Republican Beijing

Republican Beijing PDF Author: Madeleine Yue Dong
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 052092763X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
Old Beijing has become a subject of growing fascination in contemporary China since the 1980s. While physical remnants from the past are being bulldozed every day to make space for glass-walled skyscrapers and towering apartment buildings, nostalgia for the old city is booming. Madeleine Yue Dong offers the first comprehensive history of Republican Beijing, examining how the capital acquired its identity as a consummately "traditional" Chinese city. For residents of Beijing, the heart of the city lay in the labor-intensive activities of "recycling," a primary mode of material and cultural production and circulation that came to characterize Republican Beijing. An omnipresent process of recycling and re-use unified Beijing's fragmented and stratified markets into one circulation system. These material practices evoked an air of nostalgia that permeated daily life. Paradoxically, the "old Beijing" toward which this nostalgia was directed was not the imperial capital of the past, but the living Republican city. Such nostalgia toward the present, the author argues, was not an empty sentiment, but an essential characteristic of Chinese modernity.

Rickshaw Beijing

Rickshaw Beijing PDF Author: David Strand
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520913876
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
In the 1920s, revolution, war, and imperialist aggression brought chaos to China. Many of the dramatic events associated with this upheaval took place in or near China's cities. Bound together by rail, telegraph, and a shared urban mentality, cities like Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Beijing formed an arena in which the great issues of the day--the quest for social and civil peace, the defense of popular and national sovereignty, and the search for a distinctively modern Chinese society--were debated and fought over. People were drawn into this conflicts because they knew that the passage of armies, the marching of protesters, the pontificating of intellectual, and the opening and closing of factories could change their lives. David Strand offers a penetrating view of the old walled capital of Beijing during these years by examining how the residents coped with the changes wrought by itinerant soldiers and politicians and by the accelerating movement of ideas, capital, and technology. By looking at the political experiences of ordinary citizens, including rickshaw pullers, policemen, trade unionists, and Buddhist monks, Strand provides fascinating insights into how deeply these forces were felt. The resulting portrait of early twentieth-century Chinese urban society stresses the growing political sophistication of ordinary people educated by mass movements, group politics, and participation in a shared, urban culture that mixed opera and demonstrations, newspaper reading and teahouse socializing. Surprisingly, in the course of absorbing new ways of living, working, and doing politics, much of the old society was preserved--everything seemed to change and yet little of value was discarded. Through tumultuous times, Beijing rose from a base of local and popular politics to form a bridge linking a traditional world of guilds and gentry elites with the contemporary world of corporatism and cadres. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989. In the 1920s, revolution, war, and imperialist aggression brought chaos to China. Many of the dramatic events associated with this upheaval took place in or near China's cities. Bound together by rail, telegraph, and a shared urban mentality, cities like

Republican Beijing

Republican Beijing PDF Author: Madeleine Yue Dong
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 052092763X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 406

Get Book Here

Book Description
Old Beijing has become a subject of growing fascination in contemporary China since the 1980s. While physical remnants from the past are being bulldozed every day to make space for glass-walled skyscrapers and towering apartment buildings, nostalgia for the old city is booming. Madeleine Yue Dong offers the first comprehensive history of Republican Beijing, examining how the capital acquired its identity as a consummately "traditional" Chinese city. For residents of Beijing, the heart of the city lay in the labor-intensive activities of "recycling," a primary mode of material and cultural production and circulation that came to characterize Republican Beijing. An omnipresent process of recycling and re-use unified Beijing's fragmented and stratified markets into one circulation system. These material practices evoked an air of nostalgia that permeated daily life. Paradoxically, the "old Beijing" toward which this nostalgia was directed was not the imperial capital of the past, but the living Republican city. Such nostalgia toward the present, the author argues, was not an empty sentiment, but an essential characteristic of Chinese modernity.

Beijing

Beijing PDF Author: Lillian M. Li
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0230605273
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Chronicles the history of Beijing from its earliest days to the twenty-first century, discussing how economic growth as well as preparations for the 2008 Olympics have affected the city.

Camel Xiangzi

Camel Xiangzi PDF Author: She Lao
Publisher: Midland Books
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
This novel marks the peak of Lao She's career as a professional writer and registers a new approach to the representation of China in its absurdist situation. It can be read as an "epic" of modern China.

