The personal stories of the Gao villagers demonstrate and are related to changes in China.This is a close study of Gao Village twenty years after the author, an anthropologist and native of Gao villag
Mehar, a young bride in rural 1929 Punjab, is trying to discover the identity of her new husband. She and her sisters-in-law, married to three brothers in a single ceremony, spend their days hard at work in the family's 'china room', sequestered from contact with the men. When Mehar develops a theory as to which of them is hers, a passion is ignited that will put more than one life at risk.Spiralling around Mehar's story is that of a young man who in 1999 travels from England to the now-deserted farm, its 'china room' locked and barred.In enforced flight from the traumas of his adolescence - his experiences of addiction, racism, and estrangement from the culture of his birth - he spends a summer in painful contemplation and recovery, before finally finding the strength to return 'home'.
Land was always at the center of life in Hong Kong's rural New Territories: it sustained livelihoods and lineages and, for some, was a route to power. During imperial times villagers managed their lan
At the end of the nineteenth century a slice of imperial China was abruptly incorporated into the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong. It became known as the New Territories.The people of this remote an
Traversing from the rapidly urbanising county-level city of Fuqing to the remote mountainous kingdom of Lesotho in Southern Africa, Searching for Sweetness is one of the first and most extensive ethnographies linking rural-to-urban migration in China with Chinese migration to Africa. Against the backdrop of China’s national struggle for modernity and globalisation, Sarah Hanisch examines Chinese migrant women’s complex and ever-shifting struggles for upward social mobility across different generations and localities in China and Lesotho. Embedding the women’s individual portraits into larger historical contexts, Hanisch illustrates how these women interpret and narrate their migratory and everyday experiences through and beyond powerful state metanarratives on ‘sweetness’ and ‘bitterness’. In her exploration of migratory identities and projects that have been overlooked by previous studies, Hanisch brings uniquely gendered, multi-sited, and intergenerational perspectives to existing sc
This book contains analysis of different domains of contemporary art in China seen through the lens of the epistemological changes described in China Pluperfect I: Epistemology of Past and Outside in Chinese Art.It first looks at the concept of “ink art,” describing how it meant different things to different people in the former colony and how these different meanings came to determine certain institutional choices made at the beginning of the 21st century. The following chapters are dedicated to issues related to the urban and rural contexts for art creation in Mainland China and Hong Kong. One chapter observes the ups and downs of the representations of cities in the history of the People’s Republic of China and how they have defined a certain idea of culture. Another looks at how Chinese cities have been exceptional centers of art creations over the last thirty to forty years through the example of Shenzhen where a vibrant art scene, albeit closely connected to Hong Kong which has b
Route 312 is the Chinese Route 66. It flows three thousand miles from east to west, passing through the factory towns of the coastal areas, through the rural heart of China, then up into the Gobi Dese
An analysis of the lessons learned from tuberculosis control in Shanghai. Tuberculosis Control and Institutional Change in Shanghai, 1911-2011 is the first book on the most widespread and deadly infectious disease in China, both historically and today. Weaving together interviews with data from periodicals and local archives in Shanghai, Rachel Core examines the rise and fall of tuberculosis control in China from the 1950s to the 1990s. Under the socialist work unit system, the vast majority of people had guaranteed employment, a host of benefits tied to their workplace, and there was little mobility--factors that made the delivery of medical and public health services possible in both urban and rural areas. The dismantling of work units amid wider market reforms in the 1980s and 1990s led to the rise of temporary and casual employment and a huge migrant worker population, with little access to health care, creating new challenges in TB control. This study of Shanghai will provide valu
Tracing China’s journey began from exploring rural revolution and reconstitutions of community in South China. Spanning decades of rural-urban divide, it finally uncovers China’s global reach and Hong
This book is about how rural China is organized. Based on extensive fieldwork the authors present examples of both top-down and bottom-up social organizing and analyse the interplay between external a
Though China's economy is projected to become the world's largest within the next twenty years, industrial pollution threatens both the health of the country's citizens and the natural resources on wh
