China In Twenty-first Century Research Articles

:Questioning the Chinese Model: Oppositional Political Novels in Early Twenty-First Century China

:<i>Questioning the Chinese Model: Oppositional Political Novels in Early Twenty-First Century China</i>

Agency and Aspiration: How Twenty-First Century China Complicates our Understanding of Authoritarian Law

Résumé Cet article examine deux thèmes dans les publications récentes sur le droit chinois qui compliquent l'image durable du droit autoritaire comme exclusivement répressif : l’ambition et l'agentivité. Premièrement, l’émergence de la Chine comme puissance mondiale s’est reflétée dans le système juridique, où les tribunaux s’efforcent d’innover et d’exceller. Cette ambition est particulièrement claire dans l’adoption par les tribunaux des technologies et de l'intelligence artificielle. Deuxièmement, le thème de l'agentivité met en évidence les choix stratégiques disponibles pour les juges, les plaideurs et les autres qui interagissent avec le système juridique. Ces choix sont illustrés par des poursuites concernant l’accès aux informations gouvernementales et l’obligation pour des chefs de gouvernement chinois de comparaître devant le tribunal si leur département est poursuivi. Ces exemples montrent que le choix est réel, même s’il est également sévèrement limité.

Chinese visions of self and Other: the international politics of noses

Abstract How does China view the world? While much has been written about how China's international relations are best seen as intercultural relations that do not exclude the Other, this article examines how self/Other relations are visualized in terms of the human face in China, in particular through iconic images that construct the Chinese self with and against foreigners with large noses. It employs interpretivist methods to consider the interplay of social relations and international relations in order to see how ‘external appearance’ and ‘external relations’ inform each other in Chinese theory and practice. It mobilizes the classical Chinese concept ‘deep-set eyes and high-bridged nose’ to compare iconic Chinese images of noses from the Tang dynasty, the Korean War, and twenty-first century China and Taiwan. This critical juxtaposition shows how foreigners are visualized as both friends and enemies in a hierarchical social system. The article's use of visual International Relations (IR) methods enables us to re-examine foreign affairs as a site of affective politics, and thus appreciate how China's ideological world-view resonates with how its artists, scholars and officials aesthetically view the world. This is a concern for IR scholars because world-views shape how foreign policy-makers frame foreign policy problems—and thus foreign policy solutions.

Visual arts: imagining a shanzhai city in twenty-first century China

Since 1978, China has experienced an unprecedented urban and economic growth under the central government's imperative to become a global power. Whereas the central government aimed to showcase its success through ambitious infrastructure projects, distinctive skylines, and spectacular waterfronts, local officials pursued this national goal through the construction of copycats, gated communities, and theme parks and towns. From miniature Eiffel Towers and extravagant residential units to entire themed villages, local authorities and real estate developers have integrated local and global milieus as a quick-fix to upgrade the urban experience and satisfy the taste of the Chinese middle class. Despite the extensive literature in the fields of architecture, urban and social studies, the role of visual arts in the analysis of this unique urban practice has not been explored yet. Hence, this article fulfils the gap by investigating what I refer to as shanzhai (copycats) places in Mainland China through their second-hand representations in the contemporary artworks by Xiang Liqing, Zhang Peili, Hu Jieming, and Yang Yuanyuan. Through qualitative, empirical visual analysis, fieldwork and semi-structured interviews with selected artists, I explore the overlaps between visual arts and these urban phenomena to identify the dynamics and urban actors involved in space-making and suggest that private estates, copycats, and theme parks and towns do not oppose the official narrative; rather, they are localised interpretations of the national dream. Against the dominant practice of building spectacular cities, this article explores how the city could be envisioned and reproduced in the future through the selected artistic practices.

Bullet-titling in twenty-first century China: bullet-like tactility, soft touch and diachronic simultaneity

This article studies the popular bullet-titling practice in contemporary China – typing and sending a layer of horizontally scrolling comments superimposed onto moving images. It first explicates bullet-titling practice as a retaliatory action against the tactile effects of moving images, reconceptualizing cinema’s tactile quality and recovering its association with bullet-like intensity through the notion of tacti(ca)lity. Tracing the changed perception of touch in relation to the emergence of the touchscreen interface, the author then delineates the transformation of bullet-titles from offensive weapons against the optical attacks of moving images to a venue for real-time conversation and communication among spectator-cum-bullet-titlers. The article ends with a discussion of bullet-titles’ construction of pseudo-real time, which constitutes a viewing community of ‘diachronic simultaneity’ that assimilates all temporally and geographically dispersed spectators into the unfolding ‘now’ of video playback. This ‘nowness’ reconciles contemporary media consumption’s contradictory demands for globalized simultaneity and individualized flexibility, obliterating us anew.

