Revisiting China S Modernity

This book explores the relationship between the Manchus and the Han Chinese throughout the Qing dynasty, examines the transmission of modern knowledge on the ground of China's reactions to the Western influence, and discusses how the supra-nationalist discourse of various religions succumbed to the homogenizing nature of modern China.

Is modernity in non-Western societies always an �alternative� modernity, a derivative copy of an �original modernity� that began in the West? No, answer the contributors to this book, who then offer an absorbing set of case studies from modern China to make their point. By focusing on people�s ordinary routines of working, eating, going to school, and traveling, the authors examine the notion of modernity as it has been staged in the minute details of Chinese life. Essays explore people�s basic search for food, water, and lighting during the late-Qing -- early republican era; contradictory attitudes toward women and the violence of foot-binding; the role of Chinese scientists in promoting a shift to modern, nationalistic discourses; the growing popularity of savings banks among urban Chinese in the early twentieth century; the transnational and national identities of returned overseas Chinese in Xiamen, Fujian Province; and middle-class �Shanghai travelers� who imagined themselves as cosmopolitan consumers. Looking at the post-Mao reform era of the late twentieth century, contributors explore the theme of �revaluation� � that is, the way China�s move into global capitalism is commoditizing goods and services that previously were not for sale, from domestic labor to recycling and water resources, in an increasingly consumer-oriented society.

Early twentieth-century China paired the local community to the worldùa place and time when English dominated urban-centered higher and secondary education and Chinese-edited English-language magazines surfaced as a new form of translingual practice. Cosmopolitan Publics focuses on China's "cosmopolitans" Western-educated intellectuals who returned to Shanghai in the late 1920s to publish in English and who, ultimately, became both cultural translators and citizens of the wider world. Shuang Shen highlights their work in publications such as The China Critic and T'ien Hsia, providing readers with a broader understanding of the role and function of cultural mixing, translation, and multilingualism in China's cultural modernity. Decades later, as nationalist biases and political restrictions emerged within China, the influence of the cosmopolitans was neglected and the significance of cosmopolitan practice was underplayed. Shen's encompassing study revisits and presents the experience of Chinese modernity as far more heterogeneous, emergent, and transnational than it has been characterized until now.

Essays address expressions of modernity in relation to non-Western politics and national cultures. Topics range from the installation of gas streetlights in Shanghai to urban planning efforts aimed at improving daily routines of work and leisure.

The editors are grateful to the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for its generous support of their research work which enabled them to publish the present book. The present book carefully maps the Chinese modernisation discourse, highlighting its relationship to other, similar discourses, and situating it within historical and theoretical contexts. In contrast to the majority of recent discussions of a “Chinese development model” that tend to focus more on institutional then cultural factors, and are more narrowly concerned with economic matters than overall social development, the book offers several important focal points for many presently overlooked issues and dilemmas. The multifaceted perspectives contained in this anthology are not limited to economic, social, and ecological issues, but also include political and social functions of ideologies and cultural conditioned values, representing the axial epistemological grounds of modern Chinese society. 2011 was the 100th anniversary of the Xinhai Revolution. The centennial is relevant not only in terms of state ideology, but also plays a significant role within academic research into Chinese society and culture. This historic turning point likewise represents the symbolic and concrete linkages and tensions between tradition and modernity, progress and conservatism, traditional values and the demands for adjustment to contemporary societies. The book shows that Chinese transition from tradition to modernity cannot be understood in a framework of a unified general model of society, but rather through a more complex insight into the interrelations among elements of physical environment, social structure, philosophy, history, and culture.

This book analyses modernity and tradition in China today and how they combine in striking ways in the Chinese school. Paul Willis – the leading ethnographer and author of Learning to Labour – shows how China has undergone an internal migration not only of masses of workers but also of a mental and ideological kind to new cultural landscapes of meaning, which include worship of the glorified city, devotion to consumerism, and fixation upon the smartphone and the internet. Massive educational expansion has been a precondition for explosive economic growth and technical development, but at the same time the school provides a cultural stage for personal and collective experience. In its closed walls and the inescapability of its ‘scores’, an astonishing drama plays out between the new and the old, with a tapestry of intricate human meanings woven of small tragedies and triumphs, secret promises and felt betrayals, helping to produce not only exam results but cultural orientations and occupational destinies. By exploring the cultural dimension of everyday experience as it is lived out in the school, this book sheds new light on the enormous transformations that have swept through China and created the kind of society that it is today: a society that is obsessed with the future and at the same time structured by and in continuous dialogue with its past.

A vision of contemporary China from the inside, Xu's essays offer a liberal reaction to the complexity of China's rise.

Challenging both the bureaucratic one-party regime and the Western neoliberal paradigm, China’s leading critic shatters the myth of progress and reflects upon the inheritance of a revolutionary past. In this original and wide-ranging study, Wang Hui examines the roots of China’s social and political problems, and traces the reforms and struggles that have led to the current state of mass depoliticization. Arguing that China’s revolutionary history and its current liberalization are part of the same discourse of modernity, Wang Hui calls for alternatives to both its capitalist trajectory and its authoritarian past. From the May Fourth Movement to Tiananmen Square, The End of the Revolution offers a broad discussion of Chinese intellectual history and society, in the hope of forging a new path for China’s future.