Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Strange Fruit Of 9/11, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

The author discusses the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks and the larger psychological narrative and context of the attacks. Stoicism is considered as a viable response.

History Of Communication And Its Application In Multicultaral,Multilingual Social System In India Across Ages, Ratnesh Dwivedi Mr

Ratnesh Dwivedi

The history of communication dates back to the earliest signs of cavemen.Communication can range from very subtle processes of exchange, to full conversations and mass communication. Human communication was revolutionized with speech perhaps 200,000 years ago, Symbols were developed about 30,000 years ago and writing about 7,000. On a much shorter scale, there have been major developments in the field of telecommunication in the past few centuries.

American Graffiti: Musings On The Ground Zero Mosque, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

The author discusses reactions and parallels to a mosque proposed near the site of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in public discourse.

Silence Is Still Golden: Women And The Metropolis In Early Chinese Cinema, Yap Soo Ei, Ji Xing, Nicolai Volland, Yang Lijun, Paul Pickowicz

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Feng Xiaogang’s blockbuster Aftershock is making headlines these days, setting new records at the box office in China. We cannot say yet if the excitement is justified—Aftershock has only just hit the theaters here in Singapore. It is clear, however, that the current cinema craze in China is not at all a new phenomenon. In fact, new releases on the silver screen created similar sensations in Shanghai as early as eighty years ago. And many of these old films continue even today to fascinate. Films by pioneering Chinese directors of the 1920s and 1930s still dazzle, with their opulent sets, …

An Interview With Deanna Fei, Author Of A Thread Of Sky

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Deanna Fei is author of A Thread of Sky (Penguin Press, 2010), a novel about three generations of women in a Chinese American family. Here, she talks with recent UC Irvine graduate Mengfei Chen.

Mengfei Chen: What were some of your inspirations in writing the book? How did it begin? What experiences informed your writing?

Deanna Fei: A Thread of Sky is the story of a family of Chinese American women who reunite for a tour of their ancestral home. It was inspired by a trip through China’s “must-sees” that I embarked on ten years ago with my mother, my …

“We Are Not Machines:” Teen Spirit On China’S Shopfloor, Mary E. Gallagher

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

This spring, a series of well-coordinated and successful strikes in foreign-invested enterprises in China made headlines all around the world. Young migrant workers openly and forcefully articulated demands for higher wages, better representation, and more consideration of their “spiritual” and mental well-being. These demands have led to increased speculation that China’s current economic boom is winding down, as its growth strategy founded in part on cheap migrant labor from rural areas faces domestic and international difficulties.

This is not the first time that Chinese workers have openly protested for higher wages, better treatment, and more job security. What makes this …

Reading Round-Up: China Now The World’S Second-Largest Economy

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

This week came the not-unexpected news that China has passed Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy. Here, we’ve rounded up reactions to and analyses of the story:

• At his New Yorker blog, Evan Osnos asks “Why the Long Face?”, explaining that “While the story has rated front-page treatment in the U.S., it has sent China into a frenzy of self-flagellation, in the hope of reminding people that it is still home to a lot of very poor people.”

• Yoree Koh at the Wall Street Journal reports that Japan is taking the news of its third-place status with …

An Image

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

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I had never bid on eBay. It takes too much energy, too much attention to follow the vagaries of an online auction. And there never seems to be anything I want that badly. But I wanted that propaganda poster—a reproduction of an oil painting, mid-1970s—depicting, with the imagination and rhetorical power possible only in socialist realism, the May Fourth movement of 1919.

In the painting, the sky is clearing and clouds are dissipating behind the imposing presence of Tiananmen, which dominates the scene. The students, young men and women, are marching at …

Panic Room

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

On my (continuing) walk across China, I have occasionally come across the kind of construction featured in the attached image — a farmhouse with a door half way up the wall, no stairs attached. I have previously assumed the house was still under construction, or perhaps they ran out of money before doing the stairs. But as I passed his one, in Guang’an county in the middle of Sichuan, last Saturday, it struck me that this is in fact a “panic room”, a way to seal off and protect the family and its assets in the top room, safe from …

Frivolous Friday: The Red Army Learns To “Just Beat It”

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Have you ever wondered what it would look like if Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” were performed by a Cultural Revolution-era musical troupe? Perhaps not. But thanks to this video on Tudou, the question you never thought to ask has been answered.

The video has been making the rounds on Twitter this week (follow us at@chinabeat!); thanks to Kaiser Kuo for bringing it to our attention.