Ziyuan: Film mining and cinephilic expedition and exploitation in twenty-first century China

This essay studies the Chinese spectators’ active releasing, searching for, and illicit sharing of imported, voluntarily subtitled, and secretly stored foreign films and videos by offering an etymological study of ziyuan (literally translated to English as ‘resource’), the most pervasively used term in the lexicon of contemporary Chinese cinephilia. Delineating the semantic shift of ziyuan from a concept of computer networking to a film and media idiom, I examine how the discursive practice of calling a digitalized film or video ‘ziyuan’ and the corresponding metadata model of representing a video by its digital identification and location information provide the mechanism both for locating and retrieving films as digital files from the Internet and for hiding them away from clear recognition and immediate access. As the neologism replacing daoban, the Chinese equivalent of ‘piracy’, ziyuan as the popular argot, I argue, rehabilitates Chinese cinephilia thriving on piracy by metaphorically reconceptualizing the global Internet as a vast reservoir and the Internet-based media files as untapped natural resources with potential use value. The common use of this term thus mounts a collective resistance to both the unequal global capitalist order and the party-state intervention in the media market by symbolically exonerating participators and beneficiaries of making, disseminating, downloading, or streaming unauthorized films of any blame or criminal charges.

The “Internationalization” of the Humanities in Twenty-First Century China

The “Internationalization” of the Humanities in Twenty-First Century China

Social imaginary and musical persuasion in twenty-first century China: a partial ethnography of ‘floating’ migrant music

ABSTRACT Centring on the imaginary, this article examines the multi-layered interactions between music, collective consciousness and social actions in mainland China. I note that behind the prejudice against ‘floating’ migrants and a collective ignorance of their suffering lies the Chinese imaginary, or a set of common-sense understandings and expectations based on normative and emotionally appealing images. I argue that the power of Chinese propaganda music can be understood as deriving from its ability to supply and conjure up such images, which serve the state’s evolving strategic needs and promote the three fundamental beliefs by (re)interpreting past or fictional actions and their outcomes. Naturally growing within certain ‘moulds’, Chinese musicians do not challenge these images in public performances, but some of them are positioned as musical rebels to maintain the illusion of autonomy.

Privacy, Reputation, and Control: Public Figure Privacy Law in Twenty-First Century China

Privacy law, as it regulates the nonconsensual disclosure of personal life, is instrumental to how reputation in human society becomes created, destroyed, and redistributed. In the contemporary Chinese society, as in elsewhere, privacy protection, and the lack thereof, have played an important role in the making of the “haves” and “have-nots” in the society’s reputation landscape. This Article makes a first systematic effort towards accounting for China’s contemporary legal regime that regulates its public figure privacy problems. Through examining leading court cases and relevant regulatory practices, this Article demonstrates that the Chinese privacy regime in the twenty-first century, as embedded in the Party-state’s restrictive information regulation apparatus, differs in significant ways from the corresponding Western paradigms in terms of its operational structure, cultural logic, and political dynamics. Overall, China’s status-based regime is highly protective of government officials until the Party-state purges them from the official ranks. It is also often laissez-faire with respect to privacy of famous individuals outside of the government system, but with notable exceptions for those enjoying an exalted status in the realm of high culture. Furthermore, it can be conspicuously hostile towards ordinary citizens who aspire for the limelight. The impact such public figure privacy regime may have had on China’s reputation landscape is conceivably regressive. As this Article explains, underlying such regime is a lasting, albeit evolving, cultural tradition that tends to associate privacy protection with a hierarchical system of moral outlook. Notwithstanding the importance of culture, this Article further argues that China’s privacy regulation must also be understood as embedded in the country’s political context. As the status-based privacy regime produces disparate reputational consequences, it provides the ruling Party-state with a lever to incentivize and control a diverse network of elites, whom the Party-state considers as agents for upholding its political and moral authority and implementing its social control agenda. China’s privacy regime in the new millennium may thus be understood as having stemmed from an intricate political process as the Party-state strategically responds to rising challenges from increasingly powerful and competing market and social forces over the production of information, fame, and influence.

