Author: Minghui Hu
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295806060
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299
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Book Description
The figure of Dai Zhen (1724–1777) looms large in modern Chinese intellectual history. Dai was a mathematical astronomer and influential polymath who, along with like-minded scholars, sought to balance understandings of science, technology, and history within the framework of classical Chinese writings. Exploring ideas in fields as broad-ranging as astronomy, geography, governance, phonology, and etymology, Dai grappled with Western ideas and philosophies, including Jesuit conceptions of cosmology, which were so important to the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) court’s need for calendrical precision. Minghui Hu tells the story of China’s transition into modernity from the perspective of 18th-century Chinese scholars dedicated to examining the present and past with the tools of evidential analysis. Using Dai as the centering point, Hu shows how the tongru (“broadly learned scholars”) of this era navigated Confucian, Jesuit, and other worldviews during a dynamic period, connecting ancient theories to new knowledge in the process. Scholars and students of early modern Chinese history, and those examining science, religious, and intellectual history more broadly, will find China’s Transition to Modernity inspiring and helpful for their research and teaching.
Author: Madeleine Yue Dong
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 9780295986029
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356
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Book Description
Essays address expressions of modernity in relation to non-Western politics and national cultures. Topics range from the installation of gas streetlights in Shanghai to urban planning efforts aimed at improving daily routines of work and leisure.
Author: David Margolies
Publisher: Pluto Press (UK)
ISBN: 9780745341583
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 176
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Book Description
Exploring the conflict between China's rapid modernization and the West, as well as its own traditional values
Author: Tim Oakes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134659997
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 285
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Book Description
This book explores how the experience of modernization is revealed in China's newly constructed tourist landscapes. It argues that in China's burgeoning ethnic tourist villages and theme parks can be seen all the contradictions, debasement, and liberating potentials of Chinese modernity. Tim Oakes uses the province of Guizhou to examine the Chinese tourist industry as an example of the state's modernization policies and how local people have engaged with these changes.
Author: Yaowei Zhu
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438446454
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 230
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Book Description
Looks at the fate of Hong Kong’s unique culture since its reversion to China.
Author: Ronald Glassman
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 314
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Book Description
As recent events in the Far East have demonstrated, China is a nation that is in the midst of a massive social and political upheaval. The Chinese leadership is as uncertain as the populace on the future course for modern China, and remains dramatically split over capitalism and communism, pragmatism and realism, and democracy and despotism. In this work, Ronald Glassman analyzes the remarkable changes that are occurring in China, and examines the country's difficult movement from state-run economics to free enterprise, and from Communist Party dictatorship to electoral democracy. The book focuses on the emergence of a modern middle class in China, illuminating their political and economic desires and their impact in a postcommunist society. Glassman provides a Weberian analysis of the recent radical changes, using the concepts of rationalization, the bureaucratic middle strata, the greater degree of efficiency of capitalism over socialism, the independent power of the state, and charismatic leadership to help explain China's transition to modernity. His study is divided into four sections, covering the majority middle class and democracy, free enterprise and democracy, the transition to a legal democratic state, and political culture, legitimacy, and charisma. The book concludes with the thesis that China will make the transition to democracy when the new generation of leaders comes to power and the middle class becomes the mediating stratum. Students of sociology, political science, and Chinese history will find this work to be a valuable resource, as will both public and academic libraries.
Author: Hui Wang
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674966961
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 196
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Book Description
This translation of the Introduction to Wang Hui’s Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (2004) makes part of his four-volume masterwork available to English readers for the first time. A leading public intellectual in China, Wang charts the historical currents that have shaped Chinese modernity from the Song Dynasty to the present day, and along the way challenges the West to rethink some of its most basic assumptions about what it means to be modern. China from Empire to Nation-State exposes oversimplifications and distortions implicit in Western critiques of Chinese history, which long held that China was culturally resistant to modernization, only able to join the community of modern nations when the Qing Empire finally collapsed in 1912. Noting that Western ideas have failed to take into account the diversity of Chinese experience, Wang recovers important strains of premodern thought. Chinese thinkers theorized politics in ways that do not line up neatly with political thought in the West—for example, the notion of a “Heavenly Principle” that governed everything from the ordering of the cosmos to the structure of society and rationality itself. Often dismissed as evidence of imperial China’s irredeemably backward culture, many Neo-Confucian concepts reemerged in twentieth-century Chinese political discourse, as thinkers and activists from across the ideological spectrum appealed to ancient precedents and principles in support of their political and cultural agendas. Wang thus enables us to see how many aspects of premodern thought contributed to a distinctly Chinese vision of modernity.
Author: Sheldon H. Lu
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824861868
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
This ambitious work is a multimedia, interdisciplinary study of Chinese modernity in the context of globalization from the late nineteenth century to the present. Sheldon Lu draws on Chinese literature, film, art, photography, and video to broadly map the emergence of modern China in relation to the capitalist world-system in the economic, social, and political realms. Central to his study is the investigation of biopower and body politics, namely, the experience of globalization on a personal level. Lu first outlines the trajectory of the body in modern Chinese literature by focusing on the adventures, pleasures, and sufferings of the male (and female) body in the writings of selected authors. He then turns to avant-garde and performance art, tackling the physical self more directly through a consideration of work that takes the body as its very theme, material, and medium. In an exploration of mass visual culture, Lu analyzes artistic reactions to the multiple, uneven effects of globalization and modernization on both the physical landscape of China and the interior psyche of its citizens. This is followed by an inquiry into contemporary Chinese urban space in popular cinema and experimental photography and art. Examples are offered that capture the daily lives of contemporary Chinese as they struggle to make the transition from the vanishing space of the socialist lifestyle to the new capitalist economy of commodities. Lu reexamines the history and implications of China’s belated integration into the capitalist world system before closing with a postscript that traces the genealogy of the term "postsocialism" and points to the real relevance of the idea for the investigation of everyday life in China in the twenty-first century.
Author: Chun-shu Chang
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472085286
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 472
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Book Description
Describes the social and cultural transformation of seventeenth-century China through the life and work of Li Yu
Author: Cary Krosinsky
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303039204X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 245
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Book Description
Calling for more cooperation between China and the west, this new book by noted author and educator Cary Krosinsky provides readers with an on-the-ground perspective of what’s really happening in China today on the back of its recent economic rise, its desire and need to solve environmental challenges and the new positive dynamic created by its need for foreign capital. In doing so, Krosinsky and his colleagues from the Sustainable Finance Institute and Brown University highlight how China has recaptured its role as a leader in innovation, arguing that current approaches to the relationship hinder global progress on issues such as climate change, inequality, air pollution, food integrity and water security and pushes back on confrontational approaches and attempts to clarify misperceptions about contemporary China. China’s recent rise includes becoming a global leader on green policy and green finance, as it is increasingly leading the way towards modernization through innovation strategies focused on infrastructure, education, healthcare and aspects of clean energy technology, leading to opportunities across private equity, venture capital and green bonds. This creates an exciting opportunity for positive change, with environmental challenges becoming more salient to its own population, adding pressure on the government to provide solutions. China changes faster than any country in the world, creating an opportunity for meaningful, ongoing, positive transitions. Modern China is a call for more cooperation, and makes a clear, cogent case for collaboration in the face of current confrontational approaches. At the same time, dire environmental and social circumstances require an all-hands-on-deck approach. This book provides specific examples of what’s working and what’s needed to compete and thrive in this new paradigm through trusted relationships placed front and center for the future of economies and the betterment of global society.