Sodden Anniversary, Paul Katz

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

August 8, 2010 marked the first anniversary of the Siaolin Village 小林村 tragedy, when torrential rains caused by Typhoon Morakot triggered a massive mudslide that swept this idyllic community off the face of the earth, taking 474 lives. Conditions one year later were eerily similar, with rain drenching the disaster site and another threat (Tropical Storm Dianmu 電母) lurking off the east coast (happily it did not make landfall). Southern Taiwan has suffered heavy rains during the past month, but there has been little destruction and loss of life (so far), unlike the terrible flooding that has ravaged so much …

Hong Kong’S Glass Ceiling, Reenita Malhotra

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Hong Kong’s women have the power of their purses, are freer and more educated, and enjoy more legal protection than they did 20 years ago. And since 1996, when Hong Kong signed CEDAW, the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women—which calls for 50 percent representation of women in government leadership, political parties, trade unions, professional and other representative groups—women’s participation in managerial positions has risen from 22 percent in 1998 to 29 percent in 2008. In the civil service, women held 31 percent of directorate officer positions in 2008, compared to 21 percent in …

An Interview With Chinese Underground Rock Musician Zuoxiao Zuzhou, Tim Hathaway

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

A quick listen to Zuoxiao Zuzhou’s (左小祖咒）music would not be enough to explain his fame. His trademark is singing off key.

In spite of the odd sounding vocals or perhaps because of its contrast to the saccharine sweet sounds of Chinese pop and rock, Zuoxiao has become one of China’s most successful rock musicians.

He started his career in 1993 and has since produced ten albums. He has also published a best selling novel and created sculptures and artistic photography. He was a founding member of the avant garde artists residence called Beijing’s “East Village” in the early 1990s where …

The Freshest Kids In China, George Zhi Zhao

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

R16 at the Shanghai World Expo

June 19, 2010 I hear the voice of the late James Brown shouting over the booming speakers, and I watch a crowd of dancers move and contort to every minute rhythm and sound that is being controlled and manipulated by the DJ. The energy in the air is tense, as different b-boys (breakdancers) take turns stepping inside a circle of bodies, all asserting themselves in back-to-back solo performances of gravity-defying sequences of dance movements. The competitive performance of breakdancing happens all over the world, in metropolises ranging from New York City to Tokyo, from …

Where’S Haibao? Help Us Find Him!

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Shanghai seems to have turned into a massive game of “Where’s Haibao?” as the image of everyone’s favorite Expo mascot pervades the city, in places both expected and not. Gina Bock, an entering student at Pomona College, recently returned from her first trip to China and shared a few photos of her Haibao sightings with us. They’re now in a Picasa album (link below, and also accessible through our “Media” page). If you have Haibao photos of your own to add (the more unusual, the better!), let us know by writing to thechinabeat[at]gmail.com. Though we suspect Haibao will be only …

Anthologize: A New Tool For Bloggers

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

We wanted to alert readers who are fellow WordPress users to the arrival of a cool new WordPress plugin that has just been unveiled. Anthologize is the product of the “One Week | One Tool” program, a summer institute funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and held at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. The plugin — conceived, developed, and released in just one week! — enables bloggers to grab online content, edit and organize it, and produce an electronic book. Read more about Anthologize, and some ideas about how it can enhance …

A Q-And-A With Scott Tong Of Marketplace

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

As regular readers of this blog know, I spent late June and much of July in Shanghai, with brief trips to other parts of China. One aspect of this sojourn in the PRC that proved memorable was the opportunity it afforded me to finally meet several people whose reporting or commentaries I’ve admired, but whose paths had never crossed mine before, including Kaiser Kuo (whose Sinica podcasts we’ve talked up here before), David Barboza of the New York Times (whose day-in-the-life of a South China worker I singled out for praise in a recent commentary), freelancer Adam Minter (who has …

Reading Round-Up, 8/2/2010

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Before we fully embrace the arrival of August, a bit of housekeeping from July . . . some stories that we noticed during the past month and wanted to share with our readers:

• Xujun Eberlein has been busy lately, and two of her recent pieces of writing have overlaps with topics we’ve discussed here at China Beat in the past few weeks. On the matter of Wang Hui and plagiarism, see her post at Inside-Out China; for her review of the “social science fiction” novel Shengshi: Zhongguo 2013, head over to Foreign Policy.