Worüber man nicht spricht: Tabus, Schweigen und Redeverbote in China ed. by Rüdiger Breuer and Heiner Roetz

Reviewed by: Worüber man nicht spricht: Tabus, Schweigen und Redeverbote in China ed. by Rüdiger Breuer and Heiner Roetz Anna Stecher (bio) Rüdiger Breuer and Heiner Roetz, editors. Worüber man nicht spricht: Tabus, Schweigen und Redeverbote in China. Jahrbuch der Deutschen Vereinigung für Chinastudien 12. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2018. 241 pp. Paperback € 50.00, isbn 978-3-447-10807-2. Whether to talk or not to talk, and, assuming one decides to talk, how to talk about something—these appear to be quite topical issues of our times: times in which scholars of Chinese present their work differently in and outside of China, engage in long meditations about how to use a specific word, or bury themselves in the endless material of Chinese texts of all ages still awaiting their philological exploration. Fortunately, this book is not about sinologists but rather about China and, as is revealed in the subtitle, more specifically about "taboos, silence and bans on speaking." Therefore, the authors of the book undertake the challenging experiment of talking about issues of non-talking. In doing this, they touch on questions related to freedom of speech, censorship, and related issues with communicative processes They have wisely chosen, however, not to frame their questions in terms of these buzzwords but rather to sketch out their program simply as "What one should not talk about." The title of the book could be seen as a free translation of buyu 不語 and bujiang 不讲. These two concepts were at the center of the 2015 meeting of the German Association of Chinese Studies (DVCS) and the book is a collection of some of the presentations made there. As the organizers of the conference and editors of the book point out in the preface, they have consciously opted for the combination of traditional and simplified characters in order to embrace topics related to different times and areas of Chinese studies. In the opening chapter, Heiner Roetz directly addresses some key questions regarding these seminal Chinese notions of buyu 不語 and bujiang 不讲. The source for 不語 is one of the most famous ancient Chinese texts, Confucius's Lunyu, more specifically passage 7.21, which runs: zi bu yu guai li luan shen 子不語怪力亂神 ("The Master did not talk about extraordinary [End Page 14] things, feasts of strength, disorder, and spiritual beings") (trans. Legge as quoted in Roetz). Discussing different translations as well as interpretations of this passage, Roetz points out that there is no consensus regarding its meaning. To summarize briefly the differing views: some scholars say that it means that Confucius did not speak about spirits because he had no interest in religion. Others explain that he didn't dare to speak about them because of respect. Roetz also mentions a further reading which understands the passage to mean simply that Confucius remained silent. The background for bujiang 不讲 is a text from twenty-first century China, specifically the so-called Document Number 9 from 2013, also known as the "Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere" attributed to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. It mentions seven issues that should not be talked about. These are: 1, constitutional democracy; 2, universal values; 3, civil society; 4, neoliberalism; 5, Western journalism; 6, historical nihilism; 7, questioning Reform and Opening and the socialist nature of socialism with Chinese characteristics (trans. loosely based on ChinaFile, mentioned by Roetz). As Roetz points out, in contrast to the Lunyu passage, there can be no doubt regarding the meaning of this text. And, if anyone could have had doubts about its relevance in 2013, it appears to have become common knowledge in the meantime that a new emphasis on ideological tightening is one of the characteristics of Chinese propaganda of the "New Era." As the reader of Chinese will immediately notice, by addressing buyu and bujiang together in this way, the editors establish a bridge not only between different forms of Chinese characters but also between the field of literature and philosophy and the field of history and politics, between the times of Confucius and the times of Xi Jinping. The result is a book dealing with a wide area of topics ranging from taboos...

Writing Shanghai and the Return to China in Tash Aw’s Five Star Billionaire

China`s economic development constitutes the thematic subject-matter of Taipei-born Malaysian author Tash Aw`s Five Star Billionaire (2013), a novel that portrays the (re)turn to China on the part of five Chinese char acters from Malaysia. Focusing on the city of Shanghai as a symbol of the achievements and wealth of modern China, Aw revises the familiar narra tive of the Chinese diasporic experience predicated on the movement from East Asia to the free West in search for the better life. In Aw`s novel, twenty-first century China beckons and entices as the land of promise for subjects of the historical Chinese diaspora. If Shanghai is the city of promise and possibilities, it does not, however, always deliver the good life, offering instead an impersonal and alienating social existence that must be negotiated by anyone who finds his or her way to the great metropolis. If, according to conventional wisdom, the twenty-first century will be economically dominated by China and the Asia-Pacific world, Five Star Billionaire imagines the possibilities of this new world order replete with all the problems that attend the pursuit of dreams and capital accumulation.

