Asian Studies Commons^™

Book Review: Dream Of Ding Village By Yan Lianke, Mike Frick

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Unsurprisingly, the Chinese government levied a “three nos” ban—no sales, no distribution, and no promotion—against Dream of Ding Village after its publication in 2005. Though the storytelling relies heavily on dream sequences, Yan takes little poetic license when exposing the depth of the state’s culpability in spreading HIV among poor, medically-naïve farmers. He is just as uncompromising when detailing how officials denied responsibility for the ensuing AIDS epidemic, even as they profited from its human tragedy. No one in Ding Village receives medical care, mental health counseling, food assistance, or a chance to hold the blood heads legally accountable. Cast …

Changsha: Photographs By Rian Dundon, Rian Dundon

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Rian Dundon, whose photographs have previously appeared at China Beat, will soon be releasing a new book of photography on China, Changsha. Dundon’s book will feature a forward written by friend of the blog Gail Hershatter and includes his photos of and essays on the Hunan province city of Changsha. For more information, and to pre-order a copy of the book, see the book’s website (pre-sales of the book are part of a crowd-funding campaign raising funds for its first run with the publisher, Emphas.is). Below is a special teaser of Changsha material that Dundon has prepared for China Beat …

A Comparative Analysis Of The Transitional Effect Of Democratic Regime Change On Human Rights Development, Alana Mcelhinney

Political Science Theses and Capstones

It has been a long-standing topic of discussion within the field of political science on the extent to which the establishment of democratic regime characteristics influences the development of human rights. While there is considerable research in the areas of democracy and human rights, what the literature lacks is research towards the growth of democratic regime characteristics being causal to the development of human rights practices. This analysis shows that a transition in democratic regime characteristics is directly linked to the development of human rights. After completing case-study analysis and developing causal theory I take data from the years 1981 …

Civil Society And Local Activism In South Korea's Local Democratization, Yooil Bae, Sunhyuk Kim

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Recent studies on causes of intergovernmental transformation in old and new democracies have found that decentralization is often the outcome of negotiations between national and local political interests. South Korea is commonly believed to be an exception because local elections and institutions introduced in the early 1990s were, by and large, the product of negotiations among political elites at the centre, without significant inclusion of local actors. However, this article attempts to explicate a hitherto ignored aspect of decentralization reform in Korea: the role of civil society and local activism in the politics of decentralization. In the 2000s, several ‘triggering …

Avoiding Russia's Path In Myanmar, Bridget Welsh

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The political reforms that have occurred from August 2011 in Myanmar have captured international attention due in part to the overwhelming desire for the pariah of ASEAN to move toward better governance and greater political liberalization. The unexpected changes began in August 2011 when the current president Thein Sein rallied reformers in his Cabinet and sat down with the country’s de facto opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi to move the country toward national reconciliation. Over the last seven months, Myanmar’s military leadership has begun a process of liberalization that is unprecedented.

On Chinese Foreign Policy: A Big Stick, An Equally Big Carrot, Hannah K. Fishman

The Macalester Review

This paper attempts to provide a framework for analyzing China's newfound assertiveness. Does a rising China pose a systemic threat to the world order, or will Beijing's rise be characterized by what policy officials refer to as a "Peaceful Rise"? This paper argues that China is "building a bigger stick and a bigger carrot" to increase its hard and soft power capabilities; however, this policy won't necessarily pose a threat. The United States must strengthen Western-central international institutions and guide Beijing into this framework if the US wants to see a "Peaceful Rise."

Sino-Speak: Chinese Exceptionalism And The Politics Of History, William A. Callahan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This article examines how recent books by academics and public intellectuals reshaping the discourse of the rise of China. While earlier trends argued th China was being socialized into the norms of international society, many text now proclaim that due to its unique civilization, China will follow its own path to modernity. Such books thus look to the past - Chinas imperial history- for clues to not only Chinas future, but also the worlds future. This discourse which could be called " Sino-speak," presents an essentialized Chinese civilizati that is culturally determined to rule Asia, if not the world. The …

Myanmar's Road To Democracy, Bridget Welsh

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

No abstract provided.

