China Books

The result of cooperation between a social anthropologist and a social historian and is focussed on what evolves today on the social scene in southern China. Based on longitudinal fieldwork in the heartland of the Cantonese-speaking world, the Pearl River Delta, the book explores how people construct their world in a period of time characterised by drastic change. The topics covered include strategies and concerns in the wider social landscape, kinship, belonging and residential politics. The construction of the future is another leading theme that branches into fields as diverse as demographic strategies and the search for transcendental blessings. The study reports how history supplies people with a repository for the future, and accounts for how their march towards modernity is, at the same time, a reconstruction of tradition. The renewed interest in religion is brought to the fore, both in organised forms around ancestral halls and temples, and in terms of superstitions. The text contributes to a better understanding of what goes on in the most dynamic area of the People?s Republic of China, where the Communist party plan for a new individualism and a life orientation focussed on the making of private profit, but also to the wider debate on social continuity and reproduction. About the Authors: Goran Aijmer is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Writing mainly in the field of symbolic studies, he has contributed much to the understanding of the cultural semantics of Chinese, Southeast Asian and Melanesian societies as well as to the pragmatic study of migration, small-scale economy, religion and ritual in these areas. Virgil K. Y. Ho is Assistant Professor of History in the Division of Humanities at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His writing has mainly concerned with modernism in Chinese towns and cities especially Canton (Guangzhou) under foreign influences in this century. (For this item please quote stock ID 4035) ISBN: 9789622018327

(For this item please quote stock ID 4257) ISBN: 9780804718875

This book is the first to summarize and integrate the wealth of data available (both in Chinese and English) on the psychological functioning of the Chinese people - a group that represents more than a quarter of the world's population. The contributors emphasize prime areas of research, the theoretical models used to integrate these findings and problems for future investigation. They provide a cross-cultural perspective on the data, covering topics such as socialization, perception, cognition, personality, psychopathology, social behaviour and organization. About the author: Michael Harris Bond is Professor of Psychology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has lived and working in Hong Kong for more than thirty years. His research interests include the social psychology of language use, impression management, cross-cultural social psychology interaction and social axioms. (For this item please quote stock ID 4622) ISBN: 9789629963538

Competing in the 1986 National College Games of the People's Republic of China, Susan Brownell earned both a gold medal in the heptathlon and fame throughout China as 'the American girl who won glory for Beijing University.' Now an anthropologist, Brownell draws on her direct experience of Chinese athletics in this fascinating look at the culture of sports and the body in China. Training the Body for China is the first book on Chinese sports based on extended fieldwork by a Westerner. Brownell introduces the notion of 'body culture' to analyse Olympic sports as one element in a whole set of Chinese body practices: the 'old people's disco dancing' craze, the new popularity of bodybuilding (following reluctant official acceptance of the bikini), mass calisthenics, martial arts, military discipline, and more. Translating official and dissident materials into English for the first time and drawing on performance theory and histories of the body, Brownell uses the culture of the body as a focal point to explore the tensions between local and global organisations, the traditional and the modern, men and women. Her intimate knowledge of Chinese social and cultural life and her wide range of historic examples make Training the Body for China a unique illustration of how gender, the body, and the nation are interlinked in Chinese culture. (For this item please quote stock ID 4718) ISBN: 9780226076478

How have the momentous policy shifts that followed the death of Mao Zedong changed families in China? What are the effects of the decollectivisation of agriculture, the encouragement of limited private enterprise, and the world's strictest birth-control policy? Eleven sociologists and anthropologists explore these and other questions in this path-breaking volume. The essays concern both urban and rural communities and range from intellectual to working-class families. They show that there is no single trend in Chinese family organisation today, but rather a mosaic of forms and strategies that must be seen in the light of particular local conditions. (For this item please quote stock ID 6284) ISBN: 9780520082229

