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Blending elements of the surreal with carefully observed details of life in present-day Beijing, Jonathan Tel’s short stories offer a rich and highly entertaining guide to the city and its many and varied inhabitants–from a modern-day Monkey King to an equally contemporary indentured servant, from a boy tasting his first cotton candy to a Ming Dynasty princess posting her first online profile. The stories offer a vicarious tour through modern Beijing and a long view of Chinese history. The reader flies through the book, chuckling over one character’s trickery, moved by another’s plight, and horrified at another’s unwitting actions, until reaching the culminating novella, which brings the whole book and its take on China back to the Western reader with a stunning immediacy. Americans’ newly minted fascination with China, stoked by the 2008 Olympics, can find both intellectual and artistic satisfaction in this collection.
This collection of stories and a novella about China's capital city will amuse, move, and horrify the reader, from a tale about a modern-day Monkey King to a contemporary indentured servant, from a boy tasting his first cotton candy to a Ming Dynasty princess posting her first online profile.
In recent years, China and India have become the most important economic partners of Africa and their footprints are growing by leaps and bounds, transforming Africa's international relations in a dramatic way. Although the overall impact of China and India's engagement in Africa has been positive in the short-term, partly as a result of higher returns from commodity exports fuelled by excessive demands from both countries, little research exists on the actual impact of China and India's growing involvement on Africa's economic transformation. This book examines in detail the opportunities and challenges posed by the increasing presence of China and India in Africa, and proposes critical interventions that African governments must undertake in order to negotiate with China and India from a stronger and more informed platform.
In the 1980s, China faced the monumental task of creating, from scratch, internationally competitive companies. This challenge was especially daunting in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector. The Inside Story of China's High-Tech Industry describes the emergence and growth of this industry in China through a historically situated analysis of China's leading science park, Beijing's Zhongguancun, also known as China's Silicon Valley. Zhou challenges the prevailing view that foreign multinational corporations and exports are the driving forces for technological progress in less developed countries by arguing that, in the case of China, it is the conjunction of domestic and export markets that has provided the main impetus to technological learning and the development of industry competitiveness. This is the best treatment to date of China's most important innovation region. It will be useful for scholars and students in the fields of economics, regional sciences, geography, planning, sociology, information technology, and business management, as well as for anyone interested in the rise of China and global technological development.
The authors set out each of the scarcities that could limit China's power and stall its progress. Beyond scarcities of natural resources and public goods, they explore China's persistent poverties of individual freedoms, institutions, and ideological appeal--and the corrosive loss of values among a growing middle class shackled by a parochial and inflexible political system.
From the dean of Scandinavian noir, Henning Mankell, the internationally bestselling and universally acclaimed Kurt Wallander series, an incredible stand-alone masterpiece: a bone-chilling mystery that spans two centuries and four continents. In the far north of Sweden a small, quiet village has been almost entirely wiped out by a mass murderer. The only clue left at the scene is a red ribbon. Among the victims are the grandparents of Judge Birgitta Roslin, who sets out to find the killer. Despite being brushed off by the police, Birgitta is determined to prove that the murders were not a random act of violence but are part of something far more dark and complex. Her investigation leads to the highest echelons of power and into the recesses of history where the seeds of evil deeds were planted.
Why hasn't the emergence of capitalism led China's citizenry to press for liberal democratic change? This book argues that China's combination of state-led development, late industrialization, and socialist legacies have affected popular perceptions of socioeconomic mobility, economic dependence on the state, and political options, giving citizens incentives to perpetuate the political status quo and disincentives to embrace liberal democratic change. Wright addresses the ways in which China's political and economic development shares broader features of state-led late industrialization and post-socialist transformation with countries as diverse as Mexico, India, Tunisia, Indonesia, South Korea, Brazil, Russia, and Vietnam. With its detailed analysis of China's major socioeconomic groups (private entrepreneurs, state sector workers, private sector workers, professionals and students, and farmers), Accepting Authoritarianism is an up-to-date, comprehensive, and coherent text on the evolution of state-society relations in reform-era China.
One of the oldest cities in the world, Beijing was an imperial capital for centuries. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Beijing became not only the political center of the new communist country, but also the signifier of socialist ideol-ogy and revolutionary culture. Now, in the 21st century, Beijing embodies global conflicts and global connections. Over the course of the last century, then, Beijing moved from the quintessential “traditional” capital to the symbol of communist urban form and finally to a cosmopolitan metropolis. These three stages in the history of Beijing and its shifting representations are the topic of this study. Like other capitals, Beijing is much more than its physical entity. It also functions as a concept, a representation. As city planners have (and continue to) present Beijing to the world as a model, the fluctuating images of Beijing have become solidified in urban space. Today, the urban form of Beijing juxtaposes diverse spaces that span centuries, embodying the various representations of the city by its planners in different eras. These representations of space also provide possibilities for writers to rethink and rebuild the city in their literary works. Chinese writers and filmmakers often essentialize those urban spaces by making them symbols of different urban cultures, the old houses representing “traditional,” “patriarchal” Chinese culture while soviet-style buildings reflect revolu-tionary culture. Finally, the more recent sprouting of apartments, condos, and townhouses stands for the invasion of western modernity and provides evidence of global capitalism in contemporary China. Inspired by Henri Lefebvre, this study establishes a framework that connects urban spaces (representations of space) to writers and literary productions (representational space). I analyze the three major urban spatial forms of traditional, communist, and glob-alized Beijing and examine what these urban spaces mean to Chinese writers and filmmakers as well as how they use them to configure particular images of Beijing. I argue that these different configurations are actually the projections of those writers and filmmakers’ own cultural imaginations; they provoke a form of emotional catharsis and also produce alternative visions of the cityscape.
A provocative perspective on the fragile fundamentals, and forces for resilience, in the Chinese economy, and a forecast for the future on alternate scenarios of collapse and ascendance.
​Winner of the AERA Division B Outstanding Book Recognition Award This book examines the dynamics surrounding the education of children in the unofficial schools in China’s urban migrant communities. This ethnographic study focuses on both the complex structural factors impacting the education of children attending unofficial migrant children schools and the personal experiences of individuals working within these communities. As the book illustrates in careful detail, the migrant children schools serve a critical function in the community by serving as a hub for organized collective action around shared grievances related to issues of education, employment, wellbeing, and other social rights. In turn, the development of a collective identity among teachers, students, parents, and other members in the migrant communities makes it possible for activists to begin to working to address multiple forms of discrimination and maltreatment while simultaneously moving towards the possibility of more profound social transformation.