Piecing Together the Past: The Notion of Recovery in Fiction and Film from Taiwan
Writers and filmmakers in Taiwan have sought to use the narrative techniques of classic detective fiction to recover events of the Nationalist government–imposed White Terror of the early 1950s to bring the once-concealed past to light. Fiction writer Chen Yingzhen (Ch’en Ying-chen) pioneered this technique in short fiction written in 1983 to bring before the [...]
Read moreQuality, Development Discourse, and Minority Subjectivity in Contemporary Xinjiang
The government discourse that describes poverty in a minority nationality county in northern Xinjiang follows specific patterns. The term “quality” (suzhi) is used to attribute the roots of poverty to residents themselves as well as to legitimate official poverty-alleviation and market-development strategies. This official use of suzhi discourse attempts to constitute a particular kind of [...]
Read moreThe Modern Chinese Family: In Light of Economic and Legal History
Most social science theory and the currently powerful Chinese ideology of modernizationism assume that, with modern development, family-based peasant farm production will disappear, to be replaced by individuated industrial workers and the three-generation family by the nuclear family. The actual record of China’s economic history, however, shows the powerful persistence of the small family farm, [...]
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