Gifts, Favors, and Banquets

Gifts, Favors, and Banquets PDF Author: Mayfair Mei-Hui Yang
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501713043
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
An elaborate and pervasive set of practices, called guanxi, underlies everyday social relationships in contemporary China. Obtaining and changing job assignments, buying certain foods and consumer items, getting into good hospitals, buying train tickets, obtaining housing, even doing business—all such tasks call for the skillful and strategic giving of gifts and cultivating of obligation, indebtedness, and reciprocity. Mayfair Mei-hui Yang's close scrutiny of this phenomenon serves as a window to view facets of a much broader and more complex cultural, historical, and political formation. Using rich and varied ethnographic examples of guanxi stemming from her fieldwork in China in the 1980s and 1990s, the author shows how this "gift economy" operates in the larger context of the socialist state redistributive economy.

Gifts, Favors, and Banquets

Gifts, Favors, and Banquets PDF Author: Mayfair Mei-Hui Yang
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501713043
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
An elaborate and pervasive set of practices, called guanxi, underlies everyday social relationships in contemporary China. Obtaining and changing job assignments, buying certain foods and consumer items, getting into good hospitals, buying train tickets, obtaining housing, even doing business—all such tasks call for the skillful and strategic giving of gifts and cultivating of obligation, indebtedness, and reciprocity. Mayfair Mei-hui Yang's close scrutiny of this phenomenon serves as a window to view facets of a much broader and more complex cultural, historical, and political formation. Using rich and varied ethnographic examples of guanxi stemming from her fieldwork in China in the 1980s and 1990s, the author shows how this "gift economy" operates in the larger context of the socialist state redistributive economy.

Social Connections in China

Social Connections in China PDF Author: Thomas Gold
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521530316
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
This volume assesses the evolving role of guanxi (social networks) in China's transforming society.

The Art of Social Relationships and Exchange in China

The Art of Social Relationships and Exchange in China PDF Author: Mayfair Mei-hui Yang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ceremonial exchange
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description


The Art of Useless

The Art of Useless PDF Author: Calvin Hui
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231549830
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
Since embarking on economic reforms in 1978, the People’s Republic of China has also undergone a sweeping cultural reorganization, from proletarian culture under Mao to middle-class consumer culture today. Under these circumstances, how has a Chinese middle class come into being, and how has consumerism become the dominant ideology of an avowedly socialist country? The Art of Useless offers an innovative way to understand China’s unprecedented political-economic, social, and cultural transformations, showing how consumer culture helps anticipate, produce, and shape a new middle-class subjectivity. Examining changing representations of the production and consumption of fashion in documentaries and films, Calvin Hui traces how culture contributes to China’s changing social relations through the cultivation of new identities and sensibilities. He explores the commodity chain of fashion on a transnational scale, from production to consumption to disposal, as well as media portrayals of the intersections of clothing with class, gender, and ethnicity. Hui illuminates key cinematic narratives, such as a factory worker’s desire for a high-quality suit in the 1960s, an intellectual’s longing for fashionable clothes in the 1980s, and a white-collar woman’s craving for brand-name commodities in the 2000s. He considers how documentary films depict the undersides of consumption—exploited laborers who fantasize about the products they manufacture as well as the accumulation of waste and its disposal—revealing how global capitalism renders migrant factory workers, scavengers, and garbage invisible. A highly interdisciplinary work that combines theoretical nuance with masterful close analyses, The Art of Useless is an innovative rethinking of the emergence of China’s middle-class consumer culture.

Engaging Social Media in China

Engaging Social Media in China PDF Author: Guobin Yang
Publisher: MSU Press
ISBN: 1611863910
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Introducing the concept of state-sponsored platformization, this volume shows the complexity behind the central role the party-state plays in shaping social media platforms. The party-state increasingly penetrates commercial social media while aspiring to turn its own media agencies into platforms. Yet state-sponsored platformization does not necessarily produce the Chinese Communist Party’s desired outcomes. Citizens continue to appropriate social media for creative public engagement at the same time that more people are managing their online settings to reduce or refuse connection, inducing new forms of crafted resistance to hyper-social media connectivity. The wide-ranging essays presented here explore the mobile radio service Ximalaya.FM, Alibaba’s evolution into a multi-platform ecosystem, livestreaming platforms in the United States and China, the role of Twitter in Trump’s North Korea diplomacy, user-generated content in the news media, the emergence of new social agents mediating between state and society, social media art projects, Chinese and US scientists’ use of social media, and reluctance to engage with WeChat. Ultimately, readers will find that the ten chapters in this volume contribute significant new research and insights to the fast-growing scholarship on social media in China at a time when online communication is increasingly constrained by international struggles over political control and privacy issues.

Social States

Social States PDF Author: Alastair I. Johnston
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691134537
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Socialization in international relations theory -- Mimicking -- Social influence -- Persuasion -- Conclusions.

Social Media in Industrial China

Social Media in Industrial China PDF Author: Xinyuan Wang
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 191063462X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Life outside the mobile phone is unbearable.’ Lily, 19, factory worker. Described as the biggest migration in human history, an estimated 250 million Chinese people have left their villages in recent decades to live and work in urban areas. Xinyuan Wang spent 15 months living among a community of these migrants in a small factory town in southeast China to track their use of social media. It was here she witnessed a second migration taking place: a movement from offline to online. As Wang argues, this is not simply a convenient analogy but represents the convergence of two phenomena as profound and consequential as each other, where the online world now provides a home for the migrant workers who feel otherwise ‘homeless’. Wang’s fascinating study explores the full range of preconceptions commonly held about Chinese people – their relationship with education, with family, with politics, with ‘home’ – and argues why, for this vast population, it is time to reassess what we think we know about contemporary China and the evolving role of social media.

Guanxi, Social Capital and School Choice in China

Guanxi, Social Capital and School Choice in China PDF Author: Ji Ruan
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319407546
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
This book focuses on the use of guanxi (Chinese personal connections) in everyday urban life: in particular, how and why people develop different types of social capital in their guanxi networks and the role of guanxi in school choice. Guanxi takes on a special significance in Chinese societies, and is widely-discussed and intensely-studied phenomenon today. In recent years in China, the phenomenon of parents using guanxi to acquire school places for their children has been frequently reported by the media, against the background of the Chinese Communist Party’s crackdown on corruption. From a sociological perspective, this book reveals how and why parents manage to do so. Ritual capital refers to an individual's ability to use ritual to benefit and gain resources from guanxi.

The China Questions 2

The China Questions 2 PDF Author: Maria Adele Carrai
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674270339
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
The China Questions 2 assembles top experts to explore key issues in US–China relations today, including conflict over Taiwan, economic and military competition, public health concerns, and areas of cooperation. Rejecting a new Cold War mindset, the authors call for dealing with the world’s most important bilateral relationship on its own terms.

The Art of Being Governed

The Art of Being Governed PDF Author: Michael Szonyi
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691197245
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
One of Choice Reviews' Outstanding Academic Titles of 2018--an innovative look at how families in Ming dynasty China negotiated military and political obligations to the state.tate.