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The imperialist epoch was heralded in 1900, among other military campaigns, with an eight-nation imperialist invasion of China by Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States to put down the Boxer Rebellion. The importance of China for world development has long been recognised. For example
In twenty-first-century Chinese cities there are hundreds of millions of rural migrants who are living temporary lives, suspended between urban and rural China. They are the unsung heroes of the country’s ‘economic miracle’, yet are regarded as second-class citizens in both a cultural, material and legal sense. China’s citizenship challenge tells the story of how civic organisations set up by some of these rural migrants challenge this citizenship marginalisation. The book argues that in order to effectively address the problems faced by migrant workers, these NGOs must undertake ‘citizenship challenge’: the transformation of migrant workers’ social and political participation in public life, the broadening of their access to labour and other rights, and the reinvention of their relationship to the city. By framing the NGOs’ activism in terms of citizenship rather than class struggle, this book offers a valuable contribution to the field of labour movement studies in China. The monograph also proves exceptionally timely in the context of the state’s repression of these organisations in recent years, which, as the book explores, was largely driven by their citizenship-altering activism.
3835 Understanding Chinese:Layout 1 12/7/12 11:04 Page 5 1 Chinese politics The legacy of history What political scientists refer to as political culture – the deeply embedded distinctive patterns of political, economic and social behaviour that fundamentally shape politics – is best viewed as the accumulated legacies of a country’s history. History, however, is not destiny: while a country’s past shapes its politics it does not determine it. Change is ever present though the pace at which it occurs varies: sometimes glacial (with the political system
Spencer underwear, and taxi queues. Among the ‘bad’ legacies cited were a lingering ‘colonial us-and-them mentality’ in which a ‘remarkable lack of racial intermingling’ had taken place, British snobbery, and British pop culture, in which phenomena such as the Spice Girls and Loaded magazine had ‘managed to infiltrate and subvert 5,000 years of glorious Chinese culture’. 1 These lists are striking for
The US, the two Chinas and the 1960 Winter Olympics 185 10 ‘Chinese rings’: the United States, the two Chinas and the 1960 Squaw Valley Winter Olympics Rachel Vaughan It is only relatively recently that scholars have begun to recognise the centrality of sport to the public diplomacy and soft power strategies of governments within the international arena.1 To a degree, this was partly the reluctance of Western governments to acknowledge the role of sport within their diplomatic arsenal. In contrast, the West’s Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union, began to
The British community in China was rooted in the diverse cultures of imperial Britain. This book presents a study of Britain's presence in China both at its peak, and during its inter-war dissolution in the face of assertive Chinese nationalism and declining British diplomatic support. Using archival materials from China and records in Britain and the United States, the book presents a portrait of the traders, missionaries, businessmen, diplomats and settlers who constituted "Britain-in-China", challenging people's understanding of British imperialism there. Imperialism is no new subject for scholars of modern Chinese history. The largest settler communities were selfgoverning; even the smallest were still self-replicating. The book focuses on the structure and workings of this establishment in the decades before the Pacific War. The survey presented examines the processes by which Britain in China evolved, how it replicated itself and represented itself (and China). It looks at how it attempted to reform itself in the face of the militant state and mass nationalism it met in China in the mid-1920s and after. The survey also looks at the face of the efforts of the British state to regain control over it and to decolonise the British presence. All Britons in China possessed multiple identities: British, imperial and local. The book also analyzes the formation and maintenance of settler identities, and then investigates how the British state and its allies brought an end to the reign of freelance, settler imperialism on the China coast.
The Chinese political system is the subject of much media and popular comment in part because China supports an economy with an apparently inexorable dynamic and impressive record of achievement. This book provides a comprehensive introduction to China's political system, outlining the major features of the Chinese model and highlighting its claims and challenges. It explores the central role of the Communist Party in the country's politics and the way in which the Party controls most elements of the political system. The collapse of the imperial system in 1911, the subsequent decades of turmoil and war and the coming to power of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1949 constitutes a truly revolutionary period in Chinese political history. The People's Republic of China (PRC) represents an unanticipated challenge to the logic of history. The key organising principle of the political system of the PRC is the leadership of the CCP. China remains a Leninist party-state. The book also examines the role of the National People's Representatives Congress (NPC) and then the State Council and the associated structures of central government departments. Greater democracy is facilitated, as are other reforms, by the recasting of China's foreign policy to encourage a calmer international environment. China's re-emergence as a major power is the single most important geo-political trend of the early twenty-first century.
This book looks at how the contract between the Chinese state and its citizens produces ready compliance and apparent support despite the problems of corruption, food scandals, air pollution and the constraints on personal freedom. It explores the ways in which China’s past is presented as both a mandate for political monopoly and a promise of a glorious future. It does so through the voice of China's own people, by exploring the lived experiences of a broad range of her citizens from across a wide range of socio-economic, rural, urban, ethnic and religious backgrounds. The volume aims to use an ethnographic approach to comprehend how Chinese people in the twenty-first century feel about key issues they face at crucial point in the nation's development.
Introduction China's soft-power influence in the Middle East is centuries old. Indeed, even by the ninth century trade was quite developed, with dhows travelling from across the Gulf to and from China. 1 China–Iran political contacts might date as far back as the pre-imperial Chinese era, and are evident in the blue glazing for Chinese pottery sourced from Iran. Contact extended into the first and the Han dynasty, the second imperial dynasty (206 BC to 220 AD), which
3 India and China: an uneasy relationship In recent years the world has grappled with the challenges posed by China’s rapid rise, and India is no exception. The peculiar nature of Sino-Indian ties has been underscored by a sudden downturn in bilateral relations. The relationship has become so ruptured that some Indian strategists were contemplating a “year of the Chinese attack on India,” suggesting that China would attack India by 2012 to divert attention from growing domestic troubles.1 The Indian media, rather than interrogating these claims, further