Böcker i Asia/Pacific/Perspectives-serien

This classic in the annals of village studies will be widely read and debated for what it reveals about China''s rural dynamics as well as the nature of state power, markets, the military, social relations, and religion. Built on extraordinarily intimate and detailed research in a Sichuan village that Isabel Crook began in 1940, the book provides an unprecedented history of Chinese rural life during the war with Japan.   It is an essential resource for all scholars of contemporary China.

This book is a history of the societies in the south of China known variously as Li and Lao who lived in the lands between the Red and Pearl Rivers in the first millennium CE, a period in which they produced the largest collection of bronze kettledrums known in the world. These drums were symbols of political authority and legitimacy for the Li and Lao rulers, and the abundance of drums cast in the area between the Red and Pearl Rivers centuries after the Chinese Empire had conquered the surrounding districts indicates their wealth and power. Very little research has been done about the history of the societies that produced these drums, and this is the first work to try to explain the political and economic factors behind their makersΓÇÖ rise to power and their subsequent disappearance. The study not only fills several gaps in our understanding of the history of Southern China, it also challenges many widely held assumptions about the history of ethnic relations and Chinese settlement of the Lingnan region, as well as the relationship between the Chinese Empires and the lands that would form the heart of a future Vietnamese state.

In this book, Wanning Sun illuminates the harsh reality of inequality and discrimination that China's rural migrant workers face every day, and how these workers use available media to negotiate these injustices. This book is essential reading for all concerned with the growing use of media in the cultural politics of our highly digitalized world.

This book offers the first detailed English-language examination of the Great Vietnamese Famine of 1945, which left at least a million dead, and links it persuasively to the largely unexpected Viet Minh seizure of power only months later. Drawing on extensive research in French archives, Geoffrey C. Gunn offers an important new interpretation of Japanese-Vichy French wartime economic exploitation of Vietnam's agricultural potential. Gunn asks whether the famine signaled a loss of the French administration's "mandate of heaven," or whether the overall dire human condition was the determining factor in facilitating communist victory in August 1945. In the broader sweep of Vietnamese history, including the rise of the communist party, the picture that emerges is not only one of local victimhood at the hands of outsiders but the enormous agency on the part of the Vietnamese themselves to achieve moral victory, no matter how controversial, tragic, and contested the outcome. As the author clearly demonstrates, colonial-era development strategies and contests also had their postwar sequels in the "American war," just as land, land reform, and subsistence-sustainable development issues persist into the present.

Emancipation, a defining feature of twentieth-century Chinese society, is explored in detail in this compelling study. Angelina Chin expands and reinterprets the meaning of women's emancipation by examining what this rhetoric meant to lower-class women. Challenging the nation-based framework of history by focusing on two cities, Chin compares colonial Hong Kong with Guangzhou, which allows her to seamlessly integrate colonial studies and China studies.

Provides an introduction to the cultural and political dimensions of contemporary Chinese cinema. This book explores the world of Chinese underground and independent film, leading Western and Chinese scholars trace the changing dynamics of Chinese film culture. It is for those interested in a society caught between socialism and global currents.

Provides an introduction to the cultural and political dimensions of contemporary Chinese cinema. This book explores the world of Chinese underground and independent film, leading Western and Chinese scholars trace the changing dynamics of Chinese film culture. It is for those interested in a society caught between socialism and global currents.

The May 1980 Kwangju Uprising still exerts a profound influence in Korean society. Combining personal reflections and academic analysis, this text offers an examination of the multiple meanings of this event, explaining how the memory of Kwangju has affected Korean life from politics to culture.

Offers exploration of the social, economic, political, legal, and practical parameters of crime and control, locating them within a broader milieu of turbulent development and transition. This volume is useful for those interested in modern and contemporary Chinese politics, law, and society, as well as in comparative criminology and law.

Pan-Asianism has been an ideal of Asian solidarity, regional cooperation, and regional integration but also served to justify expansionism and aggression. As such, it has been a decisive factor in the history of Asia and the Pacific region. This groundbreaking collection brings seminal documents on Pan-Asianism to the Western reader for the first time. It includes some forty primary sources from the 1920s to the present.

Pan-Asianism has been an ideal of Asian solidarity, regional cooperation, and regional integration but also served to justify expansionism and aggression. As such, it has been a decisive factor in the history of Asia and the Pacific region. This groundbreaking collection brings seminal documents on Pan-Asianism to the Western reader for the first time. It includes some fifty primary sources from 1850 to 1920.

