Post-socialist Era Research Articles

Beauty as duty: a study of the feminist movement “rejecting beauty duty” on RED

ABSTRACT RED, as a platform primarily focused on visual imagery to drive consumption, has been a bastion of pseudo-feminism in China, propagating standardized beauty ideals like the “wanghong face.” However, the active engagement of numerous women in shaping discourse on these platforms has also witnessed the resurgence of feminism on the Chinese internet. In 2023, a notable trend emerged on RED under the banner of “rejecting beauty duty.” Represented by this movement, these women are referred to as “radical feminists” on the Chinese internet, a group that has become quite emblematic in the current feminist movement in China. This movement disrupted existing forms of female expression and catalyzed a fresh wave of feminist dialogues. Through the application of Critical Discourse Analysis, this article explores how Chinese feminism seeks to reconceptualize the narrative of neoliberal feminism within the context of the post-socialist era. By juxtaposing historical perspectives with contemporary realities, this article sheds light on the intricate dilemmas inherent in Chinese feminist discourse that warrant attention.

The meaning of autonomy: How artists justify career paths

While autonomy is a crucial concept in the sociology of culture, most scholars treat it as an objective feature of the cultural field or creative work. This article argues that autonomy is a subjective construct with ambiguous meanings that enable creative workers to flexibly justify their career paths. I draw on a case of Chinese visual artists in the postsocialist era (since 1979), where the institutional context of dual career path highlights the ambiguity of autonomy. Using interview data with two groups of Chinese artists in different institutional positions—state-affiliated artists employed by the official system and independent artists without official affiliation—I show that the two groups offer conflicting narratives of autonomy. State-affiliated artists claim freedom from market and art criticism, whereas independent artists assert autonomy from state and organizational duties. Both groups emphasize the kind of autonomy they have and downplay the kind they lack to justify their career over the alternative position. Based on these findings, I suggest a more interpretive analysis of autonomy in cultural fields, one that illuminates how workers use ambiguous meanings to justify career choices.

Transforming Public Spaces in Post-Socialist China’s Danwei Neighbourhoods: The Third Dormitory of the Party Committee of Shandong Province

The urban residential pattern in China experienced two significant transitions during the second half of the 20th century. The first happened in the 1960s, based on the Soviet model, when a large-scale community model was built led by government enterprises and institutions under a planned economy; the second was in 1998 when the real estate market-led socialised community model emerged after the reform of commercial housing. The former is characterised by the integration of supervisory units, service units, and property owners: Residents enjoy the right to use the residences and supporting services provided by their affiliated institutions, while for the latter case, supervisory units, service units, and property owners are separate. New conflicts have been found in Danwei neighbourhoods with the housing commercialisation reform. This research focuses on the Third Dormitory of the Party Committee of Shandong Province as a case study to analyse the transformation of public space in the Danwei neighbourhood during the post-socialist era. Through archival research, interviews, and observation, this research has found that two forces that celebrate marketisation by the new residents and resist marketisation by the original residents coexist in the Third Dormitory. Unregulated spatial practices have resulted from the incomplete control of the owners of public space by the provincial government office. This research offers an example of public space transformations in Danwei neighbourhoods, which have undergone incomplete marketisation. The reflections on the Third Dormitory provide references for future neighbourhood management and policy-making.

Animation of Experiment: The Science Education Film and Useful Animation in China

From the early 1950s to the mid-1990s, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) produced numerous science education films. Many utilized animated effects, such as illustrations, maps and cartoons, to promote the reception of scientific knowledge and ideological messages by audiences. Current scholarship on Chinese animation history stresses films made by the Shanghai Animation Film Studio, neglecting animation created by filmmakers in science education film studios. In this article, the author argues that the history of useful animation in science education films provides a different approach to understanding Chinese animation as the animation of experiment. Animation functioned as scenes of experiment that enabled science education films to deliver messages of knowledge; they also inspired amateur experiment with animated filmmaking and experimental animation practices in the post-socialist era. This article analyses animation for science education films, amateur animation practices and experimental works inspired by, or that benefited from, science education filmmaking. It will enrich the scholarship on Chinese animation and shed new light on the history of Chinese animation and film culture in the PRC.