The Taiwan Elections In Historical Perspective, Sebastian Veg

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

During a recent trip to Taipei to observe the January presidential and legislative elections, like many people with little first-hand knowledge of Taiwan, I was struck by the unique traits of Taiwan’s democracy. The elections also seemed relevant to many debates in China, not only because they were closely followed and tweeted by critical voices on the mainland, but also because of their significance against the broader historical and geographical context of the history of modern China, a connection which holds true even if one subscribes to the view that Taiwan had no previous connection with this history before 1945 …

Book Review: Developmental Fairy Tales, Nicole Kwoh

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

At the 1996 APEC Economic Leaders Meeting, Jiang Zemin concluded his speech on economic development with a quote from Lu Xun: “For actually the earth had no road to begin with, but when many men pass one way, a road is made” (1921). This quote highlights the important role played by the first generation of modern Chinese literature in shaping the current rhetoric of building a road to progress. In Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture, Andrew F. Jones explains the construction of this ubiquitous concept of cultural and historical progress. With a focus on Lu …

Salvaging Memories From The Ruins Of The Three Gorges, Daisy Yan Du

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

The Three Gorges Dam is the largest hydro-electric power station in the world. The construction of the dam began in 1994 and was completed in 2009. Proponents bill it as a symbol of China’s rise on the global stage, while critics worldwide see it as a huge humanitarian crisis that has the potential to worsen in years to come. The biggest controversy of this project concerns the forced migration of around two million people, who, due to the rising water, have been displaced from their hometowns along the upper reaches of the Yangzi River in Chongqing and Sichuan and Hubei …

Digital Chinese Whispers: Death Threats And Rumors Inside China’S Online Marketplace Of Ideas, James Leibold

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

The Chinese internet is a wonderfully raucous and interesting place. It has greatly expanded the scope of public discourse and activity, despite the party-state’s extensive censorship regime. Not surprisingly, the world’s largest cyber-community exhibits tremendous depth and diversity: progressive cyber-activists and professional agitators; navel-gazing starlets and steam-venting gamers; mundane infotainment and the banal waxing of quotidian life; and, sadly, dark corners of fear, hatred and paranoia. It’s all there; it simply depends on where one looks. Like other technologies before it, the internet is normatively neutral, and thus can be put to good, bad and anodyne uses: individuals—not tools—shape the …

Behind Bo Xilai’S Halo, Xujun Eberlein

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

In the wake of Bo Xilai’s sudden downfall, shortly after what could be called an online carnival among China watchers—probably more in celebration of a rare, real-life political drama than anything else—international media is changing its tune and beginning to paint a more sympathetic image of Bo than previously reported, by focusing on Chinese people’s love of him. Reuters, for example, has a report titled “In China’s Chongqing, dismay over downfall of Bo Xilai” that quotes a working “stick man” (棒棒军, a porter-for-hire) who praises Bo as “a good man” that “made life a lot better here.” The Telegraph‘s Malcolm …

Book Review: Chiang Kai-Shek’S Interpersonal Relationships: Perspectives Across The Strait, Sherman Lai

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

This book brings together papers and panel discussions of a conference on Chiang Kai-shek held in Taipei in January 2011 with the joint participation of historians from both the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan. It reflects new scholarship on Chiang Kai-shek in the Chinese-speaking world and showcases the approaches that historians in the PRC adopt in handling challenges that their Western colleagues do not encounter. While Chinese historians have enormous audiences, they do not share the academic freedom enjoyed by their colleagues in the West and Taiwan. Because their careers and livelihood are dependent on the Chinese Communist …

State-Induced Famine And Penal Starvation In North Korea, Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann

Political Science Faculty Publications

This article discusses North Korea as a case of state-induced famine, or faminogenesis. A famine from 1994 to 2000 killed 3–5% of North Korea’s population, and mass hunger reappeared in 2010–2012, despite reforms meant to address the shortage of food. In addition, a prison population of about 200,000 people is systematically deprived of food; this might be considered penal starvation. There seems little recourse under international law to punish the perpetrators of state-induced famine and penal starvation. State-induced famine does, however, fit some of the criteria of genocide in the United Nations Convention against Genocide, and could also be considered …

Republican China, Kate Merkel-Hess

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Several years ago, I gave a talk on my research to a community group. My first slide included the words “Republican China” and as I waited to begin I heard a woman in the front row lean over and whisper to her neighbor, “I had no idea they have Republicans in China too!”

