinese women the opportunity to reconceptualize gender. This article contributes to criticism on the interface between Korean romance novels and Chinese feminism and further unveils the relationship between Korean popular romance novels and new interpretations of femininity in contemporary China. The success of Korean romance novels benefits from the conscious choice of Chinese readers in the cross‐cultural context, influenced by changes in Chinese women's concept of gender. The response to the aesthetic needs and expectations of readers has prompted the appearance of inverted cultural export, wherein such novels influence other cultures, reflecting upon and even challenging the gender concepts of other countries, which manifests the symbiotic relationship between popular literature and feminism.

Dating shows are experiencing resurgence in contemporary China. This study conducts a critical discourse analysis of If You Are the One, one of the most popular dating shows, to examine what are the ways in which women are represented and how the show is both shaped by and constitutive of the ongoing sociocultural practices in contemporary China. The study concludes with the observation of women’s subordination to the collusion between commercialism and patriarchy and of double manipulations of women in media discourses by forces of both market and state. Facing a state–market complex, feminism has a long way to go in China.

Everett Yuehong Zhang, The Impotence Epidemic: Men's Medicine and Sexual Desire in Contemporary China. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. 304 pp.The Impotence Epidemic: Men's Medicine and Sexual Desire in Contemporary China is beautifully written and intellectually stimulating ethnography on controversial topic that few anthropologists have examined: male and the prevalence of nanke (medicine that treats male sexual disorders) in post-Mao China. Based on over ten years of fieldwork in two major Chinese cities-Beijing in the north and Chengdu in the south-the author, Everett Yuehong Zhang, deftly shows that is much more than neurovascular event, as it is treated in Western biomedicine. Embedding the rise of nanke in the radical cultural and economic transformations that have rocked China over the last few decades, Zhang argues that the is social, gendered, and intercorporeal event (200) that reflects the unique opportunities and challenges of contemporary China.The book is divided into two parts. Part I, which includes the first four chapters, examines the rise of the in post-Mao China as the revival of individual aspiration and desire. It also contextualizes as political, state, familial, and gendered issue. Part II, which consists of Chapters 5, 6, and 7, focuses on the unique cultural resources in China that serve to regulate the flow of sexual desire. If Part I's focus is the liberation and production of sexual in China, Part II is concerned with how liberation and production are limited in culturally specific ways.Drawing on rich ethnographic data, well-structured methodologies, and insightful interpretations of China's recent social changes, Zhang debunks many popular and scholarly stereotypes about male impotence. First among these is that the impotence epidemic in post-Mao China reflects an increased incidence of impotence-it does not. In his first two chapters, Zhang provides historically contextualized analysis to explain the emergence of China's epidemic. He argues that was largely unheard of in the Maoist period because of the moral symptomatology (32) of Maoist socialism; was not considered disease since pursuing sexual pleasure was deemed morally problematic. Examined against this historical background, the appearance of the in the post-Mao era does not necessarily demonstrate Chinese men's lack of or declining manliness; rather, it signifies the de-politicizing of and the revival of individual in Chinese society. Following Deleuze and Guattari's notion of as desiring production, Zhang contends that the market economy and consumer society of post-reform China unleashed flow of that had been constrained by the Maoist regime. The simultaneous emergence of nanke suggests Chinese men's active search for medical treatment, evincing not only the legitimization of individual aspiration but also new Chinese subjectivity as the subject of desire (30). Thus, Zhang states that the could even be called a contagion of desire (15).Did the Maoist state systematically oppress Chinese people's desire? In Chapter 2, Zhang argues that it may not have been Mao's intention to discourage sexual desire, but the state achieved the effect of sexual deprivation through institutions such as the unified job assignment system, which often kept young lovers geographically apart, and workplace culture that intruded into employees' private lives, often resulting in years of long-distance relationships among married couples. Through such social structures, the Maoist state suppressed a historically specific pleasure or for (66), if not sexual itself. However, Zhang also shows that even Maoist collectivism could not completely deplete individual desire; the prohibition of intimacy and closeness ironically heightened male to search for the body visible through voyeurism (68). …