In Erik Mueggler's powerful and imaginative ethnography, a rural minority community in the mountains of Southwest China struggles to find its place at the end of a century of violence and at the margins of a nation-state. Here, people describe the present age, beginning with the Great Leap Famine of 1958-1960 and continuing through the 1990s, as 'the age of wild ghosts'. Their stories of this age converge on a dream of community - a bad dream, embodied in the life, death, and reawakening of a single institution: a rotating headman-ship system that expired violently under the Maoist regime. Displaying a sensitive understanding of both Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman language spoken in this region, Mueggler explores memories of this institution, including the rituals and poetics that once surrounded it and the bitter conflicts that now haunt it. To exorcise 'wild ghosts', he shows, is nothing less than to imagine the state and its power, to trace the responsibility for violence to its morally ambiguous origins, and to enunciate calls for justice and articulate longings for reconciliation. (For this item please quote stock ID 11069) ISBN: 9780520226319

A collection of current research on Chinese child development: the context of development, cognitive development , social development, and new issues related to the topic. (For this item please quote stock ID 12725) ISBN: 9789622016590

Gift-giving is a classic topic in anthropology, where on-going debates involve the principle of reciprocity, the spirit of the gift, and the relationship between gifts and commodities. But the topic has been surprisingly little studied in the Chinese context except for the form of instrumental exchange known as networking or guanxi. (For this item please quote stock ID 17008) ISBN: 9780804726955

The past two centuries have witnessed tremendous upheavals in every aspect of Chinese culture and society. At the level of everyday life, some of the most remarkable transformations have occurred in the realm of gender. Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities is a mix of illuminating historical and ethnographic studies of gender from the 1700s to the present. The essays in this highly creative collection are organized in pairs that alternate in focus between femininity and masculinity, between subjects traditionally associated with feminism (such as family life) and those rarely considered from a gendered point of view (like banditry). The chapters provide a wealth of interesting detail on such varied topics as court cases involving widows and homosexuals; ideal spouses of early-twentieth-century radicals; changing images of prostitutes; the masculinity of qigong masters; sexuality in the era of reform; and the eroticisation of minorities. While most of the essays were specifically written for this volume, a few are reprinted as a testament to their enduring value. Exploring the central role of gender as an organizing principle of Chinese social life, Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities is an innovative reader that will spark new debate in a wide range of disciplines. 'The last thirty years have seen an astonishing growth in the field of gender studies for late-imperial and twentieth-century China. In this ingeniously orchestrated book, Brownell and Wasserstrom not only give us a careful bibliographic and analytical summary of that earlier work, but by assembling paired essays on matching male and female gender issues, written by an excellent roster of scholars, they have indicated the lines along which this field can expand fruitfully in the future.' - Jonathan D. Spence, author of The Search for Modern China (For this item please quote stock ID 17206) ISBN: 9780520221161

Judith Farquhar's innovative study of medicine and popular culture in modern China reveals the thoroughly political and historical character of pleasure. Ranging over a variety of cultural terrains - fiction, medical texts, film and television, journalism, and observations of clinics and urban daily life in Beijing ? Appetites challenges the assumption that the mundane enjoyments of bodily life are natural and unvarying. Farquhar analyses modern Chinese reflections on embodied existence to show how contemporary appetites are grounded in history. From eating well in improving economic times to memories of the late 1950s famine, from the flavours of traditional Chinese medicine to modernity's private sexual passions, this book argues that embodiment in all its forms must be invented and sustained in public reflections about personal and national life. As much at home in science studies and social theory as in the details of life in Beijing, this account uses anthropology, cultural studies, and literary criticism to read contemporary Chinese life in a materialist and reflexive mode. For both Maoist and market reform periods, this is a story of high culture in appetites, desire in collective life, and politics in the body and its dispositions. 'Evolving from her fascinating previous work concerning hands-on diagnosis in Chinese medicine, Judith Farquhar engages cultural artifacts of all kinds to probe the release of the passions in post-Maoist China. This is by far the most successful application to ethnography of the often confused and overly abstract discussions of the body as a central trope and object of recent culture theory.' - George Marcus, Rice University (For this item please quote stock ID 17856) ISBN: 9780822329213