At this time of bruising primary battles, though, the China that the Republicans have seems more relevant—as China, imagined and real, has played a recurring role in the raucous Republican primaries. Here’s a rundown of some of the ways China has popped up on the campaign trail …

Hong Kong Identity And Democratic Values, Sebastian Veg

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

When Peking University Professor Kong Qingdong’s diatribe on Hongkongers and their lingering colonial infatuation swept over the Internet in late January, the widespread and growing uneasiness about mainland Chinese in Hong Kong suddenly had a face. Triggered by a viral video of a Hongkonger telling off a mainland family in the subway because their daughter was eating dry instant noodles, Kong’s interview sparked a wave of predictable but nonetheless justified outrage in Hong Kong. It took place against the background of the annual mainland shopping spree over Chinese New Year (in a previous episode, Dolce and Gabbana staff in Tsim …

Excerpt: Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes, James Palmer

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

When the Tangshan Earthquake hit northern China on July 28, 1976, the country was in the midst of a tumultuous year that would grow even more chaotic with Mao’s death less than two months later. In retrospect, the massive earthquake has been viewed as a sign of trouble to come and a signal that major changes were on the horizon. In his new book, Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes: The Tangshan Earthquake and the Death of Mao’s China, James Palmer delves into the history of 1976, tracing the developments of that pivotal year for all in China, from the leaders residing …

How Chongqing People View Bo Xilai, Xujun Eberlein

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

One April day in my birth city of Chongqing, I encountered a rare quarrel in People’s Park. The park is one of several places in downtown Chongqing that offer low-cost “baba cha” (open-space tea), where retirees and others with time on their hands lounge under leafy banyan trees with their teacups and bird cages for a good part of the day. Two fiftyish men sat at a plastic table drinking tea and chatting about Bo Xilai, their city’s ousted leader. One of the men said that Bo’s promotion of “people’s livelihood” had been a fake show, because during his four-year …

Whither The "Year Of China"?, Denise Ho, Jared Flanery

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

To conclude my Chinese history lecture course at the University of Kentucky, I introduce my undergraduates to the concept of “soft power” and suggest that Confucius Institutes are emblematic of China’s cultural diplomacy, which aims to project a peaceful image abroad. Confucius Institutes are centers for teaching Chinese language and culture overseas; they are organized by an office known as Hanban in the Ministry of Education, though their funding comes directly from the Chinese government’s treasury. There are now over 350 Confucius Institutes in the world, and two of these are in the state of Kentucky.

Literacy And Development Within China’S Minorities, Alexandra Grey

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Outside of China, people are agape at the prospect of learning to write Chinese: “So hard! Too hard.” Back in Australia, I know first generation migrants who speak Chinese at home but have never learnt to write; they gape along with everyone else. But for all the jaw-dropping, these people can read and write the national language of their home (for the Aussie-Chinese, that’s English). What about the people inside China for whom ‘Chinese’ is a foreign language? They are a significant minority, and, on the Chinese scale, a minority still means millions of people. ‘Chinese’ is usually loosely used …

Book Review: China And Orientalism, Fabio Lanza

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

This slim, sharply-argued volume should be a mandatory reading for all of us who work on post-1949 China. China and Orientalism is a refreshing and often eye-opening analysis on how knowledge of the object called “China” has been constructed in the West since the end of Maoism. That knowledge, as Vukovich cogently demonstrates, is fundamentally flawed.

Writing as a “barbarian” outside the disciplinary gates— i.e. a self-declared non-sinologist (pp. xii-xiii) —Vukovich argues that, since the late 1970s, Western knowledge production about the PRC has been dominated and defined by a new form of Orientalism. But while for Edward Said the …

Celebrating Chunjie In Old Nanjing, Sarah Tynen

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

“You must be so homesick! Aren’t you going home to celebrate chunjie?” asked the Auntie who sells tofu on the back of a freight tricycle in the old city of Nanjing. Auntie rides down the narrow, winding alleys of Old Nanjing several times a day to emphatically announce her price of tofu at 500 grams for 1.5 yuan (that’s about a pound for 25 cents). Standing at my doorstep the week before chunjie, or the Spring Festival, also known as the Chinese New Year in the West, she told me to stock up. It was the last day of …

Rural Return: Xi Jinping’S Iowa Visit, Kate Merkel-Hess

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping’s visit to the US took him across the country, from Washington, DC, to Los Angeles (where, sadly, despite spending some time with a sartorially-challenged David Beckham, he did not show off his soccer skills, as he did in the subsequent Irish leg of his trip).