Reviewed by: Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Contemporary China Henry Sussman Haun Saussy. Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Contemporary China. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001. ix–xi + 289 pages. It takes no special virtue to share the present with China. Indeed, since Leibnitz's Novissima Sinica (1697), this is what intermediaries do best. The "coevalness" of civilizations is one of the givens of our field; it underwrites our brand of cultural pluralism. . . . Rather than a time line, with the Western present streaking away into the future, the favored figure of East-West philosophical chronology has been the intersection. Crucially, however, the intersection is the spot at which the interpreter appears. Without intermediaries, no mediation, only missed appointments. And this is where we see variation. The state of shared contemporaneity, although always possible, has to be explained through mutual explanations. It also requires some strategic manipulation of the relevant pasts and presents, so they will line up neatly with the point of convergence. (97) Armed with nothing more formidable than a thorough steeping in the arguments and issues surrounding contemporary critical theory and an impressive grounding in the histories of linguistics, China, and the broader global modernity, Haun Saussy emerges from Great Walls of Discourse as an authoritative commentator not only on contemporary China but on the exactions of interpretation itself. As the title that Saussy fashioned for this work indicates, he rightly sees himself as an adventurer in a long line of travelers, including Marco Polo, Matteo Ricci, and Ernest Fenollosa, who opened China to view. But for Saussy, the adventure of seeing and characterizing China inheres not so much in accessing the Great Wall, the ancient capital cities, the Classics, the histories, the system of elements, or an unbroken chain of aesthetic and artisanal productions. Saussy's adventure is, rather, a treacherous journey of cultural exegesis and engagement with the Other, even when the terms of its otherness are unknown or have been misconstrued. The trajectory of this voyage of discovery, always fraught with the dangers of ethnocentric projection, schematic oversimplification, and flat-out error, winds its way between [End Page 1274] vast spheres of cultural influence ("East" and "West") always out of tune and in skewed alignment with one another, between the margins of interpretative countertexts poised in mutual elucidation but conceived and composed under a constitutional cover of obscurity. Blindness, ambiguity, and misapprehension are preconditions of his quest that Saussy frontally addresses and incorporates into his accounts of phenomena including Fenollosa's legacy of Chinese translation, the appeal to the various "post-studies" made by contemporary Chinese scholars, and China's status during the heyday of French structuralism. And yet, as Saussy masterfully demonstrates early on, through an acute sense of historical and cultural differences, it is possible to discern (and if need be, orchestrate) constructive and generative dialogue between the cultural spheres, as between Matteo Ricci and Yang Tinyung at the outset of the seventeenth century, in a chapter entitled "In the Workshop of Equivalences." Through the analytical and ultimately ethical work of honing claims, contextualizing past formulations, looking askance precisely at attestations of novelty (or discovery), and never taking debunkings, however admirable, achieved elsewhere for granted, astute cultural commentators do, on occasion, get their observations right, as did Roland Barthes when he read his "Empire of Signs"—Japan—as a milieu semiologically configured by a certain extremity in its representations and an absence of apology for the resulting side-effects: The prevalence of polar schemes should always lead us to try to reconstruct the historical emergence of the antithesis and find the common basis on which it tacitly rests. (The more specifically the basis is defined, the better. . . .) On that footing, then, it becomes possible to redescribe the differences and recount their history: the poles were not always polar; they had to be polarized at some point. It is important to look for third parties, to try to neutralize oppositions by dissolving them in a larger framework, to trace their emergence or to show how artificial their symmetries are, because our previous equipment for thinking about China blinds us to such possibilities. (186) As Saussy characterizes and performs it, the...

