Rivers of Iron Lampton, David M; Ho, Selina; Kuik, Cheng-Chwee
10/2020
eBook
In 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping unveiled what would come to
be known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)-a global development
strategy involving infrastructure projects and associated ...financing
throughout the world, including Asia, Africa, the Middle East,
Europe, and the Americas. While the Chinese government has framed
the plan as one promoting transnational connectivity, critics and
security experts see it as part of a larger strategy to achieve
global dominance. Rivers of Iron examines one aspect of
President Xi Jinping's "New Era": China's effort to create an
intercountry railway system connecting China and its seven
Southeast Asian neighbors (Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar,
Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam). This book illuminates the
political strengths and weaknesses of the plan, as well as the
capacity of the impacted countries to resist, shape, and even take
advantage of China's wide-reaching actions. Using frameworks from
the fields of international relations and comparative politics, the
authors of Rivers of Iron seek to explain how domestic
politics in these eight Asian nations shaped their varying external
responses and behaviors. How does China wield power using
infrastructure? Do smaller states have agency? How should we
understand the role of infrastructure in broader development? Does
industrial policy work? And crucially, how should competing global
powers respond?
China's Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) produced propaganda music
that still stirs unease and, at times, evokes nostalgia. Lei X.
Ouyang uses selections from revolutionary songbooks to untangle the
...complex interactions between memory, trauma, and generational
imprinting among those who survived the period of extremes.
Interviews combine with ethnographic fieldwork and surveys to
explore both the Cultural Revolution's effect on those who lived
through it as children and contemporary remembrance of the music
created to serve the Maoist regime. As Ouyang shows, the
weaponization of music served an ideological revolution but also
revolutionized the senses. She examines essential questions raised
by this phenomenon, including: What did the revolutionization look,
sound, and feel like? What does it take for individuals and groups
to engage with such music? And what is the impact of such an
experience over time?
Perceptive and provocative, Music as Mao's Weapon is an
insightful look at the exploitation and manipulation of the arts
under authoritarianism.
Chinese civil society groups have achieved iconic policy advocacy successes in the areas of environmental protection, women’s rights, poverty alleviation, and public health. This book examines why ...some groups are successful in policy advocacy within the authoritarian context, while others fail. A mechanism of cultural resonance is introduced as an innovative theoretical framework to systematically compare interactions between Chinese civil society and the government in different movements. It is argued that civil society advocacy results depend largely on whether advocators can achieve cultural resonance with policymakers and the mainstream public through their social performances. The effective performance is the one in which advocators employ symbols embraced by the audience (policymakers and the public) in their actions and framings. While many studies have tried to explain the phenomena of successful policy advocacy in China through institutional or organizational factors, this book not only contains extensive empirical data based on field research, but takes a cultural sociological turn to identify the meaning-making process behind advocacy actions. Civil Society in China will appeal to students and scholars of sociology, political science, social work, and Chinese and Asian studies more broadly. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license
Managing ethnic nationalism within the People's Republic of China has become increasingly challenging. As new reforms widen economic disparities between minorities and the Han majority, even the most ...assimilated of minorities, the Zhuang, have begun to demand special treatment from the central government. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officially recognized the sixteen million Zhuang as China's largest minority nationality in the early 1950s, granting them regional autonomy. Prior to this, however, the Zhuang did not share a common ethnic identity. Katherine Palmer Kaup explores why the CCP in effect created the Zhuang nationality. Why did it launch a massive propaganda campaign to increase nationality consciousness? How is the party now responding to the Zhuang's assertive political demands? This pioneering study unveils the unique culture of the Zhuang people, showing at the same time the CCP's skillful balancing of ethnic and regional loyalties over the past 50 years to integrate the diversity of China's ethnic mosaic.
Touring China Mo, Yajun; Zuelow, Eric G. E
2021, 2021-12-15
eBook
In Touring China, Yajun Mo explores how early twentieth century Chinese sightseers described the destinations that they visited, and how their travel accounts gave Chinese readers a means to imagine ...their vast country. The roots of China's tourism market stretch back over a hundred years, when railroad and steamship networks expanded into the coastal regions. Tourism- related businesses and publications flourished in urban centers while scientific exploration, investigative journalism, and wartime travel propelled many Chinese from the eastern seaboard to its peripheries. Mo considers not only accounts of overseas travel and voyages across borderlands, but also trips within China. On the one hand, via travel and travel writing, the unity of China's coastal regions, inland provinces, and western frontiers was experienced and reinforced. On the other, travel literature revealed a persistent tension between the aspiration for national unity and the anxiety that China might fall apart. Touring China tells a fascinating story about the physical and intellectual routes people took on various journeys, against the backdrop of the transition from Chinese empire to nation-state.