The charismatic form of healing called qigong, which at its core involves meditative breathing exercises, achieved enormous popularity in China during the last two decades. Qigong served a critical social organisational function, as practitioners formed new informal networks, sometimes on an international scale, at a time when China was shifting from state-subsidised medical care to for-profit market medicine. The emergence of new psychological states deemed to be deviant led the Chinese state to 'medicalise' certain forms, such as the much publicised falungong, while championing scientific versions of qigong. By contrast, qigong continues to be promoted outside of China as a traditional healing practice. Anthropologist Nancy N. Chen examines the cultural context of medicine and healing practices in the PRC, Taiwan, and the United States, and the pages of her book come alive with the narratives of the numerous practitioners, healers, psychiatric patients, doctors, and bureaucrats she interviewed. (For this item please quote stock ID 20082) ISBN: 9780231128056

[Indent] With a wedding impending, the Taiwanese bride-to-be turns to bridal photographers, makeup artists, and hair stylists to transform her image beyond recognition. They give her fairer skin, eyes like a Western baby doll, and gowns inspired by sources from Victorian England to MTV. An absorbing consideration of contemporary bridal practices in Taiwan, Framing the Bride shows how the lavish photographs represent more than mere conspicuous consumption. They are artifacts infused with cultural meaning and emotional significance, products of the gender- and generation-based conflicts in Taiwan's hybrid system of modern matrimony. From the bridal photographs, the book opens out into broader issues such as courtship, marriage, kinship, globalization, and the meaning of the "West" and "Western" cultural images of beauty. Bonnie Adrian argues that in compiling enormous bridal albums full of photographs of brides and grooms in varieties of finery, posed in different places, and exuding romance, Taiwanese brides engage in a new rite of passage - one that challenges the terms of marriage set out in conventional wedding rites. In Framing the Bride, we see how this practice is also a creative response to U.S. domination of transnational visual imagery - how bridal photographers and their subjects take the project of globalisation into their own hands, defining its terms for their lives even as they expose the emptiness of its images. 'Do not be misled by the title of this book. It is a study of Taiwan's bridal industry but it is also a fine ethnography of marriage in contemporary urban Taipei. With great subtlety, Bonnie Adrian shows us how much marriage in Taiwan has changed and how many of the old ways it has retained. She does so with wit and humour' - Margery Wolf, author, A Thrice-Told Tale: Feminism, Postmodernism, & Ethnographic Responsibility. Bonnie Adrian is Social Sciences Core Lecturer at the University of Denver. (For this item please quote stock ID 21766) ISBN: 9780520238343

Examines the many ways in which education is changing in response to social changes in Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. The area covered is broad and relates to a variety of topics, including educational policy, economic reforms, community development, and examinations. The collected chapters in the book are divided into four types: empirical studies, documentary and policy studies, historical studies, and comments and discussions. A major aim of the work is to provide a forum for comparative studies of education across the regions of greater China. The readings illustrate increasing diversity as well as both convergent and divergent patterns of change in educational development, both of which continue to characterize these places. (For this item please quote stock ID 22072) ISBN: 9783782689113

How has rapid economic development and the aging of the population affected the expression of filial piety in East Asia? Eleven experienced fieldworkers take a fresh look at an old idea, analysing contemporary behaviour, not norms, among both rural and urban families in China, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. Each chapter presents rich data on how filial piety shapes the decisions and daily lives of adult children and their elderly parents. The authors' long-term contact with villages and city dwellers in their native language lends an immediacy lacking in more abstract treatments of this topic. This book is ideal for social science and humanities courses on East Asia. (For this item please quote stock ID 22917) ISBN: 9780804747912

