This essay delves into the impacts of adopting an insider/outsider (in-betweenness) positionality in the context of studying China’s land reform in China and Belgium. Utilising insights gained from ...my fieldwork experiences and the composition of two articles – one emphasising the economic implications of the reform and the other exploring its theoretical dimensions – I emphasise the significance of the place of knowledge production, particularly my epistemological and methodological training experience in Belgium. This experience has played a pivotal role in shaping my in-betweenness positionality, providing a framework for reflective research framing and presenting my findings. In essence, this essay contends that embracing an in-betweenness positionality is essential for producing research that is not only academically rigorous but also practically relevant, attuned to the complexities of the social issues under investigation.
China’s news sector is a place where newsmakers, advertising executives, company bosses, and Party officials engage one another in contingent and evolving arrangements that run from cooperation and ...collaboration to manipulation and betrayal. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with journalists, editors, and executives at a newspaper in Guangzhou, The Currency of Truth brings its readers into the lives of the people who write, publish, and profit from news in this milieu. The book shows that far from working as mere cogs in a Party propaganda machine, these individuals are immersed in fluidly shifting networks of formal and informal relationships, which they carefully navigate to pursue diverse goals. In The Currency of Truth, Emily H. C. Chua argues that news in China works less as a medium of mass communication than as a kind of currency as industry players make and use news articles to create agreements, build connections, and protect and advance their positions against one another. Looking at the ethical and professional principles that well-intentioned and civically minded journalists strive to uphold, and the challenges and doubts that they grapple with in the process, Chua brings her findings into conversation around “post-truth” news and the “crisis” of professional journalism in the West. The book encourages readers to rethink contemporary news, arguing that rather than setting out from the assumption that news works either to inform or deceive its publics, we should explore the “post-public” social and political imaginaries emerging among today’s newsmakers and remaking the terms of their practice.
Since its inception almost fifty years ago, Modern China has kept pace with international scholarly trends and greatly influenced global academia. As the founder and editor of Modern China, Philip C. ...C. Huang’s editorial principles, scholarly ideas, and personal theories and methodologies have been prominently embodied in the themes and contents of the journal, which has guided the development, evolution, and changing currents in the field of China studies. Reflecting back on the older methodologies of China studies, Huang abandoned the existing theoretical framework of either/or binaries and, basing himself firmly in empirical practice, pursued a new perspective focusing on the interrelationships and interpenetrations between dualities. Huang’s work has laid out the path for the future development of theory and practice in China studies.
This study utilizes a wide range of new source materials to reconstruct the day-to-day operations of the port of Canton during the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. Using a ...bottom-up approach, it provides a fresh look at the successes
This article approaches the question of Anglo-American hegemony in urban studies by examining publication and citation patterns. The past one or two decades have witnessed critical arguments about ...how knowledge production in social sciences is characterised by centre–periphery relations, and risks universalising US–American and European knowledge and epistemology. While not much systematic analysis has been done to address the extent to which urban knowledge has been shaped by Anglo-American centrism, it is not difficult to tell that the field is dominated by the Anglophone world in terms of authorship, institutional affiliation, the cities under scrutiny, and the urban theories arising. This article undertakes systematic analysis by collecting papers published between 1990 and 2010, in journals indexed by the categories ‘Geography’ and ‘Urban Studies’ in the ISI Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) database. We develop a series of analyses by examining the sites of knowledge production, contributors, key research interests, and the circulation/impact of works. We also single out research on urban China to explore questions such as the place of research on non-Anglo-American contexts in international forums. In all, this article argues that the dominant position of the Anglophone world in the production and circulation of urban knowledge is clearly discernible. But the Anglophone dominance does not necessarily mean that other research interests and orientations have not found a footing. Instead, we suggest that the growing but still small niche of urban China research presents tremendous opportunities for generating cross-context dialogues. The potential has not been fully delivered, as yet.
本文通过考察学术文章的发表和引用模式，探讨了城市研究中的英美霸权问题。过去一二十年来，一些批判性的论点指出，社会科学领域的知识生产以中心-边缘关系为特征，并且有欧美知识和认识论普适化的风险。虽然对于城市研究在多大程度上受英美中心主义的影响，尚没有许多系统的分析，但不难判断：这一领域在作者身份、机构关联、城市研究对象以及兴起的城市理论方面都受英语世界的支配。本文通过收集 1990 至 2010 年间在 ISI 社会科学引文索引 (SSCI) 数据库的“地理学”和“城市研究”期刊中发表的论文，做了系统的分析。我们通过考察知识生产的地点、贡献者、关键研究兴趣以及作品的传播/影响，展开了一系列分析。我们也将中国城市研究单列出来，以求探讨非英美语境的研究在国际学界的地位等问题。总体上，本文认为城市知识的生产和传播中可以清晰地看到英语世界的支配地位。但英语世界的支配不必然意味着其他研究兴趣和导向没有立足之地。我们指出，不断壮大但仍然只占据一小片空间的中国城市研究为跨语境对话提供了大量机会。这一潜力尚未得到充分挖掘。
Bringing knowledge about China to the disciplines has reduced the outsized role that research on Europe and America has on many topics. But mainstreaming China studies also leads to certain ...tradeoffs. How should we manage these tradeoffs and produce research that is both true to China and contributes to the social sciences? In the last 40 years, China scholars have developed many strategies to navigate the territory between area studies and the social sciences. I myself have vacillated about how China studies and political science should interact and inform each other. How are scholars addressing this issue now, in an era of mixed methods, sophisticated quantitative research, experiments and ＂big data?＂
This Special Issue aims to advance critical qualitative inquiry in China studies and contribute to a vibrant, inclusive global community. It builds upon debates and efforts in the behavioral and ...social sciences among area specialists in two eras: researchers in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the diaspora in the 1980s who sought to sinologize behavioral and social sciences, and sociologists in China in the 2000s who are seeking to indigenize these fields. The Issue takes a two-pronged approach toward advancing critical reflection in knowledge production: (a) it aspires to diminish the current influence of Western and positivistic paradigms on behavioral and social sciences research; (b) it seeks to challenge discursive hegemonic influences to create and sustain space for critical qualitative inquiry. The Issue traverses disciplinary boundaries between history and behavioral and social sciences within China Studies. It opens dialogue with the non-area specialists who are the primary audience of the Qualitative Inquiry.
This commentary serves as a tribute to the late Pow, a remarkable scholar in urban geography and urban studies, summarizing his contributions to urban China studies. It aims to showcase the way in ...which Pow's work manoeuvred adroitly with an implicit comparative gesture—building a bridge between situated Chinese cases and wider theoretical debates in urban studies in order to enrich both domains. The essay then summarizes Pow's work in the field of urban China studies by focusing on two most emblematic topics that he delved into in great depth, i.e., gated communities and eco‐city developments. The final section develops a brief quantitative analysis of the impact that Pow's work has generated. Using the software packages CiteSpace and HistCite, I unpack how his publications are cited and used by scholars, journals, and different areas of research.
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