Taxation and the Polanyian forms of integration in socialist and postsocialist Hungary

AbstractReciprocity, redistribution, and (market) exchange were the “forms of integration” put forward by Karl Polanyi as a “special tool box” to investigate relations between economy and society where the principle of price‐forming markets is not (yet) dominant. Though intended as the basis for a comparative alternative to the universalist assumptions of mainstream (neoclassical) economics, Polanyi did not make significant use of these concepts to analyze the noncapitalist societies of his day. This article investigates his Hungarian homeland, which in four decades of socialism evolved from Stalinist central planning to a mixed economy in which (re)distribution was supplemented by the expansion of market exchange, with personal taxation playing a negligible role. The constellation of (re)distribution and market has changed significantly in the postsocialist (neoliberal) era, but Scandinavian‐type societal reciprocity has remained elusive. Long after admission to the European Union, Hungarian fiscal and social policy regimes are distinctive as the market form of integration combines with low taxation and political interventions to (re)distribute resources (including transfer income from the EU) to support the formation of a national bourgeoisie. Theoretically, the perspective of the socialist Karl Polanyi is contrasted with that of the liberal institutionalist economist János Kornai.

Review: Food in Cuba: The Pursuit of a Decent Meal, by Hanna Garth

Review: <i>Food in Cuba: The Pursuit of a Decent Meal</i>, by Hanna Garth

The time of post-socialism: On the future of an anthropological concept

When accounting for changes in the post-socialist era, anthropologists were forced to carefully distinguish between what had remained the same, what had actually changed and what was emerging anew and on its own terms. As a sub-discipline, the anthropology of post-socialism has thereby contributed prominently to theories of time, change and temporal agency. It has also shown that the post-socialist present is, if at all, as determined by its socialist past as it is by its insecure futures. Based on a few ethnographic examples from a former socialist model city in East Germany, and my own experiences as both a post-socialist anthropologist and an anthropologist of post-socialism, I scrutinize the temporal logic of the sub-discipline’s defining concept. I do so by testing its applicability to three objects of anthropological inquiry, and by pondering upon its implications for a more sustained study of the future. The temporal multiplicity that this concept affords, I claim, is crucial for the discipline overall, but demands further scrutiny. Rather than abandoning it, as I and others have previously argued, it is time to rewrite the time of post-socialism with regards to the future.

Домашний як и его гибрид в номадном стаде монголов и бурят

Goals. The article aims at characterizing a unique animal of Inner and Central Asian nomads — the domestic yak (sarlyk) and its hybrid (khainak) that have been bred by Mongols and Buryats for hundreds of years. The work provides a first ethnographic insight into statistical data on yak population dynamics in synchronous and diachronous perspectives, reviews adaptive properties of the animal instrumental in surviving in extreme conditions of highlands, its exterior, breeding and behavioral specifics, economic significance. Materials and methods. The article explores literary, field and online sources to employ the methodology of comparative analysis, in particular, the comparative-historical-genetic method. Materials about yak breeding among Turkic peoples are essentially verifying by nature. Results. When it comes to declare the five traditional types of livestock bred, Mongols and Buryats mention no yak, the latter be clustered with cattle. Mongolia’s yak population ranks second worldwide — after China. The post-Socialist era witnessed an increase in yak numbers in Mongolia paralleled by a decrease in Russia. Domestic yaks have unique adaptive properties towards low oxygen partial pressure, extreme cold, and meagre fodder resources. The incomplete domestication of animals is determined by high profitability via such extensive farming techniques. Being meat, dairy and working animals, sarlyks and khainaks were most essential to the traditional economy of nomads. In the 21st century, their products become exotic and environment friendly food items, while skin, hair, wool, undercoat and other components serve as unique raw materials for light industry, pharmacology and cosmetology. Conclusions. The 21st century Mongolia with its vast yak friendly territories witnesses a significant head increase resulting in industrial processing facilities of yak raw materials nationwide. In the 1980s, the Soviets were undertaking active purposeful efforts to develop yak breeding, while the free market period decreased both numbers of animals held by Buryats and their habitat. The situation is due to the lack of demand for yak products and the lack of infrastructure for industrial processing of raw materials. The domestic yak and its hybrid had made it possible for nomads of Inner Asia — Mongols and Buryats — to significantly extend economic boundaries of their ethnic territories and inhabit montane grasslands and shrublands.