~'Successfully employing an interdisciplinary approach, which combines the historian's emphasis on long-term social change with the ethnographer's grasp of details about local society, [DuBois] presents a compelling study of the development of local cults and sectarian traditions and investigation of the impact (or lack thereof) of state policies and organised religious movements on local communities' - Paul Katz, Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica

~Until recently, few villagers of rural North China ventured far from their homes. Their intensely local view of the world included knowledge of the immanent sacred realm, which derived from stories of divine revelations, cures, and miracles that circulated among neighbouring villages. These stories gave direction to private devotion and served as a source of expert information on who the powerful deities were and what role they played in the human world. The structure of local society also shaped public devotion, as different groups expressed their economic and social concerns in organised worship. While some of these groups remained structurally intact in the face of historical change, others have changed dramatically, resulting in new patterns of religious organisation and practice.

~The Sacred Village introduces local religious life in Cang County, Hebei Province, as a lens through which to view the larger issue of how rural Chinese perspectives and behaviours were shaped by the sweeping social, political, and demographic changes of the last two centuries. Thomas DuBois combines new archival sources in Chinese and Japanese with his own fieldwork to produce a work that is compelling and intimate in detail. This dual approach also allows him to address the integration of external networks into local society and religious mentality and posit local society as a particular sphere in which the two are negotiated and transformed.

~Thomas DuBois is assistant professor of history at the National University of Singapore. (For this item please quote stock ID 23310) ISBN: 9780824828370

~In the west, the idea of autonomy is often associated with a sense of freedom - a self-interested state of being unfettered by rules or obligations to others. This original anthropological study explores a type of 'obedient' autonomy that thrives on setbacks, blossoms as more rules are imposed, and flourishes in adversity. Obedient Autonomy analyses this model, and explains its precepts through examining the specialised and highly organized discipline of archaeology in China. ~The book follows Chinese students on their journey to becoming full-fledged archaeologists in a bureaucracy-saturated environment. Often required to travel in teams to the countryside, archaeologists are uniquely obliged to overcome divisions among themselves, between themselves and their peasant-workers, and between themselves and bureaucratic officials. This analysis reveals how these interactions provide teachers of archaeology with stories used to foster obedient autonomy in their students. Moreover, it demonstrates how this form of autonomy enables a person to order and control their future careers in what appears to be a disorderly and uncertain world. ~A masterly contextualisation of archaeology in China, Obedient Autonomy shows how the discipline has accommodated itself to a Chinese social structure, and uncovers the moral, ethical, political, and economic underpinnings of that context. It will be accessible to students of anthropology even as it will provoke Euro-American archaeologists and interest social theorists of science, philosophers, gender theorists, and students of Chinese society. ~After receiving her doctorate in Social Anthropology from Harvard University, Erika E.S. Evasdottir was a Killam post-doctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia. Her research focus is now Chinese law, including issues of bureaucracy and authority within the Chinese legal community. (For this item please quote stock ID 23536) ISBN: 9780774809306

This book presents a systematic study of social stratification processes in urban China, from 1949 to 1994. Based on the life histories of a sample of urban residents from 20 Chinese cities, this book addresses two themes: (1) the interplay between redistribution and social stratification under state socialism in urban china, especially the impact of the state and state policies on individual life chances, in such areas as education, labour force participation, promotion in organizations, and the distribution of manifest and latent economic benefits; (2) an assessment of sources and extent of China?s economic transformation since the 1980s. The author blends sociological analysis and sensitivity to the historical context in interpreting changes and continuity in the 45-year history of state socialist China. This is the most comprehensive and rigorous study of social stratification in China to date. (For this item please quote stock ID 23813) ISBN: 9780521835077