But it wasn’t the visits to the coasts that dominated human interest stories on Xi Jinping’s trip, but the days in the middle, when he spent a little time in Iowa. Xi first visited Iowa in 1985, when he was an official in Hebei province, and this trip was a …

Book Review: Keeping The Nation’S House, Elizabeth Lacouture

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

In 1940, China’s Nationalist Ministry of Education issued a decree from its wartime capital of Chongqing. At a time when Japan occupied China’s eastern seaboard and the Communists controlled the north, the Ministry called on educators and homemakers to “cultivate children’s happiness.” Doing more with less, teachers and mothers were supposed to make children believe that “even if the food is unsatisfactory, the clothes are inadequate, or the habitation is insufficient… it is still very good” (p. 1). In Keeping the Nation’s House, Helen Schneider explores how Chinese educators and the Chinese state transformed the seemingly frivolous and individualistic bourgeois …

Excerpt: Autumn In The Heavenly Kingdom, Stephen R. Platt

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

A big new China book to hit shelves in recent weeks is Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War, written by University of Massachusetts, Amherst historian Stephen Platt. Platt places the Taiping Rebellion in a global context, emphasizing its importance to American and European observers of the conflict, whose economic ties to China made them keenly interested in the country’s domestic situation. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom also offers new insights into how the Taiping Rebellion tied into Chinese internal politics, particularly the ways in which the Taiping rebels sought …

Book Review: Modern China’S Network Revolution, Brett Sheehan

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

The title of Zhongping Chen’s new book has a double meaning. Modern China’s Network Revolution refers both to his claim for new, revolutionary forms of networking among lower-Yangzi Chinese elites at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries and to the revolutionary roles of those networks in elite mobilization, especially in the 1911 revolution which overthrew the Qing. As such, the book makes a meaningful contribution to debates on the nature of Chinese organizational practices, especially merchant organizational practices, and to debates about the nature of late-Qing elite mobilization and the relationship of those mobilized elites …

The First Asian Man: The Story Behind The Jeremy Lin Story, Yong Chen

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

There are good reasons why Jeremy Lin deserves the extensive news coverage he has received recently: a Harvard grad playing in the NBA, he had an indispensible role in the Knicks’ 9-2 run before losing to Miami on February 23, averaging 23.9 points and 9.2 assists in 11 games. Yet the extraordinary “Linsanity” displayed by the mass media seems to suggest that what makes Lin’s story so notable is what it says about perceptions of Asian masculinity. In Lin, the media has finally found an Asian man.

Letter From Little Lhasa, Reshma Patil

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

The runaway from a Tibetan village in Naba, China, led the way down the slippery dirt track to the doorstep of a restaurant with a Potala Palace bereft of tourists and soldiers painted on its blue walls. The Tibetan-speaking attendant at Chonor House politely declined to serve my first meal in McLeod Ganj. The kitchens were functioning only for hotel guests until the end of Losar. The three-day Tibetan New Year passed uncelebrated earlier this month in the Indian hill-town teeming with Tibetan exiles who give Dharamshala the moniker of Little Lhasa. The exiled Tibetan government is edged higher in …

Chinese Youth: A Quick Q And A With Mary Bergstrom, Jeffrey Wasserstrom

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Whenever I take a trip that includes stops in Shanghai and Beijing, two people I make sure to meet up with are Jeremy Friedlein and David Moser, the Academic Directors of the CET study abroad programs in those cities. I do this for several reasons. One is that CET has deep ties to China Beat, since the blog’s founding editor Kate Merkel-Hess and current editor Maura Cunningham are both alums. Another reason is that, for almost two years now, CET has been sponsoring a series of literary events at M on the Bund (in Shanghai) and now also Capital M …