The Impact of Ideologies on the Translator’s Work: A Conceptual Reflection and Application

This paper addresses the translator’s role from an ideological standpoint and seeks to show that the actions of translators are not completely arbitrary and may be influenced by a wide array of factors and especially ideologies. The basic assumption is that translators can detach texts neither from the ideologies of the source nor the target culture. This study results from qualitative research, namely a critical conceptual analysis of the selected theories of translation studies (Baker, 2006; Lefevere, 1992; Venuti, 1995). The conceptual reflection implies that translations serve as an infinite source of culture and history, serving the target but not the source culture. The critical discourse analysis of English translations of two selected novels that contain the ideologies of socialist and post-socialist era, and the Nazi ideology, suggests that the tendencies in translation strategies vary depending on diffusion of the languages, and awareness of the target culture and history.

What Is Literature?

This short lecture was originally published in What Is Literature: Twenty-Two Lectures on Common Senses of Literature (Shenme shi wenxue: Wenxue changshi ershier jiang). A wide-ranging, ambitious, but ultimately plainspoken and practical attempt to define literature, it was written by one of the postsocialist era’s most prolific and restless thinkers. Taking incitement from two very different Chinese authors—Mo Yan and Gao Xingjian—Liu Zaifu uses the sweep and inclusivity of their work to criticize traditional definitions of literature from ancient China, the Tang Dynasty, modern Europe, the May Fourth Movement, and socialist China. Each of these definitions is examined and then rejected as too limited or partial, unable to hold the explorations and experimentations of later writers. Liu’s survey ends in essaying his own definition for literature: Literature is the form of the aesthetic existence of a free soul.

Cercetări de teren la Cornova, 1991. A puzzle in progress

This article is a synthetic presentation of a field research conducted by the author between 2nd and 18th of August 1991, in the village of Cornova. The research needs to be approached from a multiple perspective imposed by different contexts. The first one is the fact that the research was conducted six decades after the field campaigns of the Sociologic School of Bucharest in Cornova. The second context is given by the fact that the village was included in the Ungheni district of Moldavian SSR, therefore it was a soviet territory at the time. The third context places the research between the first ethnological campaigns outside de Romanian borders in the post-socialist era. The article presents representative excerpts from a series of interviews recorded in the summer of 1991. The topics are: the main lineages of răzeși (free peasants) who had founded villages since legendary times; the deportation to Siberia of some families from Cornova; the random contacts between the Moldavians and their families left on the other side of the Ural Mountains, during the soviet period. Although these topics were intensely studied in the last decades, the value of the excerpts briefly analyzed in this article is given by the nature of the records they belong to – oral testimonies on subjects which could put the interlocutors at risk in the last days of the soviet regime.

