Modern China recent issues

Prometheus of the Revolution: Rural Teachers in Republican China

Chang Liu, — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 01:59:34 PDT

The development of modern education beginning in the late nineteenth century created a new type of educator—the public school teacher—in rural China. This article examines why rural school teachers turned out to be the vanguard of the Chinese communist revolution in the countryside. Most rural teachers, it shows, were young men in their twenties from humble farming families. Their age and background made them energetic and critical, and their training and profession made them the modern intellectual elite in rural villages and towns. But their poor living and working conditions did not live up to either their education or their expectations. This situation caused the radical and revolutionary ideas sowed in their minds during their professional training to take root. A large number of them thus joined the Communist Party and carried the torch of the urban-born communist movement into the countryside.

Reification of the Chinese Intellectual: On the Origins of the CCP Concept of Zhishifenzi

U, E. — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 01:59:34 PDT

Research has largely overlooked the reification of the intellectual (zhishifenzi) after the 1949 Communist revolution. Studying this major feature of Chinese socialism can illuminate the workings of the Chinese Communist Party, state-society relations, and the experience of so-called intellectuals. This article explores the social and ideological contexts that first nurtured the party’s concept of intellectuals. It focuses on the debate about the intellectual class ( zhishi jieji) in political and literary circles from the late 1910s to the mid-1920s. During the May Fourth era, socialists, anarchists, and other activists regarded the intellectual class as a distinct social category with internal cleavages based on age and political consciousness. Under the influence of the Comintern, the Chinese Communists recast the intellectual class as the primary ideological enemy. The debate about the intellectual class profoundly affected the party’s understanding of the intellectual. The article concludes by suggesting new directions for research on the reification of the intellectual.

Revolutionizing Ritual Interaction in the Classroom: Constructing the Chinese Renaissance of the Twenty-First Century

Carmel Sargent, T. — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 01:59:34 PDT

Over the past decade, educational leaders in China have maintained that the pattern of social interactions in Chinese classrooms is not conducive to the cultivation of innovativeness and creativity and that this lack of creativity is a major barrier to China’s global competitiveness. One key response has been the implementation of the 2001 New Curriculum reforms in basic education. This article draws on qualitative classroom observation and in-depth interview data, as well as quantitative survey data, from Gansu province to investigate the extent to which classroom interactions differ substantially in Chinese primary school classrooms that are implementing the New Curriculum reforms compared with those that are not. To the extent that individuals are constructed by the interactions in which they participate, changes in classrooms could have far-reaching implications for contemporary youth socialized differently than those of previous generations, and for the future social, cultural, and political order of China.

Union Power in China Source, Operation, and Constraints

Feng Chen, — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 01:59:34 PDT

Why are the All-China Federation of Trade Unions and its regional branches, or union bureaucracies, able to play an active role in labor legislation, unionization, and labor dispute settlements, while their grassroots organizations, or workplace unions, remain haplessly impotent and incapable of representing workers? This article argues that union bureaucracies’ power and its operation are decisively reliant upon their formal government status. While a government status constrains union bureaucracies’ autonomy, it also paradoxically accounts for their influence in areas in which their active role is permitted and expected by the government. However, workplace unions’ subordination to management leaves them no power whatsoever. Union bureaucracies’ governmental status prevents them from operating through mobilizing grassroots labor support or exerting their influence by empowering their grassroots branches. Thus, their legislative and other efforts have had a limited impact on the balance of power between labor and capital in the workplace.

A Linguistic Enclave: Translation and Language Policies in the Early People's Republic of China

Volland, N. — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 03:00:08 PDT

After 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) made great efforts to control the Chinese language—the way people write, speak, and think. Especially during the Mao years, linguistic conformity was one of the chief means through which the CCP tried to make the articulation of dissent all but impossible. As this article shows, however, the party’s actual control of language was not total; niches of greater linguistic diversity remained accessible to readers and writers who made the effort to mediate between the party-state’s prescriptions and their individual styles. Comparing three translations of Balzac’s (1949) Père Goriot by the Chinese translator Fu Lei from 1946, 1951, and 1963, and reading them against the official "blueprint" of Mao style, the author argues that Fu Lei was able to resist the pressure for conformity and in his translations continued to apply his own, idiosyncratic style. The analysis shows how segments of public writing that were less susceptible to direct intervention, such as translation of foreign literature, enjoyed more autonomy from the party-state’s pervasive linguistic controls. Due to its high popularity, translated literature thus provided readers with an important alternative to the omnipresent Mao style and served as a source of inspiration for later generations.

