Dancing with the Devil explains why public ownership has declined in post-Mao China. Focusing on the behavior of political actors under changing incentives and constraints, the book illustrates how growing concerns about jobs and revenue have forced the country's communist rulers to change their policies toward private capital.
Between Politics and Markets examines how the decline of central planning in post-Mao China was related to the rise of two markets - an economic market for the exchange of products and factors, and a political market for the diversion to private interests of state assets and authorities. Lin reveals their concurrent development through an account of how industrial firms competed their way out of the plan through exchange relations with one another and with state agents. He argues that the two markets were mutually accommodating, that the political market grew also from a decay of the state's self-monitoring capacity, and that economic actors' competition for special favors from state agents constituted a major driving force of economic institutional change.
Large-scale interconnected systems have become more prominent in society due to a higher demand for sustainable development. As such, it is imperative to create effective methods and techniques to control such systems. Large-Scale Fuzzy Interconnected Control Systems Design and Analysis is an innovative source of academic research that discusses the latest approaches to control large-scale systems, and the challenges that occur when implementing them. Highlighting a critical range of topics such as system stability, system stabilization, and fuzzy rules, this book is an ideal publication for engineers, researchers, academics, graduate students, and practitioners interested in the design of large-scale interconnected systems.
Over the last twenty years, Chinese intellectuals have actively participated in the re-construction of a new multi-dimensional intellectual discourse, generated from the complex interaction between intellectual ideas and social context. Virtually every major modern Western current of thought has exerted an impact on the development of this discourse, from Enlightenment rationalism to postmodern theories. "The Search for Modernity" looks at the changing relationship between Chinese intellectuals and society, and examines the role of Chinese intellectuals in the turbulent process of modernization, comparing them to their Western counterparts. Intellectuals in China are facing a period of confusion and uncertainty during this time of transition. "The Search for Modernity" is an important attempt to understand the philosophical dilemmas and challenges facing Chinese intellectuals as they define the issues of modernity within a global context, their self-identity, and their role in a changing Chinese society.
Asian Americans are often stereotyped as the “model minority.” Their sizeable presence at elite universities and high household incomes have helped construct the narrative of Asian American “exceptionalism.” While many scholars and activists characterize this as a myth, pundits claim that Asian Americans’ educational attainment is the result of unique cultural values. In The Asian American Achievement Paradox, sociologists Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou offer a compelling account of the academic achievement of the children of Asian immigrants. Drawing on in-depth interviews with the adult children of Chinese immigrants and Vietnamese refugees and survey data, Lee and Zhou bridge sociology and social psychology to explain how immigration laws, institutions, and culture interact to foster high achievement among certain Asian American groups. For the Chinese and Vietnamese in Los Angeles, Lee and Zhou find that the educational attainment of the second generation is strikingly similar, despite the vastly different socioeconomic profiles of their immigrant parents. Because immigration policies after 1965 favor individuals with higher levels of education and professional skills, many Asian immigrants are highly educated when they arrive in the United States. They bring a specific “success frame,” which is strictly defined as earning a degree from an elite university and working in a high-status field. This success frame is reinforced in many local Asian communities, which make resources such as college preparation courses and tutoring available to group members, including their low-income members. While the success frame accounts for part of Asian Americans’ high rates of achievement, Lee and Zhou also find that institutions, such as public schools, are crucial in supporting the cycle of Asian American achievement. Teachers and guidance counselors, for example, who presume that Asian American students are smart, disciplined, and studious, provide them with extra help and steer them toward competitive academic programs. These institutional advantages, in turn, lead to better academic performance and outcomes among Asian American students. Yet the expectations of high achievement come with a cost: the notion of Asian American success creates an “achievement paradox” in which Asian Americans who do not fit the success frame feel like failures or racial outliers. While pundits ascribe Asian American success to the assumed superior traits intrinsic to Asian culture, Lee and Zhou show how historical, cultural, and institutional elements work together to confer advantages to specific populations. An insightful counter to notions of culture based on stereotypes, The Asian American Achievement Paradox offers a deft and nuanced understanding how and why certain immigrant groups succeed.