Based on a total of 18 months of fieldwork in Shaanbei (northern Shaanxi province), this is the first book-length ethnographic case study of the revival of a popular religious temple in contemporary rural China. The book reveals that 'doing popular religion' is much more complex than praying to gods and burning incense. It examines the organisational and cultural logics that inform the staging of popular religious activities such as temple festivals. It also shows the politics behind the religious revival: the village-level local activists who seize upon temples and temple associations as a valuable political, economic, and symbolic resource, and the different local state agents who interact with temple associations and temple bosses. The study sheds unique light on shifting state-society relationships in the reform era, and is of interest to scholars and students in Asian Studies, the social sciences, and religious and ritual studies. (For this item please quote stock ID 24846) ISBN: 9780804751605

This book provides a timely contribution to our understanding of traditions and politics of identity in an important region of south China - southern Fujian. It provides new perspectives on the study of lineages, on the roles of tradition and women?s status, as well as on aspects of cultural life in Fujian in the post-Mao era. All the papers collected here show the dynamic nature of traditions that are reproduced by different agents, with reference to the post-Mao social context. To ordinary people, traditions provide a sense of cultural continuity and remain important in their rhetoric. But in fact, traditions can be reproduced and practiced in different contexts and are in constant change. The papers discuss the politics of traditions and their relevance to local identities. They contribute to an understanding of the 'revival' of traditions in post-Mao south China. Tan Chee-Beng is a Professor at the Department of Anthropology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests include cultural change and identity, ethnicity and ethnic relations, religion, Chinese communities, as well as indigenous minorities and development. He has carried out anthropological research in Malaysia and in south China. Some of his recent publications on Chinese studies include Changing Chinese Foodways in Asia (co-edited with David Y. H. Wu, 2001), Chinese Minority in a Malay State: The Case of Terengganu in Malaysia (2002), and Chinese Overseas: Comparative Cultural Issues (2004). (For this item please quote stock ID 25000) ISBN: 9789629962333

This monograph is a study of emerging kinship structures as embedded in the social and cultural history of a river valley in central coastal Fujian province from the 9th through 13th centuries. Social chapters focus on the establishment of elite kin groups, and marriage patterns. Culture chapters cover the religious culture, the academic culture, and the culture of kinship. The thesis of this book is that cultural innovation often begins at a local level, and challenges current paradigm that distinguishes the link between locality and the elite in the Northern and Southern Song. (For this item please quote stock ID 25605) ISBN: 9789629962272

Rapid economic and social reforms in rural China have aroused enormous scholarly interest at home and abroad. A key element to these changes is resource distribution. However, a systematic study of this new mode of resource distribution is to date still underdeveloped; and the com-plexity of resource allocation in the present-day peasant society of China has not been surveyed as an independent theme. This book presents an effort to examine the issues relating to the allocation of income, opportunities and assets in two villages in northern China; and thus, tries to shed light on the agent and mechanism of resource distribution in the post-reform era. XIYI HUANG received her PhD from the University of Leeds, U.K. in 2001 and currently works as the Asian Studies Librarian in the Leeds University Library. She has published a number of articles on gender, labour migration, kinship and rural development. Her research interests include poverty alleviation and institutional changes in rural China. (For this item please quote stock ID 27576) ISBN: 9789629963156

The construction of the Three Gorges dam in China will involve the relocation of more than 1.3 million people over a period of 17 years. This book examines the factors influencing the sustainability of the Three Gorges rural resettlement, and the problems and coping strategies of the relocation program. The author uses geographical information systems, interviews, social surveys, and documentary analysis to analyze the different dimensions of the resettlement. Yan Tan, Flinders University of South Australia, is a demographer and human geographer specializing in population and migration in China and Australia, and social applications of geographical information system (GIS). She has worked as a consultant to the Emerging Social Issues Division of United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP). (For this item please quote stock ID 28231) ISBN: 9789622098565