Editorial Programs in Transition: Post-Socialist Era Hungarian Publishing Houses in Romania

The tradition continued to be important, though the controversial issue of Hungarian book publishing in Romania following the 1989 changes from a socialist to a market economy and from a dictatorship to a democracy. While before 1989 the Hungarian publishing scene was largely dominated by one publishing house, Kriterion, during a period of transition it gradually diversified both structurally and in the way of editorial programs. Cultural traditions, the quality as well as the number of available manuscripts and the reading public’s expectations on the one hand, and financial and logistical circumstances on the other were some of the main factors that determined editorial programs in the transitional era. Pre-1989 Kriterion’s editorial program seems to have been a benchmark for budding publishing houses in many respects; however, there are also a number of positive/negative divergences. My paper examines the extent to which, after the regime change, Hungarian publishing houses in Romania continue and/or break the traditions established by former editorial boards, also, it presents the circumstances that influenced editorial programs in the new era.

Constructing the ultimate “leftover women”: Chinese media’s representation of female PhDs in the postsocialist era

ABSTRACT Although China’s “leftover women” phenomenon has drawn much attention academically in recent years, there is a lack of clarification of the diversity within these largely “demonized” women. This study is particularly interested in the female PhDs in postsocialist China since they are supposed to exemplify women’s empowerment but still end up being the common target of patriarchy. Therefore, this study not only examines patterns and implications of Chinese mass media’s representation of female PhDs, but also analyzes how media coverage of them has reflected the Chinese authorities’ strategic dissemination and consolidation of patriarchal power and ideologies in a postsocialist context intermingled with neoliberalism. In the end, the study discusses China’s discursive marginalization and eugenic concerns regarding female PhDs, as well as the causes of the lack of collective negotiation within these women.

Public space transformation in the case of “Skopje 2014″

The politics of the post-socialist era, during the transitional period in the Republic of North Macedonia, left dark marks in the city morphology and deeply influenced urban planning. This paper explores the most notable example of this particular trend - the project named “Skopje 2014”. The paper analyses the project’s underlying feature, which can be described as an attempt to recast a national profile, affecting public space and built heritage, without any awareness of the gap between nationalistic theory and the desperate economic realities. In hindsight, the paper argues that, unfortunately, this project was brought to life without any public participation or by taking into consideration the expert-based evaluation. Therefore, many new buildings were built and much more covered in new architectural styles, which led to uncontrolled city growth and a vague makeover of the city.

Socio-Economic Effects of National Park Governance and Management: Lessons from Post-Socialist Era Estonia

Despite the significant increase in protected territory globally, there is a common understanding that the designation of protected areas alone does not guarantee their effectiveness nor halt the loss of biodiversity. In addition to biodiversity conservation, protected areas are expected to perform a number of other functions, such as provide ecosystem services and improve local socio-economic conditions. Therefore, the need to strive towards mixed, decentralized conservation management and stakeholder involvement is increasingly emphasized. Although there is limited research, it has been noted that protected areas have not served wider objectives effectively enough. The current study provides insight concerning socio-economic effects of different governance and management practices of protected areas based on perceptions of residents and stakeholders of five national parks of Estonia. It was found that conservation status has an important impact on local socio-economic conditions largely depending on governance and management practices, resulting in both, positive and negative effects. It was concluded that the centralization of nature conservation and the abolition of protected area administrations have led to a gradual distancing of nature conservation from local conditions and the population, causing concern about the preservation of the living environment.

Men in charge of “real” work and women the office “housework”: Chinese policewomen in the post-socialist era

ABSTRACT This qualitative study seeks to contribute to studies on the gender division of labor by examining how Chinese policewomen cope with the still-socialist or danwei style of human resource management. In the post-socialist market reform era, the police department has gone through significant changes, undertaking greater economic monitoring and social service functions, including more office work, with an increasing emphasis on the harmonious relationship between the police and public or service-oriented work. These changes have led to a larger number of policewomen, but have not led to a more equitable division of labor due to the persistence of familial norms of womanhood and the enduring police service performance evaluation system that prioritizes crime-fighting tasks over public-service duties. Against this backdrop, we find that policewomen display a certain degree of flexibility, utilizing certain feminine traits in their community service work while maintaining a non-feminine and physically robust outlook.