Traveling through Time and Searching for Utopia: Utopian Imaginaries in Internet Time-Travel Fiction

The time-travel genre of Chinese Internet literature combines old mythological motifs with contemporary science fiction approaches to create a narrative line in which the protagonist travels through time, undergoes a series of trials, discovers new worlds, and realizes an idealized life. Borrowing Foucault’s theory of utopian bodies and heterotopias and taking Tianxia Guiyuan’s female-oriented Internet novel Empress Fuyao as its exemplary case, this study analyzes how time-travel fiction uses time travel in order to image a “utopia” and what kind of “new world” is projected by this utopia. In the process, this paper will simultaneously examine the relationship between utopia and twenty-first century China’s new media literature.

Xi Jinping’s Maoist Revival

After making himself one of the most powerful leaders in PRC history, Xi Jinping launched the largest ideological campaign that China has seen since Mao—a mixture of communism, nationalism, and Leninism that is meant to strengthen and discipline the CCP, reinforce its grip on power, maintain political stability, and (more nebulously) achieve the “China dream” of national rejuvenation. Xi’s ideological gambit now looks less like a show of strength than an embarrassing confession of regime fragility in a twenty-first century China buffeted by fears of economic slowdown, impatient liberals, and a public angered by rampant corruption.

The Hidden Costs of Aspiring to Global City Status: Robert Lepage, Vancouver, and Twenty-First Century China Collide at the 2010 Cultural Olympiad

“The Hidden Costs of Aspiring to Global City Status” examines the selection of The Blue Dragon, a sequel to The Dragons’ Trilogy crafted for the international festival circuit by Robert Lepage and Ex Machina, as a top-billed event in Vancouver’s 2010 Cultural Olympiad. Contextualized by the mega-event legacy of development in Vancouver, including the sale of Expo land to the wealthy Hong-Kong businessman Li Ka-shing and the post-Olympics spike in real estate twenty-five years later, this essay interrogates the ways in which The Blue Dragon represents the West’s uneasy relationship with a rapidly globalizing China and highlights the ethos driving contemporary racial tensions in Vancouver.

China in the Next Century

Mongolian Journal of International Affairs Vol.3 1996: 17-34

Camera activism in contemporary People's Republic of China: provocative documentation, first person confrontation, and collective force in Ai Weiwei's Lao Ma Ti Hua

Ai Weiwei's film Lao Ma Ti Hua (aka Disturbing the Peace, 2009) is one of the most influential activist documentaries that emerged during the aftermath of Sichuan earthquake in 2009. The film relates to Ai's ‘Public Citizen Investigation Project’, which gathers many volunteers to explore the substandard ‘tofu construction’ of school buildings that took thousands of children's lives when they collapsed in the earthquake. In August 2009, Ai's group went to Chengdu court to support another independent investigator, writer, and environmentalist Tan Zuoren who was prosecuted for subversion of state power. The night before the trial, Ai was beaten by secret security agents and the group was stopped from going to the court. The film subsequently records the group searching for an official explanation from the authorities. Whilst acknowledging the power of the film in constructing a collective political subjectivity, and the discursive effect through screenings and discussions raised, this paper focuses on the very action of proactive, activist documentation of one's witness to engage with fellow participants as well as viewer followers through digital camera. Under the theoretical framework of participatory culture, I propose the term camera activism to understand the camera-enabled individual participation into activism as a form of socio-political intervention. The paper also analyses some of Ai's problematic actions as a charismatic celebrity, which sometimes overshadow and obscure the complexity of resistance by Chinese individuals within China, thereby neglecting full recognition of the complex collective forces which support Ai. Nevertheless, ‘camera activism’ demonstrated in the making of Lao Ma Ti Hua reflects, and has the potential to reshape, the political landscape in twenty-first century China. The cinematic highlight of ‘I’, confronting and eye-witnessing what happens through the utilization of digital technologies positions ‘camera activism’ as an important part of China's iGeneration cinema culture.

