One of the most pressing issues in contemporary China is the massive rural land takings that have taken place at a scale unprecedented in human history. Expropriation of land has dispossessed and displaced millions for several decades, despite the protection of property rights in the Chinese constitution. Combining meticulous doctrinal analysis with in-depth historical investigation, Chun Peng tracks the origin and evolution of China's rural land takings law over the twentieth century and demonstrates an enduring tradition of land takings for state-led social transformation, under which the takings law is designed to be power-confirming. With changed socio-political circumstances and a new rights-respecting constitutional agenda, a rebalance of the law is now underway, but only within existing parameters. Peng provides a piercing analysis of how land has been used by the largest developing country in the world to develop itself, at what costs and where the future might be.
Focusing on Chinese elite women as a special socio-political group, this book places the sophisticated networks they formed in the shifting geographical, social, cultural and political spaces of warti
Based on recent primary research in anthropology, sociology, history and politics, and on insights from political activism, Gender in Flux addresses gender as a main axis of social organization and cultural practice in China. Covering the impoverished rural 'sending' villages of western China to the big and wealthy Yangzi valley city of Nanjing, the far northeastern village of Huangbaiyu to the major urban centres of Tianjin and Beijing, it examines gendered practices and experiences in socio-economic, political and administrative configurations, family and household organization, education, employment and mobility, and generation. The volume addresses gendered expectations and practices as lived experience within and across different scales, challenging the standard social science division of urban, rural and migrant. Gender in Flux thus sheds important light on how the changing manifestations and articulations of gender across different practices confound any attempt at a uniform ana
Originally published in 1933, this book presents a comprehensive biography of Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty, also known by the personal name of Li Shimin. Detailed information is provided on the life and achievements of Emperor Taizong, placing them in the context of socio-political developments during the late sixth and early seventh centuries. Illustrative figures, maps and a genealogical table are also included, together with detailed textual notes and appendices. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Emperor Taizong and the history of China.
Xiaoqun Xu makes a compelling and original contribution to the study of China's modernization with this book on the rise of professional associations in Republican China in their birthplace of Shanghai, and of their political and socio-cultural milieu. This 2001 book is rich in detail about the key professional and political figures and organizations in Shanghai, filling an important gap in its social history. The professional associations were, as the author writes, 'unambiguously urban and modern in their origins and functions … representing a new breed of educated Chinese' and they pioneered a new type of relationship with the state. Xu addresses a central issue in China studies, the relationship between state and society, and proposes an alternative to the Western-derived concept of civil society. This book illuminates the complexity of modernization and nationalism in twentieth-century China, and provides a concrete case for comparative studies of professionalization and class for