Offers exploration of the social, economic, political, legal, and practical parameters of crime and control, locating them within a broader milieu of turbulent development and transition. This volume is useful for those interested in modern and contemporary Chinese politics, law, and society, as well as in comparative criminology and law.

This book offers the first detailed study of the essential relationship between thought reform and the "dangerous classes"-the prostitutes, beggars, petty criminals, and other "lumpenproletarians" the Communists saw as a threat to society and the revolution. Aminda Smith takes readers inside early-PRC reformatories, where the new state endeavored to transform "vagrants" into members of the laboring masses. As places where "the people" were literally created, these centers became testing grounds for rapidly changing ideas and experiments about thought reform and the subjects they produced. Smith explores reformatories as institutions dedicated to molding new socialist citizens and as symbolic spaces in which internees, cadres, and the ordinary masses made sense of what it meant to be a member of the people in the People's Republic. Drawing on extensive, previously unavailable source material, she offers convincing answers to much-debated questions about the development and future of Chinese political culture.

In this deeply original study of the Mongols, leading scholar Uradyn E. Bulag draws on key themes of cosmopolitanism and friendship to develop a new concept he terms "collaborative nationalism." He uses this concept to explore the dilemma of minorities in China as they fight against being embraced too tightly in the bonds of "friendship." Through a rich array of case studies, Bulag illuminates the fierce competition among China, Japan, Mongolia, and Russia to appropriate the Mongol heritage to buttress their own national identities. Weighing the options the Mongols face, he argues that the ethnopolitical is not so much about identity as it is about the capacity of an ethnic group to decide and organize its own vision of itself, both within its community and in relation to other groups.

This seminal study explores the significant changes in the global IT industry as production has shifted from the developed world to massive sites in the developing world that house hundreds of thousands of workers in appalling low-wage conditions to minimize labor costs. The authors trace the development of the new networks of globalized mass production in the IT industry and the reorganization of work since the 1990s, capturing the systemic nature of an industry-wide restructuring of production and work in the global context. Their wide-ranging and detailed analysis takes the debates on the globalization of production beyond narrow perspectives of determining criteria of "success" for participation in global networks. Rather, they emphasize the changing nature of work, employment relations, and labor policies and their implications for the possibilities of sustainable economic and social development.

This pathbreaking study of North Korea's political history and culture sheds invaluable light on the country's unique leadership continuity and succession. The authors show how, in defiance of the instability of most revolutionary states, the durability of charismatic politics in North Korea defines its exceptional place in global politics.

Focusing on poverty and class in its analysis of social movements, this work shows how social movements have had to change because poverty reduction did not serve its role as a political template. It includes chapters on gender, lower castes, environment, the Hindu Right, Kerala, labor, farmers, and biotechnology.

Bringing together the work of distinguished China historians, anthropologists, and literary and film scholars, Gender in Motion raises provocative questions about the diversity of gender practices during the late imperial society and the persistence and transformation of older gender ideologies under the conditions of modernity in China. While several studies have investigated gender or labor in late imperial and twentieth century China, this book brings these two concepts together, asking how these two categories interacted and produced new social practices and theories. Individual chapters examine agricultural and urban work, travel within China, overseas study, polyandry, the acting profession, courtesan culture, female politicians, Maoist work culture, and the boundaries of virtue and respectability.Governing notions of the social order (and interrelated constructions of gender) changed radically in the modern eraΓÇöinitially with the questioning of the imperial, dynastic order and the creation of a Chinese republic in the early twentieth century, later with the creation of a Communist government and, most recently, with China''s political and cultural transformations in the post-Mao era. As ideas and practices of gender have changed, the persistence of older rhetorical signs in the interstices of new political visions has complicated the social projects and understandings of modernity, especially in terms of the creation of new public spaces, new concepts of work and virtue, and new configurations of gender.Contributions by: Madeleine Yue Dong, Bryna Goodman, Gail Hershatter, Ellen R. Judd, Joan Judge, Wendy Larson, Susan Mann, Kenneth L. Pomeranz, Tze-lan Deborah Sang, Matthew H. Sommer, Luo Suwen, Catherine Vance Yeh, and Wang Zheng.

A study of contemporary Okinawan culture, politics and historical memory. It argues that the long Japanese tradition of defining Okinawa as a subordinate part of Japan means that all claims of Okinawan distinctiveness necessarily become part of the larger debate over contemporary identity.

This volume challenges the perception of Asian women as either "mail-order" brides or overseas workers. There are a wide range of case studies, all showing the multiplicity of roles women maintain, and emphasizing the point that marriage, work and migration are inextricably linked.