Opium in the City: A Spatial Study of Guangzhou's Opium Houses, 1923--1936

Paules, X. — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 03:00:08 PDT

The article examines the insertion of opium houses at different levels of the urban space of Guangzhou—from the largest to the smallest: the areas of Honam and Hopei, the districts, the streets—during the years 1923 to 1936. The distribution of dens changed mainly due to shifts in the strategy of the authorities, who paid special attention to the visibility of opium houses in the city and to the reactions of den operators concerned with the viability of their establishments. However, the distribution of dens remained the same throughout the period: an exceptional concentration of opium houses in Henan (Honam), the part of the city located south of the Pearl River. There were three different types of opium houses: sordid dens selling cheap adulterated opium, middle-range "local opium houses," and high-class opium houses. Each type had a specific distribution throughout the city’s space corresponding to the nature of its consumers’ demands.

A Cage of Voices: Producing and Doing Dagongmei in Contemporary China

Fu, D. — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 03:00:08 PDT

"I have a stomach full of words, but I just can’t say them" is a statement often uttered by migrant women in contemporary China. Using this as a point of entry, this article explores the paradoxical role that the Dagongmei’s Home, a Beijing women’s organization that promotes the rights and interests of female migrants, plays in producing identities for its members and in channeling their voices into the public arena. The Dagongmei’s Home is both a site of articulation and a cage that limits and contains the marginal voices of migrant women. By "hailing" its members into subjectivity as the dagongmei (working sister), the organization empowers these women to speak in otherwise closed spaces. However, since the women can only speak as dagongmei, they end up reproducing the state’s discourse of modernization. Nevertheless, a community-based drama workshop set up by a British woman in collaboration with the Home becomes an unlikely site of resistance as migrant women break the script of strong women sacrificing for the nation’s economic development, thus doing dagongmei subversively.

Introduction to "Whither Chinese Reforms? Dialogues Among Western and Chinese Scholars, II"

Huang, P. C. C. — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 04:56:22 PDT

The Parallel Partial Progression (PPP) Approach to Institutional Transformation in Transition Economies: Optimize Economic Coherence, Not Policy Sequence

Fan Gang, , Wing Thye Woo, — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 04:56:22 PDT

Many economists have attributed China's high growth to the implementation of the correct sequence of reforms. The authors reject this interpretation because it does not characterize the reform process correctly; it does not recognize adequately the interaction among reforms that sustains the progress of each individual reform; and optimal sequences exist only when the policy maker is constrained to introducing only one new policy measure at a time (so-called optimality disappears once simultaneous implementation of policies is allowed). We propose the parallel partial progression approach as the alternative conceptual framework for the gradualist approach. Parallel partial progression is not the same as the step-by-step sequencing approach because a "partial reform" is not a "completed step." Simultaneous partial implementation is preferable to policy sequencing because it eliminates the costs of incoherence among policies. Incoherence among reforms results could cause a "reform bottleneck," and the two major bottlenecks that China is facing right now are financial reform and political reform.

Adapting by Learning: The Evolution of China's Rural Health Care Financing

Shaoguang Wang, — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 04:56:22 PDT

Adaptive capacity is essential for any human social system, because human societies are full of unique circumstances, genuine uncertainty, novel complexity, structural instabilities, and conflicts of values and interests, and, more important, the environment under which the systems exist is always changing, while everyone, including policy makers and policy experts, operates under conditions of "bounded rationality." Learning is the base of adaptive capacity. The first section of the article distinguishes four learning models by their location along two dimensions: the promoters of learning (policy makers or policy advocates) and the sources of learning (practical experience or controlled experiments). By studying the evolution of health care financing in rural China over the past 60 years, the remaining five sections attempt to illustrate how policy makers react to newly emerging problems, imbalances, and difficulties by "fine-tuning" or altering policy instruments, or adopting a new goal hierarchy according to lessons drawn from past and present experience as well as deliberate policy experiments. The resilience of the Chinese system lies in its deep-seated one-size-does-not-fit-all pragmatism.

China's Neglected Informal Economy: Reality and Theory

Huang, P. C. C. — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 04:56:22 PDT

The informal economy—defined as workers who have no security of employment, receive few or no benefits, and are often unprotected by labor laws—in China today accounts for 168 million of the 283 million urban employed, but the official statistical apparatus in China still does not gather systematic data on the informal economy. Part of the reason for the neglect is the misleading influence of mainstream economic and sociological theories, which have come from the "economic dualism," "three-sector hypothesis," and "olive-shaped" social structure theories that held great influence in the United States in the 1960s. This article reviews the core elements of that modernization model, the "revolution" in development economics that followed in the 1970s and 1980s, and the "counterrevolution" from neoclassical economics that came with the rising ideological tide of neoconservatism. The article argues for a balanced theoretical perspective that can more appropriately capture the realities of the informal economy today.

