"Attacking Queshan": Popular Culture and the Creation of a Revolutionary Folklore in Southern Henan
<p>This article examines rural mobilization and propaganda by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Henan via the case of an uprising during the Northern Expedition, as well as official and popular representation of that event before and after 1949. It confirms recent scholarship regarding the role of local interpersonal networks in early rural mobilization, which in this context required infiltration of local, religio-magical popular militias called Red Spear societies. It then examines popular and party-constructed representations of the revolt, illustrating both the function of early CCP propaganda within rural popular culture and its implications for official historiography, which practiced specific forms of erasure in representing popular collective memory. It uses party documents, memoirs, and local histories to show that the historical significance of the Queshan uprising resides less in the failed revolt itself than in the ways its legacy was appropriated by cadres and historians during the twentieth century.
Creating a Public Face for Posterity: The Making of Chiang Kai-shek’s Shilue Manuscripts
In the midst of war, secretaries began selecting and organizing excerpts from Chiang Kai-shek’s diary, telegrams, written reports, and speeches to form the shilüe gaoben, which might be roughly translated as “draft” or “working manuscripts.” Yet because of the Guomindang’s later exodus to Taiwan, these manuscripts remained incomplete and in different stages of draft form. As such, they open an intriguing window into the process of establishing a Chinese leader’s political legitimacy in the eyes of posterity. In comparing the shilüe to its nearest equivalent, the dynastic Standard Histories, this article finds that its content reflected the change from the relationship between emperor and subject to that between national leader and citizen. In addition, by clarifying the methodology informing the shilüe as a political/historical document, this article finds that the secretaries’ varying goals for, and abilities to put together, the shilüe influenced how posterity would view Chiang’s legacy.
Unfinished Proletarianization: Self, Anger, and Class Action among the Second Generation of Peasant-Workers in Present-Day China
As a result of its open-door policies and 30 years of reform, China has become the “world’s factory” and given rise to a new working class of rural migrant workers. This process has underlain a path of (semi-)proletarianization of Chinese peasant-workers: now the second generation is experiencing dagong, working for a boss, in industrialized towns and cities. What is the process of proletarianization of peasant-workers in China today? In what way does the path of proletarianization shape the new Chinese working class? Drawing on workers’ narratives and our ethnographic studies in Shenzhen and Dongguan between 2005 and 2008, this study focuses on the subjective experiences of the second generation of dagongmei/zai, female migrant workers/male migrant workers, who have developed new forms of power and resistance unknown to the previous generation of workers. Did the pain and trauma experienced by the first generation of dagong subjects gradually evolve into the anger and resentment that has conditioned the labor strikes and class actions of the second generation? In short, what continuity and change can we observe in the life struggles of this new working class? Is the second generation of dagong subjects compelled to take action as a result of longendured pain and anger? Self, anger, and collective action among the new working class propel the narrative described in this article.
Chinese Masculinities Revisited: Male Images in Contemporary Television Drama Serials
Geng Song<br />Jul 1, 2010; 36:404-434<br />
Who Gets the House? Renegotiating Property Rights in Post-Socialist Urban China
<p>Privatization of urban housing in China has altered the basic parameters of household dissolution from those that prevailed before 1980. For several reasons, divorce was rare during the Mao years, but one critical barrier was employer control over urban housing. Thirty years later, employers no longer supply new flats and the majority of urban couples are homeowners. Simultaneous with the privatization of urban real estate has been a divorce revolution. In 1978 there was one divorce for every twenty marriages and courts handled half of the cases. By 2008 there was one divorce for every five marriages and courts finalized less than 30 percent of cases. Through a comparison of the changes in black letter law and arguments made by ordinary citizens in 24 focus groups, the article illustrates how ordinary citizens are negotiating with black letter law to institutionalize post-socialist property rights.
Copying, Counterfeiting, and Capitalism in Contemporary China: Jingdezhen’s Porcelain Industry
Eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in Jingdezhen between 2003 and 2006 revealed that copying and counterfeiting dominated porcelain production. Ideas about markets and the organization of production encouraged ceramists to copy and counterfeit in search of profit. At the same time, producers responded to others’ fraudulent acts by personalizing their market participation. Their network building was motivated by the belief that individuals with whom you shared a personal connection would not cheat you. Ideas about atomized individuals and dishonest markets, on the one hand, and strategies to personalize market activity, on the other, characterized contemporary capitalism in Jingdezhen (and perhaps China more broadly). This contradiction exemplifies a dual process by which capitalism affects how people think and what they do, while at the same time preexisting ideas and practices inform how capitalism operates in a particular setting.
Copying, Counterfeiting, and Capitalism in Contemporary China: Jingdezhen’s Porcelain Industry
Eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in Jingdezhen between 2003 and 2006 revealed that copying and counterfeiting dominated porcelain production. Ideas about markets and the organization of production encouraged ceramists to copy and counterfeit in search of profit. At the same time, producers responded to others’ fraudulent acts by personalizing their market participation. Their network building was motivated by the belief that individuals with whom you shared a personal connection would not cheat you. Ideas about atomized individuals and dishonest markets, on the one hand, and strategies to personalize market activity, on the other, characterized contemporary capitalism in Jingdezhen (and perhaps China more broadly). This contradiction exemplifies a dual process by which capitalism affects how people think and what they do, while at the same time preexisting ideas and practices inform how capitalism operates in a particular setting.
NASA: Oil slick off coast of Mexico Gulf
NASA: Oil slick off coast of Mexico Gulf
The oil slick …
Copying, Counterfeiting, and Capitalism in Contemporary China: Jingdezhen’s Porcelain Industry
Eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in Jingdezhen between 2003 and 2006 revealed that copying and counterfeiting dominated porcelain production. Ideas about markets and the organization of production encouraged ceramists to copy and counterfeit in search of profit. At the same time, producers responded to others’ fraudulent acts by personalizing their market participation. Their network building was motivated by the belief that individuals with whom you shared a personal connection would not cheat you. Ideas about atomized individuals and dishonest markets, on the one hand, and strategies to personalize market activity, on the other, characterized contemporary capitalism in Jingdezhen (and perhaps China more broadly). This contradiction exemplifies a dual process by which capitalism affects how people think and what they do, while at the same time preexisting ideas and practices inform how capitalism operates in a particular setting.
The Legacy of China’s Wartime Reporting, 1937-1945: Can the Past Serve the Present?
Japan’s invasion of China in the summer of 1937 dealt a devastating blow to Chinese journalism. Yet despite the hardships, China’s wartime reporters produced a legacy of vivid writing. In the face of a series of major defeats, the journalists attempted to shore up morale and stressed the heroic resistance of Chinese forces. They reported on Japanese atrocities such as the Rape of Nanjing, but not to such an extent that might erode morale. During the Maoist era, the legacy of this war reportage largely faded from a public memory which privileged the revolution. When a “new remembering” of the war emerged in the reform era, the heroic resistance narrative from war reportage dovetailed nicely with the new nationalism of today’s China. But this literature has been less helpful in developing the theme of Chinese victimhood, a key component of the new memory of the war. Finally, memoir literature, so common in most combatant nations, has been problematic in China. Those who remember their war experiences do so through the prism of later traumas, particularly the Cultural Revolution.