(ProQuest-CSA LLC: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) Chinese society today is characterized by the coexistence of numerous social conflicts and social stability. This coexistence reveals the resilience of the Chinese political system.1 A resilient political system allows its citizens to use conflict-resolution mechanisms while preventing what Frederick Barghoorn has called "flabby flexibility" or "lack of principles".2 By this he means that citizens resort to non-institutionalized or illegal modes of action to pursue their interests. Undisciplined actions are likely to threaten political stability. In China, citizens have access to a number of channels of political participation,3 but state power prevents regime-threatening actions and allows the Party-state to maintain the social order amid a legion of social conflicts.4 However, the Party-state faces serious pressures because of the magnitude of conflicts and the recurrence of noninstitutionalized or illegal modes of action.5 These illegal modes of action reveal the limitations of the regular or permitted channels. Hence, an analysis of the factors that affect citizens' choice of the modes of action illuminates the degree of institutionalization of conflict resolution in China. The permitted channels of conflict resolution in China include both the use of the law and non-legal modes, such as petitions or mediation. These non-legal modes are, however, still "in the shadow of the law" in the sense that existing laws or government regulations are referred to when these modes are used to address social disputes.6 Research on Chinese citizens' use of permitted modes, especially the law, suggests a mixed picture. On the one hand, as Diamond et al. argue, "in today's China law matters more than it ever has" because it plays an unprecedented role in helping address social conflicts and citizens' grievances.7 Chinese citizens increasingly make use of the law in pressing their interests despite the widely known flaws of legal institutions.8 On the other hand, these flaws make successful action difficult. Effective lawsuits often require the use of tactics or political resources such as political connections. These tactics or resources require citizens to obtain support from the media or from sympathetic state agents, or to gain access to important institutions.9 Failure, especially when suing state agencies, is not rare.10 Such difficulties are also faced by those citizens who use non-legal modes of action. For example, research on the use of petitions has shown that petitioners often encounter serious or insurmountable hurdles in making state authorities pay serious attention to their grievances.11 The limited effectiveness of permitted channels has not driven the disgruntled to silence. In recent years, there have been numerous incidents of disruptive or illegal modes of action, including protests, demonstrations, violent confrontations, and even attacks on state agencies.12 It is these non-institutionalized modes of action that have led the central Party-state to set "the building of a harmonious society" as a top priority.13 If the use of the law and those non-legal modes of action that are "in the shadow of the law" can be an indicator of the degree of conflict resolution's institutionalization in a society, the recurrence of social protests in China suggests that this institutionalization is rather limited. The relationship between citizens' use of permitted modes and illegal modes of action has not been adequately addressed. The many existing studies on the permitted modes of action commonly point out their limitations, but they stop short of demonstrating the implications of these limitations. There is no systematic research on the likelihood of citizens' legal action escalating into illegal modes. Analysis of this likelihood illuminates the degree of pressure faced by the Party-state in maintaining social order. Previous research has not generated the data necessary to undertake such an analysis. …

Drawing on interviews with 25 young men living in Chengdu, China, this paper examines how Chinese young men practice ‘new man’ masculinity in the face of structural transformation in contemporary China. In this paper, we build on elastic masculinity theory by putting it in explicit dialogue with hybrid masculinities to examine the transformations in Chinese men’s practices of masculinity and how hybrid masculinities may work in the Chinese context. We argue that these Chinese men’s elastic masculine performances suggest that they support gender equality in the family but, in practice, they simultaneously embrace enduring forms of patriarchy. Our findings show that young, heterosexual men perform progressive ‘new man’ masculinity in the family as egalitarian boyfriends by recognizing women’s equal status and challenging the traditional and descending familism; however, they practice hegemonic masculinity by investing in breadwinner roles and relational performance of egalitarianism in the presence of other men to obscure gender inequality. In this sense, these Chinese men practice elastic masculinity associated with enduring systems of gendered power and inequality. This study offers an insight into understanding ‘new man’ masculinity in contemporary China and contributes to our knowledge of how hybrid masculinities look, feel, and work outside of Western societies.