Youth Education and Learning in Twenty-First Century China

:Rural-to-urban migration within China is one of the important drivers of transformation in economic and social conditions in the twetny-first century. This study uses data from a new nationally based sample, the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), to capture the multidimensionality of migration, household registration, and current residence and examines school pacing and verbal and math achievement among adolescents ages ten to fifteen. The study finds little evidence of significant migration effects after controlling for family structure, socioeconomic status, and county characteristics, except for one select group— urban “left-behind”—who are the most advantaged in both math and language achievement. Girls who are coresident with siblings demonstrate an advantage compared to boys who are coresident with siblings on language skill while it is singleton girls who demonstrate a disadvantage compared to singleton boys on math skills. Both girls and boys coresident with siblings perform lower overall than singleton boys on mathematics achievement. In modern China, male children in singleton families exhibit the gendered mathematics achievement test advantage that is well recognized in the international literature, whereas male children coresident with siblings more closely resemble girls.

Dilemmas and pathways to dealing with flood problems in twenty-first century China

With more than 60 percent of China’s 1.34 billion population, about 50 percent of its most productive arable land, and the world’s second largest and rapidly growing national GDP exposed to flooding of various kinds, China has an intractable flood problem. Envisioning potential impacts of climate change and continued intensification of floodplain development driven by rapid industrialization and urbanization, it is very likely that China will see a continued increase of exposure to floods this century. This overview article outlines and discusses fundamental dilemmas, plausible pathways, and key options for managing future flood risks in China in the context of rapid socioeconomic transition and climate change. Fundamental dilemmas are the embedded difficult trade-off choices, from balancing economic development with flood vulnerability reduction, to coordination and cooperation among increasingly diverse actors and across scales. Among plausible pathways, this article argues that a resilience strategy for managing flood risk is desirable. It would require human adjustment to flood, not by aiming for full protection and control but by adjusting our use of floodplains, integrating and experimenting with a wide range of flood risk management options, so that a dynamic balance is maintained between exposure and coping capacity and flood risk is contained at an acceptable level. Embracing variability and uncertainty lies at the heart of such a flood resilience centered paradigm. Reducing the flood toll cannot be had without trade-offs in economic development, food production, and agricultural productivity.

Kang Xiaoguang: Social Science, Civil Society, and Confucian Religion

This article examines the academic and intellectual career of Kang Xiaoguang, a prominent advocate of Confucianism and of the establishment of Confucianism as China’s state religion. It argues that Kang’s advocacy is rooted in a utilitarian vision of religion, and a pragmatic desire to encourage the development of healthy state-society relations in twenty-first century China.

Faust made in China: Meng Jinghui and Shen Lin’s irreverent socio-cultural deconstruction of Goethe’s iconic masterpiece

China’s unparalleled economic rise in the past 30 years and the blistering social transformation associated with it has generated immense interest globally in China as a nation. Regrettably, Western interest is still extremely narrow and restricted to statistical economic data and the belief that social change in China and modernisation is driven exclusively by the forces of globalisation, that is, economic forces, is widespread and little attention is given outside of specialist circles to the new robust intellectual and artistic-creative energies underlying China’s transformation and self-invention since 1978, identified by Deng Xiaoping as absolutely essential for China’s modernisation program. Bootleg Faust (Daoban Fushide, written by Shen Lin of the Central Academy of Drama, 1999), the ambitious staging of the translation-adaptation-deconstruction of the German classic by Meng Jinghui, China’s leading experimental theatre director on January 1, 2000 to welcome the New Millennium (and to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Goethe’s birth) is a remarkable artistic achievement. The very fact that Goethe’s FaustOne and Two, completed in 1832, and rarely performed in its totality in German-speaking countries, can be staged in Chinese adaptation for weeks, and to full houses in Beijing, Shanghai and other Chinese provincial centres and overseas is proof that the Luhanite vision of a global village is no longer virtual, but real, just as real as Meng Jinghui and Shen Lin’s theatrical professionalism and genius to give Goethe’s signature work relevance in twenty-first century China. Some of the salient aspects of this theatrical achievement and the socio-cultural significance of Meng and Shen’s irreverent artistic endeavour of deconstructing Goethe’s Faust will be explored in this paper.