Mapping Modern Beijing

Mapping Modern Beijing PDF Author: Weijie Song
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190200677
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Mapping Modern Beijing investigates the five methods of representing Beijing-a warped hometown, a city of snapshots and manners, an aesthetic city, an imperial capital in comparative and cross-cultural perspective, and a displaced city on the Sinophone and diasporic postmemory-by authors travelling across mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and overseas Sinophone and non-Chinese communities. The metamorphosis of Beijing's everyday spaces and the structural transformation of private and public emotions unfold Manchu writer Lao She's Beijing complex about a warped native city. Zhang Henshui's popular snapshots of fleeting shocks and everlasting sorrows illustrate his affective mapping of urban transition and human manners in Republican Beijing. Female poet and architect Lin Huiyin captures an aesthetic and picturesque city vis- -vis the political and ideological urban planning. The imagined imperial capital constructed in bilingual, transcultural, and comparative works by Lin Yutang, Princess Der Ling, and Victor Segalen highlights the pleasures and pitfalls of collecting local knowledge and presenting Orientalist and Cosmopolitan visions. In the shadow of World Wars and Cold War, a multilayered displaced Beijing appears in the Sinophone postmemory by diasporic Beijing native Liang Shiqiu, Taiwan sojourners Zhong Lihe and Lin Haiyin, and migr martial arts novelist Jin Yong in Hong Kong. Weijie Song situates Beijing in a larger context of modern Chinese-language urban imaginations, and charts the emotional topography of the city against the backdrop of the downfall of the Manchu Empire, the rise of modern nation-state, the 1949 great divide, and the formation of Cold War and globalizing world. Drawing from literary canons to exotic narratives, from modernist poetry to chivalric fantasy, from popular culture to urban planning, Song explores the complex nexus of urban spaces, archives of emotions, and literary topography of Beijing in its long journey from imperial capital to Republican city and to socialist metropolis.

Beyond the Neon Lights

Beyond the Neon Lights PDF Author: Hanchao Lu
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 052093167X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 474

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Book Description
How did ordinary people live through the extraordinary changes that have swept across modern China? How did peasants transform themselves into urbanites? How did the citizens of Shanghai cope with the epic upheavals—revolution, war, and again revolution—that shook their lives? Even after decades of scholarship devoted to modern Chinese history, our understanding of the daily lives of the common people of China remains sketchy and incomplete. In this carefully researched study, Hanchao Lu weaves rich documentary data with ethnographic surveys and interviews to reconstruct the fabric of everyday life in China's largest and most complex city in the first half of this century.

Chinese Roundabout

Chinese Roundabout PDF Author: Jonathan D. Spence
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393309942
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
"If one has the art, then a piece of celery or salted cabbage can be made into a marvelous delicacy; whereas if one has not the art, not all the greatest delicacies and rarities of land, sea, or sky are of any avail." --a Beijing cook, nineteenth century from Chinese Roundabout

Strands of Modernization

Strands of Modernization PDF Author: David B. Sicilia
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487539681
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw extraordinary transfer and diffusion of industry- and transportation-related technology, and business methods. While most scholarship on nineteenth-century technology transfer beyond Europe and North America has focused on the West-to-East movement of artifacts, skills, and knowledge, Strands of Modernization considers the transfer of technology and business methods within East Asia in the period between approximately 1850 and 1920. Highlighting currents moving in multiple directions, contributors expand upon conventional notions of what qualifies as a "technology" or a "business practice," looking more broadly at skills, systems of technology, tacit knowledge, and the ideologies and other belief systems with which they interact. The core ambition driving Strands of Modernization is to illuminate processes of adaption, versus adoption, that occur when technology and business practices cross sociocultural boundaries.

The Lure of the Modern

The Lure of the Modern PDF Author: Shu-mei Shih
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520935280
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
Shu-mei Shih's study is the first book in English to offer a comprehensive account of Chinese literary modernism from Republican China. In The Lure of the Modern, Shih argues for the contextualization of Chinese modernism in the semicolonial cultural and political formation of the time. Engaging critically with theories of modernism, postcoloniality, and global and local cultural studies, Shih analyzes pivotal issues—such as psychoanalysis, decadence, Orientalism, Occidentalism, semicolonial subjectivity, cosmopolitanism, and urbanism—that were mediated by Japanese as well as Western modernisms.

Globalizing Automobilism

Globalizing Automobilism PDF Author: Gijs Mom
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1789204623
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 688

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Book Description
Why has “car society” proven so durable, even in the face of mounting environmental and economic crises? In this follow-up to his magisterial Atlantic Automobilism, Gijs Mom traces the global spread of the automobile in the postwar era and investigates why adopting more sustainable forms of mobility has proven so difficult. Drawing on archival research as well as wide-ranging forays into popular culture, Mom reveals here the roots of the exuberance, excess, and danger that define modern automotive culture.