With contributions from some of the most well-respected and experienced Chinese writers, journalists, and organizers, China's Great Leap examines the People's Republic of China today as its government and 1.3 billion people prepare for the 2008 Olympic Games. When Beijing first sought the Games, China was still recovering from the upheavals of Maoist rule and adapting to a market revolution. Today, China wants to engage with the outside world-while fully controlling the engagement. How will the new leaders in Beijing manage the Olympic process and the internal and external pressures for reform it creates? China's Great Leap will illuminate China's recent history and outline how domestic and international pressures in the context of the Olympics could achieve human rights change. Learn about key areas for human rights reform and how the Olympics could represent a possible great leap forward for the people of China and for the world. With contributions from Joseph Amon, Bao Tong, Frank Ching, Jerome A. Cohen, Arvind Ganesan, R. Scott Greathead, Han Dongfang and Geoffrey Crothall, Sharon Hom, John Kamm, Phelim Kine, Jimmy Lai, Liu Xiaobo, Martin Lee, Christine Loh, Emily Parker, Kenneth Roth, Sophie Richardson, Mickey Spiegel, Wang Dan, and Dave Zirin. (For this item please quote stock ID 29563) ISBN: 9781583228432

Anthropologists and world historians make strange bedfellows. Although the latter frequently employ anthropological methods in their descriptions of cross-cultural exchanges, the former have raised substantial reservations about global approaches to history. Fearing loss of specificity, anthropologists object to the effacing qualities of techniques employed by world historians?this despite the fact that anthropology itself was a global, comparative enterprise in the nineteenth century.
Rainer Buschmann here seeks to recover some of anthropology?s global flavor by viewing its history in Oceania through the notion of the ethnographic frontier?the furthermost limits of the anthropologically known regions of the Pacific. The colony of German New Guinea (1884?1914) presents an ideal example of just such a contact zone. Colonial administrators there were drawn to approaches partially inspired by anthropology. Anthropologists and museum officials exploited this interest by preparing large-scale expeditions to German New Guinea.
Buschmann explores the resulting interactions between German colonial officials, resident ethnographic collectors, and indigenous peoples, arguing that all were instrumental in the formation of anthropological theory. He shows how changes in collecting aims and methods helped shift ethnographic study away from its focus on material artifacts to a broader consideration of indigenous culture. He also shows how ethnological collecting, often a competitive affair, could become politicized and connect to national concerns. Finally, he places the German experience in the broader context of Euro-American anthropology.
Anthropology's Global Histories will interest students and scholars of anthropology, history, world history, and Pacific studies.
About the Author
Rainer F. Buschmann is associate professor of history and founding faculty member at California State University, Channel Island.
(For this item please quote stock ID 30270) ISBN: 9780824831844

This book continues the focus of Living in China. The authors interviewed 19 foreign friends who study or work in China. Among them are a senior journalist, editors, translators, ecologist, ambassador, new-born movie, TV, and Beijing Opera starts, a descendant of foreign revolutionary friends born in China, and foreign Olympic coaches.... You will surely be touched by their stories about their different Chinese dreams, big and small. Some of those dreams have been realized, while some are still in progress. Their stories show different experiences and life values, and reflect some of the realities of today's China.
About the Author Lu Yang, the pen name of Yang Zhen, a senior journalist of the Japanese language version of People's China magazine, has worked in foreign publishing, communications and cultural exchanges for more than 20 years. He has written many articles on Chinese history and culture, as well as China's reform and opening-up, and has won worldwide acclaim from readers both at home and abroad. Some articles have been collected into books and some have received awards. In recent years, he has focused his interests on the conditions of foreigners living in China, and so was invited to be the leading writer of the book Living in China. (For this item please quote stock ID 31057) ISBN: 9787802288416