Contributors

The basic character of crime in contemporary China by the Ministry of Public Security Research Unit Number Five1 offers what must be the most comprehensive picture to date of crime in contemporary China. Written by the unit in charge of criminal investigation this authoritative article offers figures and analysis rarely seen outside the Ministry. Almost by definition it was never meant for open publication. It was designed for Chinese specialists within the Ministry to help them come to terms with, and to gain some understanding of, the nature of crime in the China of economic reform. The overall volume from which this article comes was one of three internally published by the Ministry between 1989 and 1993. The first two volumes are collections of articles from throughout the country, and the final volume (published in 1993) was a summary of major criminal trends and an update on the situation. The decision to publish these books followed a specialist conference convened by the Ministry in 1989 and held in Hebei for specialists in the area. The significance of the series is testified by the fact that the then Deputy Minister of Public Security, Yu Lie, was made editor-in-chief of the whole series.

Reviewed by: The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination by Haiyan Lee Carlos Rojas The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination by Haiyan Lee. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. Pp. xii + 362. $50.00 cloth, $50.00 e-book. In this extraordinary study, Haiyan Lee begins by referencing a series of incidents in contemporary China where passersby have callously declined to help a stranger in distress. Perhaps most notably, there was an infamous incident in Guangdong in 2011, which was caught on video, when a two-year-old girl named Wang Yue 王悅 ("Yueyue 悅悅") was accidentally run over by not one but two vehicles. She lay screaming in agony in the middle of the public road for more than seven minutes as at least eighteen pedestrians walked right by her without stopping to offer assistance (eventually, a lowly rubbish collector attempted to get her medical attention, but the child died shortly afterward). Part of the reason why so many people in contemporary China are disinclined to help someone they do not know is because there have been an equally [End Page 253] well-publicized series of cases in which Good Samaritans have been successfully sued by the very people they had been trying to help—on the logic that the person offering assistance must have somehow been complicit in the original injury, otherwise why would they have stopped to help in the first place? This growing reluctance to assist strangers in need has been widely cited, in both the domestic and the international press, as symptomatic of a pervasive moral crisis in contemporary China. Haiyan Lee engages this ongoing discussion by comparing this contemporary phenomenon to the so-called Lei Feng spirit (Lei Feng jingshen 雷锋精神) that was promoted during the Maoist 1960s. Named after a PLA soldier who died in his early twenties and was posthumously lionized for his selfless devotion to the Party and his community, the Lei Feng spirit would appear, at first glance, to represent the very antithesis of the callous selfishness that leads contemporary bystanders to refuse to assist their injured compatriots. Lee, however, argues instead that it is precisely this advocacy of Lei Feng spirit (and all that it represents) that helped make the contemporary selfish behavior possible in the first place. In particular, she contends that the putative altruism embodied by the Lei Feng spirit does not represent a genuine moral gesture, since the legendary Lei Feng is explicitly presented as acting on behalf of Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party rather than out of a sense of true moral conviction. Lee argues that the result is a systematic deferral of moral judgment from the individual to the external figure of the Party, which in turn actively inhibits the development of an autonomous moral agency. In this respect, she argues, the Maoist celebration of Lei Feng's putative selflessness contributed directly to the sort of moral myopia that we find in contemporary phenomena such as the Wang Yue incident. In The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination, Lee sketches a set of overlapping genealogies of discourses of the stranger in modern Chinese literature and culture. Her main focus is on the twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries, though some of her examples extend further back into the late imperial period and even the classical era. Her approach is guided by a body of moral philosophy developed by figures such as Emmanuel Levinas, Zygmunt Bauman, and Hannah Arendt, among others, but she also draws deftly on other theories and methodologies ranging from sociology to poststructuralism. The result is a [End Page 254] lively and compelling set of analyses that engage closely with a wide variety of literary and cultural works, while consistently foregrounding a set of moral concerns with wide-reaching implications. Lee's study is divided into three parts, centered around themes of "alien kind," "fictive kin," and "friends and foes." Each part consists of a pair of chapters looking at issues involving spirits and animals, female outsiders and internal migration, and class difference and foreign visitors, respectively. Each chapter, in turn, is structured around a set of close analyses of a handful of texts, intermixed with a broader range of cultural, historical...

The Culture of Guanxi in a North China Village