The Evolution of Multifamily Housing: Post-Second World War Large Housing Estates versus Post-Socialist Multifamily Housing Types in Slovenia

The academic discourse on post-Second World War (post-WW2) multifamily housing complexes has mostly focused on their negative aspects, related, especially, to their high population densities, poor quality of construction and social problems, due to the dominance of low-income residents. In reaction to these and other negative characteristics, alternative multifamily housing types started to emerge, first in Western European countries in the 1970s, and later in Eastern European countries, following the adoption of the market economy system at the beginning of the 1990s. The transformation that has occurred in mass housing types has been particularly distinct in Eastern European countries. Motivated by the lack of focused analyses of the important characteristics of these transformations, this article adopts a rare approach to the mass housing debate by focusing on examining the merits of post-WW2 large housing estates as compared to those of the post-socialist era. With a focus on Slovenia as a case study, a comparative analysis is performed by conducting a detailed review of the literature and other relevant sources. The comparative analysis shows that post-socialist multifamily housing types have many advantages over the post-WW2 housing estates, a finding that leads us to deduce that the transformations in mass housing typologies that have occurred in Slovenia (and other Eastern European countries) may have serious implications on the future of large housing estates. It is thus suggested in the conclusion that suitable regeneration policies need to be urgently implemented in post-WW2 housing estates in order to create more attractive living environments and prevent the potential degradation of these neighborhoods, which would, in turn, result in spatial residential segregation with concentrations of low-income households in post-WW2 housing estates.

Migratory dynamics of the rural population of the Apuseni Mountains in the post-socialist period

The aim of the present article is to draw up an analysis on the migratory dynamics of the population from the Apuseni Mountains in the Post-Socialist era. In order to accomplish this aim, we collected statistical data from two representative years, namely 1992 and 2011, which correspond to two censuses. The analysis was meant to reveal the evolution of the settlements (people who settled in the area) and of emigration, as registered in the two reference years and to identify the causes that determined the evolution of the emigration and immigration.

Review of “The Retreat of Liberal Democracy: Authoritarian Capitalism and the Accumulative State in Hungary”

In The Retreat of Liberal Democracy, Gábor Scheiring sets out to explain the retrenchment of democratic institutions in his home country of Hungary following the election of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in 2010. This is a deeply personal story for Scheiring, who watched his parents struggle with the hardship and disillusionment that accompanied the transition from socialism to capitalism. While Scheiring served in the Hungarian parliament from 2010 to 2014 as part of the country’s burgeoning green movement, his father—a blue-collar worker—turned to the right. This book is, in many respects, an attempt to make sense of this experience—to make sense of how members of the working class came to see Orbánism as a palliative for the experience of class dislocation in the post-socialist era. But workers were not the only ones hurt by the transition to capitalism. As Scheiring describes, the push for market liberalization was part and...

Is land nationalization more conducive to sustainable development of cultivated land and food security than land privatization in post-socialist Central Asia?

The impact of policies on cultivated land and food security has received global attention, especially in Central Asia, which underwent drastic transformations in land policies during the post-socialist era. Therefore, this study focused on the impacts of policies on the quantity and quality of cultivated land and food security in Central Asia from 1992 to 2015. The results showed that although different land policy reforms were implemented by five Central Asian countries, the cultivated land areas tended to be stable after 2010. The cultivated land increased by approximately 7.02 × 104 km2 in Central Asia. After 2000, cultivated land slowly increased and the degree of land degradation rapidly decreased, illustrating that the turning point for the quantity and quality of cultivated land change caused by these policies occurred in 2000. In addition, changes in cotton and grain cultivation occurred in response to the policies of Central Asian countries. Grain per capita increased in land nationalization countries, whereas it decreased in land privatization countries. Thus, driven by policies, the cultivated land use mode in Central Asia was gradually replacing the mode used by the Soviet Union and has been moving toward sustainable development. Some Central Asian countries, however, still face food insecurity.