China is a complex tapestry of ancient cultures, modern technology, amazing riches and moving experiences, which is reflected in its people. "Children of China" illustrates the incredible diversity of the country's children, from the 55 minority groups to urban city children. These portraits of children from different provinces and minority regions are beautiful, humble and precious. Snapshots of daily life abound, images of children from Harbin who play in the ice castles with no gloves in -30 degree weather, Mongolian children riding horses in daily life and children who live near the Silk Road playing outdoors when temperatures soar to 40 degrees. You will also enjoy the photos of children performing traditional Peking Opera, ballet, tea ceremonies, practicing calligraphy, or taking etiquette classes and training for the 2012 Olympic Games. This book reminds everyone that children are the inspiration of the world. All detailed information for each photo are listed at the back of the book. (For this item please quote stock ID 31058) ISBN: 9787508511139

After a teaching career in Canada, where she was born, Lisa Carducci found China to be the most favourable place for her writing. Author of more than 40 books and 2,000 articles, she aims to improve, year after year, her knowledge of the Chinese culture's many diverse features. However, this experience of China would not make sense to her if she did not share it with "those who don't have the chance to discover it on the ground." In 2001, Lisa Carducci was granted the Friendship Award of the People's Republic of China, and, in 2005, permanent residence status. (For this item please quote stock ID 31144) ISBN: 9787119055657

Dancing from the Heart is written from the heart. This book is a wonderful evocation of contemporary Polynesian life, joy, and loss. Yet it is also analytically adventurous. Cook Island dance becomes a lens through which questions of gender, performance, embodiment, and globalization come into focus in novel ways. This is surely one of the finest of recent Pacific ethnographies. -Nicholas Thomas, Univeristy of Cambridge
Dancing from the Heart is the first study of gender, globalization, and expressive culture in the Cook Islands. It demonstrates how dance in particular plays a key role in articulating the overlapping local, regional, and transnational agendas of Cook Islanders. Kalissa Alexeyeff reconfigures conventional views of globalization?s impact on indigenous communities, moving beyond diagnoses of cultural erosion and contamination to a grounded exploration of creative agency and vital cultural production. Central to the study is a rich and textured ethnographic account of contemporary Cook Islands dance practice. Based on fieldwork, in-depth interviews, and archival research, it offers an engrossing analysis of how Cook Islands social life is generated through expressive practices. Dance is explored in a variety of settings, including beauty pageants, tourist venues, nightclubs and community celebrations at home and within Cook Islands communities abroad.
About the Author
Kalissa Alexeyeff is a McArthur Fellow in the Gender Studies Program at the University of Melbourne. (For this item please quote stock ID 31173) ISBN: 9780824832445

Despite an increase in the investigation of Hong Kong's drug problem, little has been published concerning the causes of continuous drug use or the recovery process experienced by chronic drug abusers. A Brighter Side documents a pioneer longitudinal study of chronic drug abuse in Hong Kong, using an analytical framework to explore the protective and risk factors affecting relapse or abstinence from drugs. The findings have significant implications for theories of drug use and rehabilitation, especially in regards to the role of social capital, self-efficacy, short-term abstinence, and harm reduction in the road to recovery. The findings also have practical implications for services aimed at chronic drug abusers in Hong Kong and other Asian societies. (For this item please quote stock ID 31251) ISBN: 9789629964085

This book presents a rich exploration of masculinities and homosexualities in China. It provides an historical account of sexuality and masculinity from ancient China onwards; reports the results of an extensive ethnographic survey of contemporary Chinese gay men from a wide range of different locations in China, showing how they live their everyday lives; relates homosexuality in China to the extensive social and cultural theories on gender, sexuality and the body, looking especially at the idea of "queer space" and how this is developed in China, and also to theories of postcolonialism and globalisation; and includes a textual analysis of queer culture. The book concludes that divergent and contradictory pictures of modern Chinese masculinities ? such as "memba", "tongzhi" and "golden boy" - emerge in different locations, these being hybridized identities emerging from the coexistence of universalised rhetoric and styles and indigenous Chinese cultural and social traditions. (For this item please quote stock ID 29420) ISBN: 9780415451895