Following the failure of communist revolutions in Europe, in the
1920s the Soviet Union turned its attention to fostering
anticolonial uprisings in Asia. China, divided politically between
rival ...military factions and dominated economically by imperial
powers, emerged as the Comintern's prime target. At the same time,
a host of prominent figures in Soviet literature, film, and theater
traveled to China, met with Chinese students in Moscow, and placed
contemporary China on the new Soviet stage. They sought to
reimagine the relationship with China in the terms of socialist
internationalism-and, in the process, determine how
internationalism was supposed to look and feel in practice.
Internationalist Aesthetics offers a groundbreaking
account of the crucial role that China played in the early Soviet
cultural imagination. Edward Tyerman tracks how China became the
key site for Soviet debates over how the political project of
socialist internationalism should be mediated, represented, and
produced. The central figure in this story, the avant-garde writer
Sergei Tret'iakov, journeyed to Beijing in the 1920s and
experimented with innovative documentary forms in an attempt to
foster a new sense of connection between Chinese and Soviet
citizens. Reading across genres and media from reportage and
biography to ballet and documentary film, Tyerman shows how Soviet
culture sought an aesthetics that could foster a sense of
internationalist community. He reveals both the aspirations and the
limitations of this project, illuminating a crucial chapter in
Sino-Russian relations. Grounded in extensive sources in Russian
and Chinese, this cultural history bridges Slavic and East Asian
studies and offers new insight into the transnational dynamics that
shaped socialist aesthetics and politics in both countries.
As China continues to transform itself, many assume that the nation will eventually move beyond communism and adopt a Western-style democracy. But could China develop a unique form of government ...based on its own distinct traditions? Jiang Qing--China's most original, provocative, and controversial Confucian political thinker--says yes. In this book, he sets out a vision for a Confucian constitutional order that offers a compelling alternative to both the status quo in China and to a Western-style liberal democracy.A Confucian Constitutional Orderis the most detailed and systematic work on Confucian constitutionalism to date.
Jiang argues against the democratic view that the consent of the people is the main source of political legitimacy. Instead, he presents a comprehensive way to achieve humane authority based on three sources of political legitimacy, and he derives and defends a proposal for a tricameral legislature that would best represent the Confucian political ideal. He also puts forward proposals for an institution that would curb the power of parliamentarians and for a symbolic monarch who would embody the historical and transgenerational identity of the state. In the latter section of the book, four leading liberal and socialist Chinese critics--Joseph Chan, Chenyang Li, Wang Shaoguang, and Bai Tongdong--critically evaluate Jiang's theories and Jiang gives detailed responses to their views.
A Confucian Constitutional Orderprovides a new standard for evaluating political progress in China and enriches the dialogue of possibilities available to this rapidly evolving nation. This book will fascinate students and scholars of Chinese politics, and is essential reading for anyone concerned about China's political future.
As China and the U.S. increasingly compete for power in key
areas of U.S. influence, great power conflict looms. Yet few
studies have looked to the Middle East and Africa, regions of major
political, ...economic, and military importance for both China and the
U.S., to theorize how China competes in a changing world
system.
China's Rise in the Global South examines China's
behavior as a rising power in two key Global South regions, the
Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. Dawn C. Murphy, drawing on
extensive fieldwork and hundreds of interviews, compares and
analyzes thirty years of China's interactions with these regions
across a range of functional areas: political, economic, foreign
aid, and military. From the Belt and Road initiative to the
founding of new cooperation forums and special envoys, China's
Rise in the Global South offers an in-depth look at China's
foreign policy approach to the countries it considers its partners
in South-South cooperation.
Intervening in the emerging debate between liberals and realists
about China's future as a great power, Murphy contends that China
is constructing an alternate international order to interact with
these regions, and this book provides policymakers and scholars of
international relations with the tools to analyze it.
China's extraordinarily rapid economic growth since 1978, driven by market- oriented reforms, has set world records and continued unabated, despite predictions of an inevitable slowdown. In The State ...Strikes Back: The End of Economic Reform in China?, the renowned China scholar Nicholas R. Lardy argues that China's future growth prospects could be equally bright but are shadowed by the specter of resurgent state dominance, which has begun to diminish the vital role of the market and private firms in China's economy. Lardy's book is a timely sequel to his path-breaking Markets Over Mao: The Rise of Private Business in China (Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2014). This book mobilizes new data to trace how President Xi Jinping has consistently championed state-owned or controlled enterprises, encouraging local political leaders and financial institutions to prop up ailing, underperforming companies that are a drag on China's potential. As with his previous book, Lardy's perspective departs from conventional wisdom, especially in its contention that China could achieve a high growth rate for the next two decades—if it reverses course and returns to the path of market- oriented reforms.
Why does China act as it does in its pursuit of energy security? Are "resource wars" inevitable? Going beyond traditional analyses that focus on China as a regional and global threat, Jean Garrison ...sheds new light on the roots of the country's energy policy and the constraints that it faces. Garrison eschews the zero-sum approaches that underlie much conceptualization of the subject, arguing that they are in large part based on the erroneous notion that China is a unitary actor with a coherent energy strategy. Her attention to the competing developmental and environmental priorities at play in China's domestic politics is a critical contribution to the global energy-security debate.