Out of the Darkness: Chinese Transition Paths

Bramall, C. — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 04:56:22 PDT

China's rapid economic growth since 1978 has occurred precisely because it has not followed the strategy of parallel partial progression and financial liberalization advocated by Fan and Woo. However, China missed an historic opportunity to build welfare capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s, choosing instead to dismantle its rural health care and educational systems and—as Philip Huang rightly argues—failing to secure workers' right in the burgeoning informal sector. In these respects, China's transition path has been far inferior to that of Britain in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Nevertheless, the global financial crisis of 2008-2009 has discredited Anglo-Saxon capitalism and presents a renewed opportunity for China to build a form of xiaokang socialism modeled on the Rheinish capitalism that was so successful in countries such as France, Germany, and Japan before 1989.

Maximum Tinkering under Uncertainty: Unorthodox Lessons from China

Heilmann, S. — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 04:56:22 PDT

At a time when many Western standard recipes for economic policy are losing credibility, it is imperative to step back from past orthodox explanations and rethink the unconventional approaches to managing economic change that we find in China's developmental experience. The key to understanding the adaptability of China's political economy over the last few decades lies in the unusual combination of extensive policy experimentation with long-term policy prioritization. China can serve as an extremely instructive place to look for lessons on creative management of uncertainty in policy making.

Two Temples, Three Religions, and a Tourist Attraction: Contesting Sacred Space on China's Ethnic Frontier

Xiaofei Kang, — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 14:15:49 PDT

Huanglong (Yellow Dragon) in northwestern Sichuan province is an old multi ethnic pilgrimage site that has become a UNESCO World Nature Heritage Reserve and a major national tourist attraction since the 1990s. This article focuses on the controversy over the identity and restoration of two major temples in Huanglong and analyzes the interaction of contemporary China's religious revival and the development of tourism. As local state agencies seek to redefine the religious landscape of Huanglong in the service of both state hegemony and the market appeal of ethnic differences, they compete with Han Chinese lay Buddhists and Tibetan and Daoist monastic forces, each of whom take advantage of tourism to further their own religious and ethnic causes.

"A Married Out Daughter Is Like Spilt Water"?: Women's Increasing Contacts and Enhanced Ties with Their Natal Families in Post-Reform Rural North China

Weiguo Zhang, — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 14:15:49 PDT

This article investigates how the intersection of two state policies, the market reforms initiated in 1978 and the "one-child" policy launched in 1979, is shaping gender, family, and kin relations in rural North China. It focuses particularly on women's ties with their natal families after marriage; these have become closer, with more frequent daughter-parent contact. The qualitative data were collected from interviews and focus group discussions conducted intermittently between 2002 and 2004 in three Hebei counties. The changing context of the new political economy, brought about by market reforms, has broken down the pre-reform institutional and economic constraints inherent in daughter-parent ties, thereby enhancing these relationships in post-reform rural society. Moreover, the "one-child" policy, which aims to regulate individual fertility and retard population growth, has had the unintended consequence of strengthening relations between married daughters and their birth parents.

A Hybrid Revolutionary Process: The Chinese Cooperative Movement in Xiyang County, Shanxi

Ngo, T. M.-H. — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 14:15:49 PDT

This case study of the cooperative movement in Dongfengren village, Xiyang county, Shanxi province, during 1944 shows that interactions between the state's voluntarist and idealistic policies and peasants' resistance grounded in their traditional values and practices produced the hybrid revolutionary processes that characterized the party-state's penetration into the village during the wartime period. Widespread peasant resistance compelled outside cadres to introduce various incentives similar to those applied in the 1950s to sustain the cooperative movement.

Private Tutorial Art Schools in the Shanghai Market Economy: The Shanghai Art School, 1913--1919

Zheng, J. — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 14:15:49 PDT

Drawing on school archives and other primary sources, this article looks at a category of art schools in early twentieth-century Shanghai that has long been ignored in modern Chinese art history studies, namely the early private tutorial art schools. It focuses on the early history of the Shanghai Art School (Shanghai meizhuan ) as a typical case. It argues that, in contrast to government schools, which represented national ideals and were involved in "the Chinese response to Western influence," the beginning of early private tutorial art schools was a product of new market demand for commercial art. In the 1910s, they were extensively involved in Shanghai's commercial art scene and in its mass culture. In this unique way, they contributed to the modernization of culture in China.