[Indent] This comprehensive volume analyses Chinese birth policies and population developments from the founding of the People's Republic to the 2000 census. The main emphasis is on China's 'Hardship Number One Under Heaven': the highly controversial one-child campaign, and the violent clash between family strategies and government policies it entails. Birth Control in China 1949-2000 documents an agonising search to solve this predicament, a protracted inner Party struggle, a massive effort in social engineering and the grinding problems of implementation. It reveals how birth control in China is shaped by political, economic and social interests, bureaucratic structures and financial concerns. Based on his own interviews and a wealth of new statistics, surveys and documents, Thomas Scharping also analyses how the demographics of China have changed due to birth control policies, and what the future is likely to hold. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Modern China, Asian studies and the social sciences. (For this item please quote stock ID 21751) ISBN: 9780700711543

(For this item please quote stock ID 15178) ISBN: 9787801492159

After a teaching career in Canada, where she was born, Lisa Carducci found China to be the most favourable place for her writing. Author of more than 40 books and 2,000 articles, she aims to improve, year after year, her knowledge of the Chinese culture's many diverse features. However, this experience of China would not make sense to her if she did not share it with "those who don't have the chance to discover it on the ground." In 2001, Lisa Carducci was granted the Friendship Award of the People's Republic of China, and, in 2005, permanent residence status. (For this item please quote stock ID 29526) ISBN: 9787119051802

For seven years in the 1970s, the author lived in a village in northeast China as an ordinary farmer. In 1989, he returned to the village as an anthropologist to begin the unparalleled span of 11 years? fieldwork that has resulted in this book?a comprehensive, vivid, and nuanced account of family change and the transformation of private life in rural China from 1949 to 1999. The author?s focus on the personal and the emotional sets this book apart from most studies of the Chinese family. Yan explores private lives to examine areas of family life that have been largely overlooked, such as emotion, desire, intimacy, privacy, conjugality, and individuality. He concludes that the past five decades have witnessed a dual transformation of private life: the rise of the private family, within which the private lives of individual women and men are thriving. (For this item please quote stock ID 20029) ISBN: 9780804744560

The growing body of literature on ethnic businesses has emphasised the importance of small family-based businesses as a key form of immigrant adaptation. Although there have been numerous references to the importance of 'family labour' as a key ethnic resource, few studies have examined the work roles and family dynamics entailed in various kinds of ethnic businesses. Helping Out addresses the centrality of children's labour participation in such family enterprises. Discussing the case of Chinese families running take-away food shops in Britain, Miri Song examines the ways in which children contribute their labour and the context in which children come to understand and believe in 'helping out' as part of a 'family work contract'. Song explores the implications of these children's labour participation for family relationships, cultural identity, and the future of the Chinese community in Britain. While doing so, she argues that the practical importance and the broader meanings of children's work must be understood in the context of immigrant families' experiences of migration and ethnic minority status in Western, white-majority societies. (For this item please quote stock ID 12844) ISBN: 9781566397094

Jews in Old China was originally published by Hippocrene Books in 1984 with considerable success. It was then translated into Hebrew and published in Israel in 1987. This expanded edition offers a rich exposition, according to the Chinese investigations, on the origins of these Jewish migrants-when and why they came, the routes they followed, where they settled, and descriptions of their religious and social lives under the Hans, the Mongols and the Manchus. This book provides a wealth of information about the conflicts, contributions, adaptation and ultimate assimilation of the Jews in China. Sidney Shapiro, an American lawyer, came to China in 1947 and "joined the revolution." He became a Chinese citizen in 1963, and is now member of the Consultative Conference, the Translators Association of China, the Chinese Writers Association, and the Soong Ching Ling Foundation. He is the author of several books, and the highly acclaimed translator of the Ming-Dynasty classic Outlaws of the Marsh and Deng Rong's biography of her father Deng Xiaoping and the Cultura Revolution. (For this item please quote stock ID 29255) ISBN: 9787119051642