This collection of papers comprises over ten papers published in recent years, with topics on new phenomena, new problems, new thinking, and new views in the fields of “barrier-free communication”, “new technologies and new media”, “Internet and society”, etc. They present and reflect on the new developments and new trends of current Chinese media research from different aspects, and to a certain extent outline and depict the landscape of the accelerating informatization of the Chinese society. They show the important influences of the media in the evolution of contemporary Chinese society.
This collection of papers comprises over ten papers published in recent years, with topics on new phenomena, new problems, new thinking, and new views in the fields of “barrier-free communication”, “new technologies and new media”, “Internet and society”, etc. They present and reflect on the new developments and new trends of current Chinese media research from different aspects, and to a certain extent outline and depict the landscape of the accelerating informatization of the Chinese society. They show the important influences of the media in the evolution of contemporary Chinese society.
The final destination of the Long March and center of the Chinese Communist Party's red bases, Yan'an acquired mythical status during the Maoist era. Though the city's significance as an emblem of revolutionary heroism has faded, today's Chinese still glorify Yan'an as a sanctuary for ancient cultural traditions. Ka-ming Wu's ethnographic account of contemporary Yan'an documents how people have reworked the revival of three rural practices--paper-cutting, folk storytelling, and spirit cults--within (and beyond) the socialist legacy. Moving beyond dominant views of Yan'an folk culture as a tool of revolution or object of market reform, Wu reveals how cultural traditions become battlegrounds where conflicts among the state, market forces, and intellectuals in search of an authentic China play out. At the same time, she shows these emerging new dynamics in the light of the ways rural residents make sense of rapid social change. Alive with details, Reinventing Chinese Tradition is an in-depth, eye-opening study of an evolving culture and society within contemporary China.
An Anthropological Inquiry into Confucianism provides a chronological, historicized reappraisal of Confucianism as a belief system and a way of life that revolves around three key concepts: ritual (Li), emotion (qing), and rational principle (li). Instead of examining all pertinent concepts of Confucianism, the book focuses on how Confucian thinkers grappled with these three words and tried to balance them throughout multiple dynasties and by polemics an practice performing rites in daily life. Informed by the theory and perspectives of anthropology, Guo Wu revisits the origin of Confucianism and treats it as part of the legacy of pre-textual worshipping and funerary rites which are incorporated, recorded, and interpreted by Confucians. An anthropological angle continues to flesh out the extant Confucian classics by reinterpreting the parts concerning the human-human, human-animal, and human-sacred objects relations. Modern anthropological studies are referenced to showed how Confucian ritualism permeated to the lifeworld of Chinese villages since the Song dynasty and revived in Ming-Qing dynasties along with a resurgent interest in the expression of human emotions, which had an inherent tension with (Heavenly) rational principle. The book concludes that the Confucian balancing of the triad continues into the 21st century along with its revival in China.
Based on fieldwork, archival research, and interviews, this book critically examines the building of modern Chinese discourse on a unified yet diverse Chinese nation on various sites of knowledge production. It argues that Chinese ideology on minority nationalities is rooted in modern China's quest for national integration and political authority. However, it also highlights the fact that the complex process of conceptualizing, investigating, classifying, curating, and writing minority history has been fraught with disputes and contradictions. As such, the book offers a timely contribution to the current debate in the fields of twentieth-century Chinese nationalism, minority policy, and anthropological practice.
This book tells the story of Chinese Zen master Yinyuan's journey from China to Japan amid the turmoil of the Manchu conquest of China. Despite tremendous difficulties, he persuaded the Shogun to build for him a new monastery (Manpukuji) in Kyoto and founded his own tradition called Obaku"--
In the first exploration of Chinese paintings as both material products and pictorial representations, The Double Screen shows how the collaboration and tension between material form and image gives life to a painting. A Chinese painting is often reduced to the image it bears; its material form is dismissed; its intimate connection with social activities and cultural conventions neglected. A screen occupies a space and divides it, supplies an ideal surface for painting, and has been a favorite pictorial image in Chinese art since antiquity. Wu Hung undertakes a comprehensive analysis of the screen, which can be an object, an art medium, a pictorial motif, or all three at once. With its diverse roles, the screen has provided Chinese painters with endless opportunities to reinvent their art. The Double Screen provides a powerful non-Western perspective on issues from portraiture and pictorial narrative to voyeurism, masquerade, and political rhetoric. It will be invaluable to anyone interested in the history of art and Asian studies.
From the first sets of photographic records made by Western travelers to doctored portraits of Chairman Mao and the avant-garde photographic performances of the post–Cultural Revolution era, photography in China has followed divergent paths. In this book, Wu Hung explores the multiple histories of photographic production in China, using them to tell a larger story about China’s shifting sociopolitical contexts and the different agendas, technologies, and aesthetics that have helped define its arts. At the center of the book is a large question: how has photography represented China and its people, its collective history and memory as well as the diversity of Chinese artists who have striven for creative expression? To address this question, the author offers an in-depth study of selected photographers, themes, and movements in Chinese photography from 1860 to the present, covering a wide range of genres, including portraiture, photojournalism, architectural and landscape photography, and conceptual photography. Beautifully illustrated, this book offers a multifaceted and in-depth analysis of an important photographic history.
This book explores the development of the Chinese animation film industry from the beginning of China’s reform process up to the present. It discusses above all the relationship between the communist state’s policies to stimulate "creative industries", concepts of creativity and aesthetics, and the creation and maintenance , through changing circumstances, of a national style by Chinese animators. The book also examines the relationship between Chinese animation, changing technologies including the rise first of television and then of digital media, and youth culture, demonstrating the importance of Chinese animation in Chinese youth culture in the digital age.
This book is about how one of the leading intellectual architects of Chinese modernization, Yan Fu (1854 - 1921), introduced the Chinese intellectual world to the liberalism of John Stuart Mill partly by grasping Mill's ideas, but also by misunderstanding and projecting them onto indigenous Chinese values, which in turn led to criticism and resistance. Rather than bending Western liberalism to the purposes of Chinese nationalism, Yan initiated a distinctively Chinese liberal tradition that became a major component of China's modern political culture.
International folk dancing serves to scrutinize relationships between Taiwan and the United States after World War II. Meanwhile, California-based Taiwanese immigrants apply their past dancing memories to their current practice of international folk dancing, suggesting new definitions to existing conceptions of Taiwanese identity. Moreover, the unstableness in the dance form's translations in Mandarin Chinese--tu-feng-wu or shi-jie min-su wu-dao--indicates that there is no consistent understanding of "folk," "international," and even "international folk dancing" itself. The lack of coherent translation furthermore signals varied interpretations of Taiwanese-ness by Taiwanese people from different places and of different generations
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