• If you’re in Beijing and …

Decentralizing Culture: The Effect Of Digital Networks On Copyright And Music Distribution, Benjamin Gibert

Benjamin Gibert

The advance of technology profoundly impacts how people interact with culture as the proliferation of digital networks transforms the effects of copyright in modern societies. This paper argues that the oligopolistic conditions of content markets and the legal discourse of intellectual property law have historically enabled copyright holders to promote a limited conception of art and obscure the complexities of copyright theory. While conceptual ambiguity is inevitable in the construction of aesthetic legal categories, current practices impose too many restrictions. The practical choices made concerning copyright in cyberspace will determine the evolution of culture in increasingly networked societies. The music …

Barricading The Digital Frontier: Copyright, Technology And The War On Music Piracy, Benjamin Gibert

Benjamin Gibert

The Internet is changing the way vast numbers of people experience culture today. Providing tools to interact with, manipulate and freely redistribute content, technology is dissolving conventional divisions between creators and consumers of cultural artefacts. As new technological and legislative mechanisms are deployed to stop digital piracy, there is a need to reflect on the meaning of copyright, piracy and culture in the context of digital technologies. This paper discusses the relationship between copyright and cultural participation. It refers to the music industry in order to depict the changing patterns of consumption behavior precipitated by the rise of digital networks …

Modernity, Capitalism, And War: Toward A Sociology Of War In The Nineteenth Century, 1815-1914, Eric Royal Lybeck

Masters Theses

The academic discipline of Sociology has rarely broached the subject of war and its recursive relationship with society. This paper addresses three major approaches in several disciplines that can be deemed ‘economically deterministic’: Marxist, Liberal, and Realist. These approaches can be useful for certain questions, but also leave out, or cloud other non-economic variables in understanding war – notably culture and military variables themselves. By using Karl Polanyi’s thesis regarding the “Myth of the Hundred Years’ Peace” (1815-1914) as a foil, the historical case of war in the nineteenth century is used to highlight the nature of war in European …

The Culture Of Revolution: Revolutionary Transformation In Iran, Autoosa Elizabeth Kojoori-Saatchi

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The current challenges to the authority of the Islamic Republic and mass demonstrations in opposition to the presidential elections of 2009 in Iran, have raised the specter of another revolution in the country. In the 20th century, the country underwent two major revolutions: the Constitutional revolution during the first decade of the century and the Islamic revolution in the late 1970s. In this thesis, I will examine why revolutions occur in Iran with greater frequency than other societies. By relying on a historiography and contemporary empirical evidence, I will explore the cultural underpinnings of the Iranian revolutionary worldview embedded in …

Spy Scandal: We Haven't Heard The Last Laugh Yet, Nicholas Hayes

University Chair in Critical Thinking Publications

No abstract provided.

The Positive- And Negative-Right Conceptions Of Freedom Of Speech And The Specter Of Reimposing The Broadcast Fairness Doctrine ... Or Something Like It, Adam Fowler

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A key theoretical debate underlying the now defunct Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulation known as the Fairness Doctrine is conflict over what constitutes the right to freedom of speech: a positive or negative conception. Similarly, since repeal of the Doctrine, other FCC measures to uphold the “public-interest” standard in broadcasting have relied on a positive conception of speech. This thesis demonstrates the history of this debate through court cases, news reports, scholarly articles and historical documents. It then is argued that the positive-right nature of these regulations is problematic philosophically, constitutionally and practically. The positive-right conception lends itself to an …

Return To Unfinished Business: Re-Energizing U.S. Nuclear Arms Policy, William T. Eliason

Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

Today's international environment characterized in nuclear threat terms as having increasing concerns about the potential for terrorist or non-state use of nuclear devices and a decline in the likelihood of the original nuclear weapon states engaging each other in a nuclear war remains in search of a path away from the fear of nuclear attack some twenty years after the end of the Cold War. This research dissertation will seek to answer the question of how best to reestablish a nuclear arms control regime. This dissertation argues that the international environment has fundamentally changed since the end of the Cold …

Why Welcome Al Basheer? Contextualizing Turkey`S Darfur Policy (With Birol Akgun), Mehmet Ozkan

Mehmet OZKAN

No abstract provided.

Stanley Mcchrystal, Felix Dzerzhinsky, Jérôme Kerviel: Are We All Ciphers?, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article examines the fall of United States (US) Army General Stanley McChrystal, and the concepts of the self and identity.

An Update On Suicide Terrorism, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

The author considers the potential moral and ethical merits of suicide and suicide terrorism from a historical and philosophical perspective.

An Excerpt From 'And One Fine Morning: Memories Of My Father', Nicholas Hayes

University Chair in Critical Thinking Publications

No abstract provided.

Psychologists Gone Wild: The Politics Of Scientific Psychology, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

With power on the line in science, one should expect controversy beyond the substantive. In scientific psychology—whether discovering human nature or discovering what can be said about it—the search for the what of human nature becomes a mask for human nature.