Governing Death, Making Persons tells the story of how economic reforms and changes in the management of death in China have affected the governance of persons. The Chinese Communist Party has sought to channel the funeral industry and death rituals into vehicles for reshaping people into "modern" citizens and subjects. Since the Reform and Opening period and the marketization of state funeral parlors, the Party has promoted personalized funerals in the hope of promoting a market-oriented and individualistic ethos. However, things have not gone as planned. Huwy-min Lucia Liu writes about the funerals she witnessed and the life stories of two kinds of funeral workers: state workers who are quasi-government officials and semilegal private funeral brokers. She shows that end-of-life commemoration in urban China today is characterized by the resilience of social conventions and not a shift toward market economy individualization. Rather than seeing a rise of individualism and the decline of a socialist self, Liu sees the durability of socialist, religious, communal, and relational ideas of self, woven together through creative ritual framings in spite of their contradictions.
Stability Analysis and Robust Control of Time-Delay Systems" focuses on essential aspects of this field, including the stability analysis, stabilization, control design, and filtering of various time-delay systems. Primarily based on the most recent research, this monograph presents all the above areas using a free-weighting matrix approach first developed by the authors. The effectiveness of this method and its advantages over other existing ones are proven theoretically and illustrated by means of various examples. The book will give readers an overview of the latest advances in this active research area and equip them with a pioneering method for studying time-delay systems. It will be of significant interest to researchers and practitioners engaged in automatic control engineering. Prof. Min Wu, senior member of the IEEE, works at the Central South University, China.
The leading Party cadre of Lin Village in Southeast China describes in this book forty years of turbulent events that affected individuals and families in the village: the downfall of the landlords during the Land Reform, the rise of poor peasants to political power, the political fanaticism of the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and recent efforts to restore rational, pragmatic policies in China's countryside.The magnitude of change in Lin Village since 1949 has been considerable. Most villagers have benefited from tangible improvements in agriculture, education, and medicine, and they have developed a sense of political participation and integration into the national political arena. Significantly, while these dynamic changes have been taking place, the observance of cultural tradition has persisted. Attempts made by the government to change "feudalistic" beliefs and practices have yet to make any lasting impression on village life.More than an account of one village, this book documents for readers the cataclysmic changes of China's entire post-liberation era, detailing their effects in a personalized style. An American anthropologist of Chinese descent, Huang Shu-min employs participant-observation and personal interviews to shape this unique view of rural China today and to delineate some of the misconceptions held by Western academics.
Intercultural theater is a prominent phenomena of twentieth-century international theater. This books views intercultural theatre as a process of displacement and re-placement of various cultural and theatrical forces, a process which the author describes as 'the poetics of displacement'.
Reproducing Chinese Culture in Diaspora discusses how a group of anti-communist Chinese exiles from Yunnan Province have managed to establish a rural livelihood in Thailand's northern hills over the past half century. When faced with the seemingly invincible Communist forces that were sweeping across the Mainland, these nationals retreated in 1949 or shortly thereafter to the Golden Triangle that sits astride the borders of Burma, Laos, and Thailand in voluntary exile. This book mainly concerns their hardships as they have struggled to carve out a new life along with their attempts to find an agricultural identity in the area. Initially gaining power as drug traffickers and narco-kings, the Yunnan exiles have transformed into sustainable farming leaders. Yet, despite their success in establishing themselves in Thailand, their community is facing a steep decline that threatens their long time survival. Part of their rationale in leaving communist China in search of a new settlement in the Golden Triangle, the exiles sought to protect Chinese traditions and ideals in the face of what they felt was Western influence. Yet, in their attempts to maintain their traditions, they've drifted to the opposite extreme, treating those traditions as sacrosanct and adhering to them rigidly. As a result, many of the younger generations are fleeing the communities from this "cultural petrification," and those who stay openly challenge the authoritarian old guard in a desire to modernize. This clash of old vs new severely strains a prosperous yet fragile community, clouding its future in uncertainty.
It is the end of the nineteenth century and China is riding on the crest of great change, but for nine-year-old Willow, the only child of a destitute family in the small southern town of Chin-kiang, nothing ever seems to change. Until the day she meets Pearl, the eldest daughter of a zealous American missionary. Pearl is head-strong, independent and fiercely intelligent, and will grow up to be Pearl S Buck, the Pulitzer- and Nobel Prize-winning writer and humanitarian activist, but for now all Willow knows is that she has never met anyone like her in all her life. From the start the two are thick as thieves, but when the Boxer Rebellion rocks the nation, Pearl's family is forced to leave China to flee religious persecution. As the twentieth century unfolds in all its turmoil, through right-wing military coups and Mao's Red Revolution, through bad marriages and broken dreams, the two girls cling to their lifelong friendship across the sea. In this ambitious and moving new novel, Anchee Min, acclaimed author of Empress Orchid and Red Azalea, brings to life a courageous and passionate woman who loved the country of her childhood and who has been hailed in China as a modern heroine.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.